Hemingway Daiquiri
A Daiquiri without its sugar, widened with grapefruit and maraschino liqueur instead.
CC BY-SA 2.0 · Cropped, white-balanced, graded and re-encoded to WebP by eXir.
A Hemingway Daiquiri in a coupe, pale straw-coloured with a light foam, garnished with a lime wheel on the rim
Serving
Drink spec, per drink
Every figure above is per drink and does not move with the count, which 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.
The recipe is cherry distillate, sugar, alcohol and water; the leading producer states its products contain no animal-derived ingredients.
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
23 ml fresh lime juice
15 ml fresh grapefruit juice
60 ml white rum
15 ml maraschino liqueur
- 23 ml fresh lime juice
- 15 ml fresh grapefruit juice
- 60 ml white rum
- 15 ml maraschino liqueur
- ~56 ml water
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 47sSqueeze the 23 ml fresh lime juice and the 15 ml fresh grapefruit juice and strain out the pips and pulp from both.
Combine the 60 ml white rum, the 23 ml fresh lime juice, the 15 ml fresh grapefruit juice and the 15 ml maraschino liqueur in a shaker and fill it with cubed ice.
No syrup goes in at all. Maraschino liqueur carries enough sugar of its own to fill the sweetener's place in the family formula, so nothing further is added on top of it; the whole point of a Daiquiri made this way is what it leaves out.
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.
Common pitfallGrapefruit juice turns bitter and dull within minutes of squeezing, faster than lime does. Juicing it last and shaking straight away matters more here than the equivalent step does in a plain Daiquiri.
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, not a rule of thumb.
About
A Havana bartender's answer to a single customer's request for his usual drink without the sugar, named for the writer who kept ordering it that way.
Constantino Ribalaigua Vert, head bartender and later owner of El Floridita in Havana, is credited with both the standard Daiquiri served there and this variation on it 1. According to an account from Hemingway's niece Hilary, the writer tried the bar's usual Daiquiri sometime in the early 1930s, then asked for a second one with less sugar and more rum 1. Ribalaigua's response, doubling the rum and dropping the sugar, gave the drink its Cuban name: Papa for Hemingway's own nickname, and doble for the extra spirit 1.
Why Hemingway asked for it that way is not settled. One account attributes it to a fear of diabetes 2; another names haemochromatosis, a hereditary disorder of iron and sugar metabolism, as the reason 3. Neither source corroborates the other's diagnosis, and the drink's history is usually told with the medical claim attached loosely rather than as settled fact.
The grapefruit juice and maraschino liqueur that mark the recipe as served today are a later addition. Antonio Meilan, who succeeded Ribalaigua as head bartender at El Floridita, is credited with adding both to the plain rum, lime and no-sugar formula, and it was under Meilan that the drink took on the name it is now more commonly known by, the Hemingway Special 3. Ribalaigua's own Daiquiri came in several recorded strengths and variations besides this one, of which the Papa Doble is the one that kept a customer's name attached to it after the bar itself changed hands 1.
- 1The Cocktail King Of Cuba — The Man Who Invented Hemingway's Favorite Daiquirikucb.org
- 2Toast to Papa Dobledeepsouthmag.com
- 3Hemingway Special Daiquiri (Papa Doble)diffordsguide.com