The Daiquiri, Three Ways

(This post is part of a series that I’m using to help write my next book, the new edition of 100 Classic Cocktails, and provide inspiration for home bartenders in these times of social distancing. Some of the recipes are ones I’m trying to workshop, and I’m asking my readers to test the recipes at home if able and send me their thoughts on the questions I have. Others are ones I think I’ve nailed that can be easily made with common household ingredients, and I’m sharing them to help my readers keep their spirits up while spending a lot more time at home than usual. I’ll always specify which is which. For more background on all of this, including the book, you can check out the first post in the series here. All posts will be tagged “(100) Classic Cocktails”.)

The Daiquiri is an unambiguous classic: it’s simple, it’s elegant, and it’s delicious. It’s also the archetype of drinks that are easy to make and hard to master, so much so that it’s often held up as a particularly good test to administer to a bartender to see if they know their stuff.

We’re going to do things a little differently today and lead off with a recipe. The Daiquiri is one I’d love to get feedback on and you probably have everything you need for it if you’ve been following along at home. So consider it today’s Question/Quarantine Cocktail:

Still Life of a Daiquiri, No. 67.

Daiquiri
2 oz. White Rum
3/4 oz. Fresh Lime Juice
3/4 oz. 1:1 Simple Syrup

Shake. Strain into a chilled cocktail or coupe glass.

That’s the recipe I’m expecting to print in the new edition of Classic Cocktails. But on the night that I tested the Daiquiri, here’s what I actually made:

No Lie, The Best Daiquiri I’ve Ever Made
2 oz. Unaged Rum (House Blend)
3/4 oz. Fresh Lime Juice
1/2 oz. 1:1 Simple Syrup
1 tsp. 2:1 Demerara Simple Syrup

Shake about 1.5x longer than you otherwise would. Strain into a chilled coupe glass.

Let’s review the differences and get to my questions for home tasters from there.

First, I hadn’t meant to use a house blend of rums for the base, but I had (I’d guess) about 1 3/4 oz. of the Wiggly Bridge rum left, so I topped the jigger up with Privateer. Honestly, I think that was a good move, but it’s not necessary to have a house rum blend to make a good Daiquiri.

But let’s investigate our rum terminology a bit. “White,” “silver,” and “light” as rum descriptors are extraordinarily common and basically useless. And so, I’m afraid, are “amber,” “gold,” and “dark.” All of these terms describe the color of the rum, but rum is unusual among spirits in that the color has relatively little to do with the flavor.

One would expect a clear rum to be unaged, but it’s actually very common for them to be aged for 2-3 years* in oak barrels and then filtered before bottling. This is a part of the tradition especially among Hispanophone rum-producing countries - even the lauded white rums of Cuba are generally aged and filtered - and if done well, the filtering process takes the color without stripping away interesting flavor. But that just means the rums will play differently in cocktails than unaged rums would, acting at least somewhat more like lightly-aged rums.

Speaking of which, color is also pretty meaningless in gauging the flavor of brown rums, because color is frequently added. For the most part, this is again done in a way that is supposed to be flavor-neutral: just enough caramel coloring to make a straw-colored aged rum look “amber,” but not enough to be perceptible (caramel coloring has a bitter taste, so the producers really don’t want you to be able to pick it out). But there are instances of unaged rums being colored in the same way, and of course there are many producers throughout the world whose rums are actually, y’know, colored by their aging process and nothing else.

“Dark” rums have the starkest intra-category contrast. Some pretty dark rums get that way from extended wood exposure. But even if a very dark rum has spent a long time in barrels, chances are it gets its hue primarily from added coloring. Often this comes in the form of a big dollop of added molasses, which does change the rum’s flavor, as well as its viscosity. I follow the brilliant recommendation of Martin Cate in Smuggler’s Cove (if you like rum, tiki, cocktail history, or good drinks, pick up a copy to devour while self-isolating) in describing this last group as “black rums,” because they actually are defined by their color. In recipes, you’ll sometimes want to specify a rum with that consistency and profile, but the existing terms are unhelpful. “Dark” can also mean aged and unsweetened/uncolored rums, while the term “blackstrap rum” that has gained some currency is equally useless, because basically all rum that is distilled from molasses is distilled from blackstrap molasses, whether or not more is added for color after distillation.

In Classic Cocktails, I plan to dispense with this nonsense and call specifically for unaged, aged, or black rum, with further precision by island or style as necessary - e.g., “unaged Martinique rhum agricole.”

