Daiquiri
White rum, fresh lime and sugar, shaken hard and strained up.
CC BY-SA 4.0 · Cropped, white-balanced, graded and re-encoded to WebP by eXir.
A Daiquiri served up in a coupe, pale and faintly cloudy under a thin white foam, on a dark grey counter
Serving
Drink spec — per drink
Every figure above is per drink and does not move with the count — that is what makes the two service modes comparable. Sugar per litre, strength and standard drinks stay in the units their own authorities publish, because they are figures for comparing rather than for pouring. Dilution is modelled rather than measured, as a fraction of the poured volume before any ice; dotted figures descend from that estimate.
Diet and allergen labels are computed from the ingredients listed on this page and nothing else. They cannot account for cross-contamination or for the particular product you buy, and they are not medical or safety guidance.
Ingredients
30 ml fresh lime juice- 60 ml white rum
- 23 ml simple syrupInterchangeable by volume and close in sugar, so the arithmetic barely moves. The drink gains a faint molasses note that sits naturally alongside a pot-still or column rum, at some cost to the citrus's own brightness.flavour: moderate change · strength: no change · sweetness: minor change
Glass
Vessel
169 ml of liquid, served without ice, inside the 180 ml the glass holds. The build fails if a recipe ever exceeds its stated vessel.
A batch needs a vessel that closes and fits a fridge shelf.
Method
4 steps · 1m 32sSqueeze the 30 ml fresh lime juice and strain out the pips and pulp.
Combine the 60 ml white rum, the 30 ml fresh lime juice and the 23 ml simple syrup in a shaker and fill it with cubed ice.
Shake hard for 12s. Short and violent; the aim is to chill and aerate, not to melt the ice.
Double strain into a chilled coupe, catching the ice shards the shake has broken off.
Strained up into a chilled glass rather than served over ice. A shaken sour is already at the temperature and dilution it is meant to be drunk at; more ice would only keep diluting a drink whose balance depends on stopping there.
Common pitfallBottled lime juice reads sweeter and flatter than fresh, and it is the substitution most likely to be made without noticing, because bottled lime looks identical to the fresh juice it is replacing. The juice needs to be squeezed the same day the drink is made.
Keeping and make-ahead
Batched ahead, this keeps sealed and cold. The water line the engine adds is the dilution figure from the spec panel — it is not a rule of thumb.
About
Invented in Cuba in 1898 by an American engineer cooling off after a day at the mines, and the source of a name now attached to two very different Havana drinks.
The name comes from Daiquirí, a beach and an iron mine near Santiago de Cuba, itself a word of Taíno origin 1. The drink is credited to Jennings Cox, an American mining engineer working there for the Pennsylvania Steel Company, who mixed the local white rum with lime juice and sugar around 1898 1 2.
How it left Cuba is recorded twice, and the two accounts do not compete. William A. Chanler, a US congressman who bought iron mines in the area, is said to have taken it to New York clubs in 1902; Rear Admiral Lucius W. Johnson, a Navy medical officer who had drunk it in Cuba, introduced it at the Army and Navy Club in Washington in 1909 1. A drink can arrive in two cities.
Havana then built a second drink on the same three ingredients. Constantino Ribalaigua Vert, bartender and later owner of El Floridita, was serving a frozen version by the 1930s — crushed ice through a blender rather than a shake, and usually a fruit besides 2. That is the one Ernest Hemingway drank there, and the line attributed to him about a daiquiri tasting of neither rum nor lime nor sugar but of daiquiri belongs to the frozen drink rather than to this one 2. The shaken version at the mines came first by three decades, and the two have been confused ever since.
- 1Daiquirien.wikipedia.org
- 2The fascinating story of the daiquiri, Hemingway's favourite drinknationalgeographic.com