Dance of the Daiquiri
Rum, lime, and sugar—I would not be the first to invoke the Trinity in describing their synergy in a cocktail. Humbly I step forward here today, however, to explicate the fitness of the invocation—to affirm it as no mere profanation.
Its manifestations are mainstays: the Mojito, the Caipirinha, the Ti’ Punch—the Ti’ Punch embodying the highest veneration of sugarcane, with its foregrounding of rhum agricole.
Yet it is the Daiquiri that discloses rum, lime, and sugar in the fullness of its triune glory.
Its classic specs are that of the sour template, of which it is the premier example:
2 oz rum
0.75 oz lime juice
0.75 oz simple syrup
Simple, perhaps, but “A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything).” Like Virgil at the summit of Purgatory, the specs can only guide one to a point. Balancing these three ingredients requires a further elevation of one's art (and not a little grace).
In contemporary bartending culture, the Daiquiri plays a multifaceted role. Similarly to a shot of Fernet Branca, it can be a handshake—a way of recognizing one's fellow artisans and celebrating their company. At the start of each shift at the illustrious Death & Co., for instance, “GDT” or “Gangster Daiquiri Time”—whereupon a bartender makes a round of Daiquiris for the staff—is a sacred ritual.1
Beyond a handshake, however, a Daiquiri order can also be a gauntlet. Like an omelette in a French kitchen, it allows insight into the subtlest aspects of a bartender’s technique. To make a Daiquiri is to be put to the test.
What rum to use? The go-to remains a modest light rum, generally something aged and filtered in the Spanish style, such as Havana Club 3 Year, El Dorado 3 Year, or Flor de Caña 4 Year Extra Seco. Yet there's no rule against picking up an amber or dark rum, or against blending rums; indeed, it can be a welcome delicacy. Those after my own heart will incorporate an agricole. Rum being a remarkably diverse category of spirits, the possibilities are manifold.
The key here is that the character of the rum(s) one chooses will entail adjustments to the other ingredients.
Take sugar. A traditional 1:1 simple syrup affords a neutral and controlled increase of sweetness and dilution. A rich 2:1 cane or demerara syrup lends caramel and toffee notes to the palate, along with viscosity to the texture. Some purists insist on using granulated sugar to at once limit dilution and retain the neutrality of the sweetener. Intention is everything.
Now take lime. What kind of limes are you using? Persian or Key limes? The latter is more acidic and aromatic. That changes the calculus. How ripe are your limes? How fresh is your juice? Are you juicing à la minute, or have you let it sit for a few hours? The sweet spot for oxidization time continues to be disputed, but all agree that after 24 hours it will taste acrid and metallic. Perhaps you have braved the frontier of “superjuice” to extend that timeframe. At any rate, you must taste the juice! Citrus is notoriously inconsistent. How tart is it? How bitter? How sweet? How fragrant? How much of the essential oil have you extracted from the rind? How will you now modify your other ingredients/proportions? Maybe a full ounce of lime juice to stand up to a half ounce of rich cane syrup? Maybe dial down the quantity or caramel character of the sugar to better elicit the florality of a Key lime? Judgment is all.
So now you’ve jiggered, but into what vessel? A cobbler shaker or a Boston shaker? The tin-on-tin Boston shaker has become the more fashionable of the two for most applications, but many professionals insist on making a Daiquiri with a cobbler shaker to chill the drink more quickly and to allow a comely sprinkling of ice chips into the glass with the pour. (A touchy subject, those shards at the top of a drink—nothing short of a faux pas in the eyes of many other professionals, who “close the gate” on their Hawthorne strainer or “double strain” with a conical fine-mesh sieve.)
On the matter of ice, presuming you’re a home cocktail enthusiast like myself and don’t enjoy the luxury of a Kold-Draft or Hoshizaki machine, what are you grabbing from the freezer? 2” cubes? 1” cubes? Maybe all you have is what your icemaker churns out, ‘those stones which the builders rejected...’ Whatever the case may be, it will influence how much ice you’ll have to use and how long you’ll have to shake to attain just the right degrees of temperature, aeration, and dilution.2
At long last, you draw your chilled coupe and pour, your wash line touching the brim. You pause to admire the thin layer of froth that’s gathered at the surface of this viridescent haze. Any longer and you might catch the glass grinning back at you. You know that that first sip will be the finest, so you stretch out your hand...
