How to Make Twists on the Rum Cocktail

There are two Daiquiris, and for our purposes, we can divide them into the right kind and the wrong kind—and if you believe Daiquiris to be blended concoctions of sour mix spiked with rum so cheap they don’t sell it in liquor stores, I regret to inform you that you’ve only had the wrong kind. “One is the neon slushy you’d get in Cancun that’s so sweet you involuntarily lick the air after you taste it,” we’ve warned you of previously, “and the other is one of the greatest simple cocktails of all time.” A proper Daiquiri is simply rum, lime, and sugar—find out why it’s a great litmus test of a bartender’s skill, or just make one, below.

Add ingredients to shaker tin, add ice and shake hard for 10 to 12 seconds. Strain off ice into a stemmed coupe glass. Garnish with a thin lime wheel.

The Brooklynite was an invention of the bar at the Stork Club, the most famous nightclub in New York. The Stork was, for a time, the epicenter of the New York social scene, the Studio 54 of its day. It was exclusive, snobbish even—the message to the staff, scrawled on a backroom chalkboard, was “if you know them, they don’t belong at the Stork Club”—but for the right kind of socialite, the exclusivity is part of the thrill. Among those for whom the door was always open was the journalist and bon vivant Lucius Beebe, who in 1946 was commissioned to compile the club’s cocktails and culture into The Stork Club Bar Book, “a cocktail book to end cocktail books” it claimed, with some 350 recipes amid lengthy meditations on drinks, drinking and, of course, the various splendors of the Stork Club.

While the Brooklynite was more of an addendum than a star in that book, its a delightful little drink and among the better things to make with a bottle of Jamaican rum. The honey does an admirable job of couching the rum’s heavy funk. Additionally, rum and lime have been best friends since before you met either of them, and the bitters add some welcome front-palate spice. 

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake hard for eight to 10 seconds and strain into a cocktail glass or coupe.

While the Captain’s Blood is built upon the foundation of the Daiquiri, it differs in some key ways. The first and most important is the choice of rum. While a standard Daiquiri uses a light, easy Spanish-style white rum, the Captain’s Blood calls specifically for Jamaican rum. It’s a spirit that has a distinct fingerprint and it’s not subtle, thus calling for it gives the cocktail a firm shove into darker and more esoteric territory.

The second way this strays from a Daiquiri is in its heavy dose of Angostura Bitters, which adds tons of texture and the flavors of baking spice. The bitters combine with the hogo to create an entirely new drink, one that’s deeper and richer and honestly weirder, a drink that’s still sunshine-caliber refreshing but whose soul spends half the year in the underworld. It’s a Daiquiri with an edge.

The final twist in Gaige’s original recipe—the one we can’t and won’t recommend—is that he keeps the full measure of lime juice but completely omits any sweetener at all. This makes a cocktail that’s punishingly tart and entirely unpleasant, but we’re in the business of deliciousness around here.

Add all ingredients to a shaker, and shake on ice for eight to 10 seconds. Strain up into a coupe, martini, or cocktail glass, and garnish with a lime wheel, or perhaps nothing at all.

The Old Cuban—aged rum, lime, simple syrup, and mint, with Angostura Bitters and Champagne—is very often described as a combination of a French 75 and a Mojito, but we think that’s not quite right. Both of those latter cocktails are pure brightness, while the vanilla from the aged rum and the spice from the bitters in the Old Cuban moves it from poolside to inside as if under a slowly twisting ceiling fan in a smoky room, long narrow beams of light through the wooden shutters. It is the darker side of refreshing, the more alluring and seductive side, and has our vote for one of the best cocktails invented in the last 20 years.

Add all ingredients except wine to a cocktail shaker with ice, shake well for 10 to 12 seconds and strain into a flute or stemmed cocktail glass. Top with wine and garnish with a mint leaf or sprig.

Invented at one of the Midwest Meccas of cocktail making, Chicago’s the Violet Hour, the Hush and Wonder is “as close to a ‘signature drink’ as we have,” wrote Maloney in his James Beard Award-winning book The Bartender’s Manifesto, “because it touches on most of our core philosophies: It’s a barely tweaked, modern take on a very obvious Mother Drink; it’s incredibly complex without being 10 touches; and it relies on solid technique to reach its full, spectacular potential.” It is a Daiquiri, essentially—rum, lime, and sugar—given texture with a dash of grapefruit bitters, and a seductive floral radiance from a rinse of crème de violette. It is simplicity itself, using bottles that most bars already have lying around, and yet achieves something completely new and utterly delicious. 

