welcome friends welcome back to cocktails after dark today we're going
to do a Cuban Daiquiri Cocktail because so far we haven't really done too many rum
cocktails and the reason I chose a daiquiri cocktail is because these little limes
showed up in the grocery store if you live in the United States you would
call them a key lime if you live in Asia you would just call them a lime because
that's that is the lime thats everywhere they also go by the name of bartender
lime West Indian lime Mexican lime they go by a bunch of different names and up
until the mid 1920s this lime was the one that was behind every bar and was
available in every grocery store non-stop then in the 1920s into the
1930s we started to see a shift away from this lime which is I think an
incredible flavorful lime to the lime that we all know today that has has
taken over it's called a Persian lime even though it was bred and developed in
California it is across this lime is a cross between a lemon and a key lime
it's kind of complicated I find citrus to be fascinating the way that they
crossbreed them and they get completely different things anyway so in the 1930s
in Cuba where the daiquiri was invented this would be the lime the bartender
lime or the key lime or the West Indian lime that would be the lime that's
called for in the drink so I started looking through old cocktail books and I
started looking at recipes from the havana night clubs that issued cocktail
books to their patrons and so you'd go to the bar you'd spend your money you'd
you'd play at the tables because there were lots of casinos you drink a lot and
then you would take home a souvenir cocktail book and so I looked at once
from bar la Florida and there's four different daiquiris in this one and it
calls for something called Alamo of Aird which or Verde my Spanish is horrible
which is probably this although in the English translation it says lemon so I'm
not really too sure I looked at a bunch of other ones and they all have sort of
the same proportions but the one I want to do is from the slaw
josè cocktail book and the 1932 sloppy joes cocktail book calls for a teaspoon
of sugar one part of rum and the juice of a lemon and that stays the same
through like 19 33 34 35 by the time you get to the 1938 it calls for a teaspoon
of sugar two ounces of rum and the juice of a lime so that's the one we're gonna
make we're gonna give it a try we're gonna see what happens and four
daiquiris I've seen formulas that are all over the map
generally they ask for a Cuban style rum so in the 1930s Bacardi would have been
the de facto Cuban style rum even though some of these places had their own house
rums made specifically for their bar with their own labels sloppy joes had
their own rum and because this is no longer made in Cuba I'm gonna try an
actual Cuban rum we're gonna do it two ways we're gonna see what happens and
then we're going to come to a conclusion of sorts perhaps now let's start into
the shaker superfine sugar one spoonful we're gonna do two ounces of Bacardi Rum
I once did an ad for Bacardi Rum Oh probably 20 years ago at this point and
I got to tell you it was a nightmare I'll play it up here in the corner
somewhere you can see his nightmares like three and a half or four days of
shooting in a water pumping plant in Scarborough just outside of Toronto or
at the edge of Toronto nightmare absolute night I returned this
giant water pumping station from the City of Toronto into a nightclub and we
got free rum at the end they paid us I got paid but I also got a couple of
bottles of free rum and one of those bottles of free rum was still in our
liquor cabinet unopened fifteen years later and I just I ended up throwing it
out because I just don't really like Bacardi Rum but I hang out fairly often
with the Bacardi rep for for Ontario and he suggested I try this one so that's
what we're gonna do today we're gonna give that a go so that's the juice of
one lime the sugars in there the lime is in there the rum is in there let's get
in with some ice cracked ice and we'll give that a shake take the ice out of
this glass and this gets a double strain
and now exactly the same with the Cuban rum so bar spoon of superfine sugar very
in exact amount two ounces of rum and this is the this is the Cuban rum that
if you visit Cuba and you hang out there now that's the one you're going to see
everywhere or at least the last time I was in Cuba that's the one I saw
everywhere so a little bit of roll on the lime these little limes they don't
take much you can just squeeze them between your fingers and you'll get most
of the juice out and I'm gonna strain out the seeds because there are a lot of
seeds
and again the juice of a lime pretty inexact
and it depends on what lime you're gonna use as well I mean I'm using these
little limes probably get a little bit more juice out of those even though they
don't juice as nicely so that is a factor that could really screw this up
but there we go okay lime and some cracked ice for shaking don't strain and
here we have two versions of the 1938 daiquiri from sloppy joes bar in Havana
Cuba and we've used two different types of Cuban rum so let's give them a try
I'm gonna try I'm gonna try the cube a first it has a different color because
the rum is a little bit darker it's got a little bit of a yellow tinge on the
nose it's quite nice it is quite nice
bracing does does that make sense bracing it is very rum forward because
rum is the the biggest thing in there there is a touch of sweetness from the
sugar which is quite nice and I really like that lime flavor so let's try the
Bacardi I'm not a fan of Bacardi so I'm interested to see what happens on the
nose it's pretty much the same
very close very very close but just by a hair the cube a wins there's something
there's something at the end that I don't like that is a little bit jarring
you know you've got something in your you're drinking it and it's very
pleasant and then there's something that just sort of grabs you at the end you go
oh no that wasn't nice at all yeah I'm gonna try the cube a again this is the
problem with trying cocktails
just by a hair the cube a so is it the perfect daiquiri probably not I think
this is one where you could spend a very long time tweaking the ingredients to
get it perfect and of course the different lime that you use or whether
you use a lemon is going to change the flavor profile considerably how much
juice you can get from a lime is going to change the flavor profile
considerably so it probably would be best if you started to do this at home
to measure exactly how much lime juice you're putting in and play with it and
play with different rums I mean I've got a bunch of other white rums that I could
try it with so there's a whole pile of different rum profiles that you could
play with to make this work you don't have to stick to Cuban rum I don't think
I mean if you want to be a stickler and you do it exactly the same way sure but
I think there's a lot of different flavor of profiles by changing out the
spirit so in the comments below tell me your favorite rum for a daiquiri what
rum do you use in a daiquiri do you use key limes do you use Persian limes do
you use lemons how do you make your daiquiri do you use sugar like I use
sugar or do you put in simple syrup and some of these recipes put in things like
grenadine Curacao maraschino maraschino there's a whole bunch of other things
that they put in sort of round out the flavor but I kind of like this in its
purest form thanks for stopping by see you again soon
you