The Spirits #102: The Hemingway Daiquiri

~ Papa Doble ~ Dolphinfish Dreams ~ Bref ~

~ THE HEMINGWAY DAIQUIRI ~

50ml light rum
10ml maraschino
10ml pink grapefruit juice
10ml lime juice
Dash Peychaud’s bitters (optional)

Freeze a coupe. Place all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker and fill halfway with ice. Shake hard for 20 seconds. Strain into the coupe and garnish with grapefruit. Perhaps a maraschino cherry too, if you fancy.

Some Hemingway Daiquiri Notes:

1) There is a legend attached to this cocktail: that this is what Ernest Hemingway drank at the Florida Bar in Cuba; being diabetic, you see, he couldn’t have a regular Daiquiri which would have been made with sugar. But this is apocryphal on six or seven levels. Maraschino is pretty darn sugary for a start - not to mention a little adverby for Papa H’s tastes. Hemingway’s preferred recipe was in fact more like 75ml rum, 15ml lime. No messing around there. The substitution of maraschino for sugar syrup was a fairly standard manoeuvre at the time, at least judging from my travels around pre-Revolutionary Cuba and the drink that has come to take Hemingway’s name appears to be an evolution of the Daiquiri No. 3 from the menu at La Florida. It was blended up with ‘snow ice’ into a sort of slushy. I also can’t quite picture Hemingway drinking a slushy, can you?

2) I’m aware that the figure of Hemingway towers over every young American man with literary ambitions. But the only Hemingway this not-so-young Englishman has ever read is The Old Man and the Sea, which I picked up one afternoon Abbott-Kinney library when I was living there (one of the many excellent public libraries in L.A., by the way, who knew?) I was initially alarmed about what seemed to me the gleeful slaughter of dolphins - so this is why he’s been cancelled?! Until I realised that he meant dolphinfish, aka the maki maki. So that was OK. And the story? Terrific, five out of five.

3) The proportions above are what 2014 Richard came up with when he wrote the book, The Spirits. Your 2023 Richard wondered if it might not be a little dry - particularly when he noticed that Alice Lascelles had opted for a rather more luscious 50ml rum, 25ml grapefruit and 15ml each of lime and maraschino in her (extremely good) Cocktail Edit. But actually, maybe it’s the rain, maybe it’s the fact that it’s 11.47am as I write this, but I rather liked this pared-back, no-nonsense version. Sometimes you want a cocktail that makes you stand up straight and pay attention.

4) I added the Peychaud’s purely for colour. A drop of Campari or Aperol would also do the trick. I feel a drink should be the colour of the thing it tastes of and the dull green this came out as didn’t do much for me.

5) I’m going to leave it there. I remain eye-deep in another project - but I didn’t want to leave you thirsty.

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🖊️I am Richard Godwin.
🧋My instructions for sugar syrup, ice, grenadine, orgeat, etc are here.
🧑‍🏫 My 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS are here.
⚗️ My bottle recommendations are here.
📃 The full A-Z recipe archive is here. 
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