Before inspiring literary icons, being dotingly sipped by Ernest Hemingway and penned by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Daiquiri was, and remains to be, a small beachside town in Cuba.
Compared to the slushie-like version we often see today, this cocktail was originally a simple shaken combination of lime juice, sugar, and (specifically) white rum. Like many great inventions, this iconic cocktail was created by pure chance thanks to a mining engineer and the absence of gin.
In the late 1800s, in the cocktail's namesake town, it is said that engineer Jennings Cox was in the swing of entertaining and making guests drinks when he found himself short of the main ingredient, gin. Fortunately (for his guests and us), in a swoop of resourcefulness, gin was replaced with what the local area made so well; Bacardi rum. Just like that, the Daiquiri was born.
Then more of a punch than a cocktail, the recipe continued to evolve as it travelled from Daiquiri to Santiago, then over to international shores. Using the ice in different ways, the Daiquiri took on new forms, but it wasn’t until the invention of the blender in the mid-1900s that the cocktail was blitzed into the frozen form we now know and love.
Adding two levels of coconut (cream and frozen) to a blender gives the Daiquiri a very well-suited sweet, nutty flavour, bringing this well-travelled sunny drink back to its palm-tree-lined beach roots.
