Where Did You Come From, Where Did You Go? The Daiquiri Edition

I’ll admit, the first time I ever heard the word “daiquiri” I was somewhere around eight years old and drinking a Strawberry Daiquiri Sobe (RIP). Despite its suspiciously milky pink color, I had an affinity for this drink and it’s lizard counterpart. Certainly at the time, in my eight year old teetotaler heart, I had no idea what a daiquiri was.?Now, is the time to scroll to the end if you're looking for a unique daiquiri recipe.

One of the first things to know about a daiquiri is it is made with rum. Rum is distilled from molasses and is a byproduct of the sugar boom in the 1650s throughout England. As the popularity of sugar began to rise, its production skyrocketed and so did the amount of garbage that came with it: molasses. There was one pound of molasses from every two pounds of useable sugar with nothing worthwhile coming from the molasses.

Yet.

The joke was whiskey was distilled from the essence of beer; brandy was distilled from the essence of wine; and rum was distilled from the essence of fermented industrial waste. They quickly figured out they could make rum from the industrial waste that was molasses and that was the beginning of the end for everyone’s sea legs.?

One of the first iterations with rum was called a grog. It’s about as undesirable as it sounds: watered down rum consumed by sailors.? It was one part rum to four parts water and slowly evolved to include sugar and lime to help make the grog more palatable. It was a sailor’s drink and often their motivation to work because not everyone is handsome enough to win over the Keira Knightleys of the world as they’d often lament, “but why is the rum gone?”

Where did the daiquiri come from?

In the late 1800s in Cuba the proliferation of rum has invaded every coast in the Caribbean almost as quickly as Harry Styles has invaded our hearts in America. It's popularity rose increasingly during Prohibition when people fled to the nearby Cuba to imbibe for the weekend and then return home properly lubricated. The basic idea of a daiquiri is rum, sugar, and lime juice. The beauty of a daiquiri is it allows for creativity. You can make it frozen, add grenadine, or a dash of Green Chartreuse, or even the questionable “purple stuff” you found in your aunt’s liquor closet that is equal parts dusty, sticky, and discontinued.

The daiquiri was simple, delicious, and came attached to a famous American author: Ernest Hemingway. If you do any kind of research on the daiquiri you’ll quickly come across Hemingway’s name. He was as prolific a drinker as he was a writer. (While it is Hemingway who is most associated with the daiquiri now, F. Scott Fitzgerald was the first to introduce the daiquiri in 1920 in This Side of? Paradise to the American reader). You can easily find the Hemingway Daiquiri, or his infamous Death in the Afternoon, which he also created, in any bar that is worth their weight in spirits.?Truth be told, I haven’t tried a Death in the Afternoon. I’m not fond of death, especially in the afternoon, and it’s combination of champagne and absinthe.

An aside about Hemingway, he holds the record for most daiquiris consumed in one sitting at a famous bar in Cuba, El Floridita, where his record is 16.

As I said, prolific drinker.?

The original way to make a daiquiri was to put all your ingredients (rum, simple syrup, and lime juice) into a cocktail shaker and make the drink one by one. Like most shaken cocktails, this takes time, and usually a shaker can only hold 1-3 drinks. As bars throughout the Caribbean were being overrun due to the increasing popularity of travel and the widespread deliciousness of the daiquiri, there was a much needed solution to make more daiquiris and to make them faster.

Where did the original daiquiri go?

In 1937, that solution came through an unlikely source: Seven-Eleven. At a National Restaurant Show in Chicago, Fred Waring introduced his Waring Blender, that has affectionately become known as the slurpee machine.? This magical, how-do-they-make-ice-that-texture, slurpee machine would ensure the daiquiri would never be the same. Now, the frozen daiquiri has become how people consume them, but that is far from how they started.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love a deliciously blended frozen daiquiri or a margarita. There are far too many occasions, like being on any beach or trying to out drink your Hemingway wanna-be friend, that are made better with that chilled magical concoction. But, I think the daiquiri deserves to be properly understood, in its original recipe.

We live in a time where we can easily be caught between what everyone thinks something is compared to what it actually is. Like, how everyone thinks the earth is round when it's actually flat. (Just seeing if you made it this far). Or how most people think a peanut is a type of nut when it's actually a legume. It isn't hard to find things that are defined by what people think they are rather than what they actually are. I hope you can be someone who can tell the difference. I remember making a daiquiri (not frozen and served up in a coupe glass) for someone once and before he even drank it he said, "that's like no daiquiri I've ever had before." He, like most people, associated the daiquiri as a frozen cocktail. However, it is much more than that.

Secondly, it is common for something patiently crafted to be replaced by something mass produced out of convenience. Personally, I'd rather wait 15 minutes for a cappuccino at a local coffee shop, than blow through a Starbucks drive thru (No hate, my daughter loves their cake pops). We can easily give up on honing a craft because it takes too long or demands too much of our energy and settle for something that we wouldn't consider nearly as good all in the name of efficiency. The original daiquiri recipe started as a craft and slowly became unrecognizable for the sake of speed and efficiency.

The Daiquiri: Lose Your Sea Legs

Now, you might be dying to know (hopefully not dying in the afternoon) what actually is my daiquiri recipe, not just what everyone thinks it is. As stated above, there are many ways to be creative when it comes to the daiquiri. My suggestion would be experiment! A good cocktail often comes from experimentation while working with a reliable base, but here is what has become my favorite recipe:

Lose Your Sea Legs

• 1.5 oz Plantation White Rum,
• 0.5 oz Smith and Cross Jamaican Rum,
• 0.75 simple syrup,
• 0.75 oz freshly squeezed lime juice,
• 1-2 tsp of Green Chartreuse

Combine all ingredients into a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Shake until shaker is too cold to handle. Strain into a chilled coupe glass.

Enjoy and blow your friend's mind that they are drinking a daiquiri.

For a deep dive into rum, this is a great read