Daiquiri

The drink is named after a beach. In the summer of 1898, just after the Spanish-American War, an American mining engineer named Jennings Cox was entertaining visitors near the village of Daiquirí on Cuba’s southeast coast. The story goes that he ran out of gin, reached for the local Bacardí, cut it with lime and sugar, and — pressed for a name — borrowed the beach’s. Cox’s handwritten recipe survives; his modesty does not seem to have been required.

The drink traveled on a warship. In 1909 a U.S. Navy medical officer, Lucius Johnson, drank with Cox in Cuba and carried the recipe home to the Army and Navy Club in Washington, whose Daiquiri Lounge still commemorates the delivery. But its true cathedral was El Floridita in Havana, where Constantino Ribalaigua Vert spent four decades refining it over shaved ice with the precision of a jeweler.

“Three ingredients, and nowhere to hide.”

— The bartender’s audit, standard issue

It was there that Ernest Hemingway wandered in from the bathroom line next door, tried one, and requested modifications: double the rum, none of the sugar. The Papa Doble was born, augmented with grapefruit and maraschino, and Hemingway drank them in quantities that remain the stuff of bar legend — his barstool at El Floridita is now occupied by a life-size bronze of him, permanently waiting for the next round.