Add rum, lime, simple syrup, and bitters to a cocktail shaker with ice, and shake hard for eight to 10 seconds. Put the crème de violette into a coupe or cocktail glass and then turn and tilt the glass until the violette coats the inside (this is a “rinse”). It’s best to do this over a sink, so you can get the liqueur all the way to the inner edge of the glass—this will help with aroma. Once the inside of the glass is duly coated with crème de violette, invert entirely to discard excess. Strain the cocktail into the glass. Garnish with a lime wheel, a grapefruit peel, or nothing at all.

Ernest Hemingway spent a lot of time in Havana and he became a regular of La Florida (affectionately known as La Floridita), a Cuban bar known for its delicious Daiquiris. He was such a fan of a Daiquiri variation that used Maraschino liqueur that the bar named it after him. Of course, the writer’s preferred recipe was unpalatably boozy. So we offer a way to make a more restrained—but still excellent—version of the Hemingway Daiquiri.

Combine ingredients either on finely shaved ice and shake, or otherwise to a blender and blend on high for 10 seconds. Serve up in a stemmed glass, and garnish with a scowl, or perhaps a war story.

The Daisy de Santiago is made of rum, lime juice, a touch of sugar, and Yellow Chartreuse, served on crushed ice with a mint sprig and a sparkle of soda and it is a lovely thing indeed. It’s got the bright exuberance you’d expect but lifted by the carbonation and charmed by Chartreuse’s spice. It tastes splendiferous—not showy like a firework, but showy like a mink coat. While a Daiquiri is snappy, the Daisy de Santiago is garish. While a Daiquiri is radiant, the Daisy de Santiago is seductive. Is it better than the Daiquiri? Of course not. But we love it all the same.

To a tall glass, add all ingredients. Add crushed ice about halfway up and give a brief stir or swizzle, five to eight seconds, to begin the chilling process. Fill the rest of the glass with crushed ice and garnish with a mint sprig or two.

The Royal Bermuda Yacht Club is not a tiki drink. Admittedly it sounds like one, and the recipe might even read a little like one, but it’s not—if you’re hoping for a juice-packed garnish monster, this is not the cocktail for you. So why isn’t it a tiki drink? Well despite being later swept up in Trader Vic’s orbit (a big tiki guy) and despite using falernum (a big tiki ingredient), it’s not overly juicy or complicated, it doesn’t have 55 garnishes, and it doesn’t come in a mug shaped like an angry totemic demigod. The Royal Bermuda Yacht Club is clean, lithe, and snappy.

Done well, the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club Cocktail is bright and almost exuberantly refreshing. The lime and the rum speak for themselves, but where you’d expect to find the balancing sugar, the cocktail instead comes with the juicy zest of orange liqueur and the warm spice of falernum. Its association with the tiki world is not completely inappropriate—it’s a difference of degrees, not of kind, but it’s a lot of degrees. It’s a Daiquiri, essentially, with a hint of island patois, or a Mai Tai, if you must, but with a soldier’s posture and a pressed suit, which is about as tiki as a Royal Yacht Club in Bermuda would ever deign to be. 

Add ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice and shake hard for eight to 10 seconds. Strain up into a cocktail class or coupe and garnish with a lime wheel or peel.

“If the Frozen Daiquiri has been seen as ignoble,” write Garret Richard and Ben Schaffer in their book Tropical Standard, “that goes 100 times for the Frozen Strawberry Daiquiri, which has served as the poster child for the despised era of syrupy, frigid booze bombs after the cocktail’s collapse.” Richard is a tiki guy, and his and Schaffer’s book is the first attempt, possibly ever, to unite the flamboyant exuberance of tiki with the methodical precision of the modernist craft movement. They point out that in the 1940s the Frozen Strawberry Daiquiri was worthy company for high society, and its fall from grace is a relatively recent phenomenon. Part of their effort is to re-induct it into the union of acceptable drinks.

To create a better version they used all the methods a craft bartender would—fresh ingredients, good rum, precise sweetness—but they couldn’t get the texture right. They then realized the Starbucks Frappuccino had the mouthfeel they wanted. And that’s a result of of there being a touch of a commercial food emulsifier in the drink called xantham gum, which holds the ice and liquid together for superior consistency. You’ll find it’s the key to you making an amazing blended Daiquiri too.

Recipe adapted from Tropical Standard: Cocktail Techniques & Reinvented Recipes

Add rum, lime, strawberries, salt, and sugar to the blender, and blend on low without ice for about 15 to 20 seconds to dissolve the sugar and break up the berries. Next add the xanthan gum, and blend on low for another 10 seconds without ice to “hydrate” it. Next add 1.5 cups of crushed ice (or 170 g of ice) and blend up to high until fully smooth. Pour into a large, chilled coupe, and garnish with a sliced or whole strawberry, or a lime wheel.