So, why in the above Daiquiri recipe did I say ‘white rum’? Because consumers mostly don’t know that these color terms are meaningless yet. I have every expectation that some of them will use aged and filtered ‘white’ rums in making the unaged rum recipes. And so, to the…

First Question for Home Testers: I’d like you to try this Daiquiri with whatever sort of white rum you currently have in your house. If you do this, contact me and let me know how you liked the recipe, and whether your white rum is actually unaged or aged and filtered (or you’re unable to determine, in which case please also share the brand name). I believe the recipe will hold up fine regardless.

“But,” I hear you cry, “the title of this post implies three versions of the Daiquiri. What was that about?” I’m glad you asked!

The other big change I made to the Daiquiri recipe for my own preparation, which I think was probably the biggest game-changer in terms of flavor, was to incorporate a teaspoon of 2:1 Demerara simple syrup in addition to the regular 1:1 stuff made with white sugar. It was a stunningly good flavor choice. It also feels kind of fastidious to publish a recipe for a fairly common cocktail that calls for two different kinds of homemade sugar syrup.

So, I’d like you guys to try some variations. The one I led off with, with 3/4 oz. of 1:1 simple syrup, should get you to a similar place in terms of overall sweetness as 1/2 oz. 1:1 simple syrup plus 1 tsp. 2:1 Demerara. I know the second one is really good. I invite you to make it if you have or can easily prepare both kinds of simple syrup. But I need feedback more on the first one, because that’s the one I expect most of the book’s readers will actually end up making.

Additionally, if you’re feeling particularly helpful and/or experimental, I’d like you to try version number three:

The Reverse-Simó-Sidecar Daiquiri
2 oz. White Rum
3/4 oz. Fresh Lime Juice
1/2 oz. 1:1 Simple Syrup

Shake. Strain into a chilled cocktail or coupe glass rimmed with sugar.

See, Joaquin Simó advises adding a barspoon of rich Demerara simple syrup to the Sidecar to get it to balance properly - a problem so famously tricky that many contemporary bartenders have written off the Sidecar entirely. Meanwhile Jason Kosmas and Dushan Zaric, in the Employees Only cocktail book Speakeasy (the first good cocktail guide I ever owned, and another excellent read if you’re stuck at home) come out in favor of the semi-traditional sugar rim on the Sidecar for the same reason: it needs that extra touch of sweetness.

In testing the recipes for the new edition of Classic Cocktails, I learned that the Beachcomber also semi-traditionally has a sugared rim, and discovered that a bit of added sugar really does improve the drink. So while it’s not particularly traditional in the Daiquiri, I’d like you to help me test my theory that we can reverse-engineer the effects of the teaspoon of 2:1 Demerara syrup by sugaring the rim of the glass. Which brings us to the…

Second Question for Home Testers: If you can try the first Daiquiri (with 3/4 oz. 1:1 simple syrup), I’d love for you to also try the third (with 1/2 oz. 1:1 simple syrup) and let me know how they compare. Feedback on either independent of the other is of course still welcome.

Never rimmed a glass before? It’s easy. You want to moisten the lip of the glass first, which is best accomplished by getting it nice and cold and using condensation to your advantage. You can put it in the freezer for a little bit or fill it up with ice and wait. If you’re feeling impatient, you can also run an ice cube or a wedge of lime around the edge until it’s sufficiently wet (though note that using the lime will affect the flavor). Then, pour some plain white sugar into a dish. If the dish is large enough, simply overturn the glass into the sugar, press down, and give it a spin or two. Sugar should cling to the glass when you pick it back up. If you have a smaller dish, press one side of the glass into the sugar instead and give it a few gentle spins until the rim is coated. That’s it! You can also use this technique with salt for a Margarita.

Notes

(*) 2-3 years is common, but there are other options, too: Bacardi Superior is aged for a minimum of 1 year and then filtered, while Flor de Caña’s white rum is aged for 4 - and they also have an amber rum with the same age statement.

Bar Staples

What are the workhorse spirits for a basic cocktail bar? What can you buy inexpensively enough to drink in quantity, that will reliably make decent cocktails?

I've flirted with the idea of a blog series dedicated to this problem, but that's as far as I've gotten with it. My own bar is very idiosyncratic these days, a combination of my poor self-control when faced with a truly novel beverage, my desire to stay on top of local spirits production, and my friends' assumption that unusual spirits are the best gift to bring to any social gathering at my house (they're not wrong, but it means I can find myself with, say, three Maine gins with weird botanicals in my house at once, and no bourbon).

There's also my love of rum, which I've allowed myself to indulge in appropriate disproportion for the last year or two. I've probably got ten or so different kinds on hand right now, depending on how you count it. I could actually tally them up right now, but that might discourage me from getting other rums in the future, and we can't have that.

