Daiquiri Day

What the day is

Daiquiri Day is observed on July 19. The drink is rum, lime juice and sugar, shaken with ice and strained. That is the entire recipe, and its simplicity is why bartenders use it to judge each other.

With three ingredients there is nothing to hide behind. Bad rum tastes like bad rum, bottled lime juice tastes like bottled lime juice, and the balance between sour and sweet is either right or obviously wrong.

Origin and background

The name comes from Daiquiri, a village and iron mining area near Santiago de Cuba. The drink is generally credited to Jennings Cox, an American mining engineer working there around 1898, though rum, lime and sugar had been combined in the Caribbean long before anyone wrote a name on it.

It reached the United States through naval officers and travelers, and became firmly associated with Havana bars in the decades that followed. Ernest Hemingway drank his at El Floridita in a variant made to his specification: double rum, no sugar, grapefruit juice and maraschino liqueur, which is a considerably more austere drink than the standard.

The frozen daiquiri is a different animal, blended rather than shaken, and it is what most Americans picture. Commercial slush machines and sweetened mixes turned it into something closer to a dessert, which is why the original has a reputation for being a bartender's drink rather than a holiday one.

How to take part

• Squeeze the limes to order. Lime juice starts losing its character within hours, and bottled juice is the single most common reason a daiquiri tastes wrong.
• Use simple syrup rather than granulated sugar, which will not dissolve properly in a cold shaker.
• Start at two parts rum, one part lime, three quarters sugar syrup, then adjust to the rum you have.
• Shake hard with plenty of ice. Dilution is an ingredient here, not an accident.
• Chill the glass first, and drink it immediately. A daiquiri does not improve while you find someone to toast.
• Try a decent aged rum once. The drink changes completely.