Being a geek about anything means you get The Question: “What’s your favorite (music, manga, fill in your particular passion here)?”
As a guy who writes about all sorts of cocktails, I hate to admit bibulous bias. “Depends,” I’ll lie, followed by some qualifying crap about the season, the occasion, the company I’m with.
But the answer I’m always thinking is this: Daiquiri.
Often incorrectly made (real ones don’t come from Slurpee machines), the Daiquiri has been dismissed as a "girlie drink". That would be news to fans such as J.F.K and Ernest Hemingway, who had his own excellent take on this classic called the Papa Doble (more on that in a sec).
As with most cocktails, the Daiquiri’s origins are much debated. Most cocktail nerds side with the story that a couple of American engineers stationed in a Cuban mining town called (what else) Daiquiri in the late nineteenth century invented the drink when they ran out of gin. Living in the land of rum, they reached for a bottle of the lighter variety, combined it with lime, sugar and ice, shook it up — and the rest is history.
Still, it’s hard to imagine the sublime simplicity of this tartly refreshing trio of ingredients hadn’t occurred to anyone earlier.
Done right, the Daiquiri is cocktail perfection.
This article appears in Aug 19-25, 2010.