In any case, I've come back to the idea of a series on workhorse spirits because my own personal list is outdated. I can remember a time when Bulleit and Bully Boy were reasonable choices for general-purpose whiskey mixing: pretty darn good and reliably available for thirty bucks, sometimes less. Not so anymore.

Whiskey, in particular, has gotten a lot more expensive in a relatively short time. I don't begrudge the distillers their success one bit, mind you. I adore sipping a nice glass of Whistlepig or Gunpowder, and I believe they're worth every one of the many pennies they cost. But sometimes you want to throw a party, and for that, you need a decent knockaround base spirit that isn't chasing the high-end sipping market.

To that end, I'll be doing a series on spirits that hit the sweet spot for me. How actionable this intelligence is will depend very much on your tastes and where you live. I'll try to stick to brands that are at least theoretically available outside of greater Boston, but there are weird local price fluctuations that may make my recommendations unreasonable (or unnecessary) in other parts of the country. Myers's rum, for instance, is pretty reliably more expensive than Gosling's or Rhum Barbancourt at liquor stores near me, which has to be some kind of Cambridge Triangle effect.

I'll try to incorporate general advice as well, since the particular contents of any list like this will change over time. I'm also creating a new sub-page under "Spirits" where I'll be keeping track of the most reliable workhorses I come up with. Happy drinking!

(This is, incidentally, not the exciting announcement I teased in the Patriots' Day post. It is merely an exciting announcement, and quite unrelated to that one, which is still pending.)

"Funky" Rum

Personally, I'm a dark rum guy. There-is-rum-in-my-veins is a distinct feeling, simultaneous with ordinary intoxication but quite different from it - almost as if rum and alcohol were separate drugs entirely. It is a reset for the mind, a brief detachment from the body followed by a hurtling-back-into-it that heightens your sense of everything around you; a glimpse, perhaps, of the sublime.

People who drink at a certain level often acquire these kinds of tastes. Most of my friends who are anything-people are whiskey-people, some are gin-people, and all of them are surprised to find out that I'm a rum-person. There aren't a lot of rum-people, at least not around here, and finding one is always a bit like meeting another Red Sox fan in New York City: you're friends right away, regardless of everything else about you.

If you're into dark rums, at some point you've probably heard the siren song of so-called "funkiness," a trait associated with Jamaican rums in particular. I'll be honest, I kind of like this description. For me, a funky rum is one with a bunch of unexpected and hard-to-place notes: floral maybe, or fruity, but not perfectly either of those; still somehow clearly organic. It's at once fun to play the what-is-this game, and liberating to know you'll never have all the answers. Like going to a conceptual party at an artistic stranger's house. Funky.

There is, however, a more technically-appropriate word available for this trait, "hogo," which I've just learned today. Paul, of The Cocktail Chronicles (and founder of Mixology Monday before handing it off to our local friend Fred Yarm), has an old post about it that I happened to stumble upon.

And what a post! With a call-out to Boston's own contemporary classic, the Periodista; an old recipe from Eastern Standard that uses four of my favorite ingredients; and a (fond) description of the rum I keep for sipping purposes, Smith and Cross Jamaican, as "cane-spirit fetish porn where hogo is concerned." Honestly, this post is mostly an excuse to reprint that line - I started writing it before I'd even finished reading Paul's.

So what is hogo, really? Apparently, it's a corruption of "haut goût," an old French cooking term for the distinctive flavor of a game meat that has been slightly and deliberately decomposed. (This, by the way, is me citing Paul citing David Wondrich's Punch, in which he quotes a West Indian planter character from a nineteenth-century novel by Grant Allen. So if you repeat this information, y'know, be sure to cite your sources.)

Why would we want our rum to taste like rotting meat, then? Well, we wouldn't, exactly. At least, I assume we wouldn't - I've never had any sort of haut goût meat, to the best of my knowledge, and I can't say for sure what it tastes like. But human beings have gotten pretty good at massaging the decomposition process to produce desirable results. That is literally what fermentation is, and we wouldn't have yogurt, vinegar, leavened bread, or any kind of alcohol without it.

In other words, "hogo" seems to be that set of flavor notes best described as the taste of fermentation itself, rather than the notes we'd pick out by association as banana or violet. In practice, the yeast is responsible for all of these, but it's those flavors most unapologetically its own - the "gamey, squirrelly, glandular musk," to borrow one more phrase from Paul - that come through as the hogo or funky notes.

Why on earth have I been looking into all this today, in particular? Because I'm gearing up for a special Patriots' Day lesson on Boston cocktails, including the Periodista, and boning up on my rum facts. If you'd like to hear more rum facts, whiskey facts, or Boston facts, come to the lesson!