In more ways than one, to take that first sip is to taste truth. It is at once a confrontation with one’s finitude and a fleeting encounter with the infinite. If one attends to a fraction of the details recited above, one’s Daiquiri will be delicious. It will be. But it won’t be perfect. —Perfect? What do you mean by “perfect?” What gives one the conviction that the ideal or essential Daiquiri could exist? Isn’t such talk mere abstraction, a requirement we’ve imposed on the cocktail prior to our life in cocktail bars? —Ah, but my Wittgensteinian interlocutor, this is not just a problem of language. The promise of this perfection whispers pre-conceptually through the umbral chambers your nose, mouth, and throat. It is in those few first sips of a Daiquiri, even as (especially as) one acknowledges that s/he hasn't perfected it, that one can sense the possibility, the eventuality of perfection—even if that sense is a kind of epektasis and that eventuality a kind of eschaton, only to be tasted “When the tongues of flame are in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and rose are one.”
It is a recognition that comes with a particular pathos. It can be no coincidence that the same country that gave us the Daiquiri gave us Bolero. At the height of exultation, there is a tinge of melancholy.
It’s said that a Daiquiri should be enjoyed in three sips. The adage is truer than it is hyperbolic. The process of decay begins the moment it is poured. It warms; it deflates; it vanishes. “Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” As each sip stretches more deeply into that triune mystery of rum, lime, and sugar, the mystery recedes. The more one is faced with the finitude of one’s reach, the more one apprehends one’s desire as infinite—as for the infinite.
“Back to the rough ground!” Let me tell you about my Daiquiri. It’s not perfect. Frankly, it’s a work in progress. But it’s still damn good.
The base is presently a light rum that I purchased at a distillery in St. Michaels, Maryland when I was vacationing with my family on the Eastern Shore—Lyon White Rum by Windon Distilling Company. It’s not your average Daiquiri rum—unfiltered, unaged, a hybrid fermentation of Louisiana cane sugar and molasses, pot distilled and bottled at 45% abv. Grassy and saline, in some ways it’s more reminiscent of an agave or a cane juice spirit than a Spanish-style ron, even with its musty-sweet finish from the molasses. And if I haven’t already made it abundantly clear, I am all about those vegetal agricole notes. In fact, I accentuate just those aspects by adding a touch of Martinique rhum or Haitian clairin. I’ve gravitated toward a couple of variations:
1.5 oz Lyon White Rum
0.5 oz Clément Canne Bleue
0.75 oz lime juice
0.75 oz 1:1 simple syrup
or
1.75 oz Lyon White Rum
0.25 oz Clairin Casimir 2018
1 oz lime juice
0.5 oz 2:1 cane syrup
When I finish the Lyon, I plan to grab a bottle of Barbancourt (either the white or the 8 year) and start experimenting with Phil Ward’s specs:
2 oz Barbancourt White Rum
0.75 oz lime juice
0.5 oz 2:1 cane syrup3
And when all of my liquor-store stars are in full alignment, it will be William Elliott’s:
1 oz Neisson Rhum Agricole Blanc
1 oz Santa Teresa 1796
1 oz lime juice
0.5 oz 2:1 simple syrup
Again, it’s a moving target. I make no claims to achieving the beatific gustation here. The paradox persists: I shall never realize it and yet it is always being realized.
A balanced cocktail is often seen as a gestalt, a whole that transcends the sum of its parts. And rightly enough. Toby Maloney finds an even richer figure, however, in “‘the Triptych’—a reference to when three panels of a painting stand alone in their own right, each with its own meaning, and how when they come together, they collectively mean something else, something more interesting.”4 It’s difficult to imagine a more apposite metaphor for constructing a cocktail. The classics, after all, tend to be built in threes—spirits, sugar, and citrus for shaken cocktails; spirits, sugar, and bitters for stirred—and however much the spirits form the centerpiece, that centerpiece remains informed by the composition of each panel: “the three pillars of the Triptych are constantly in motion.”5 The principles of rhythm and movement hold in the fine art of mixing drinks just as they do in the visual arts.
On the experience of a Daiquiri, however, let us think with another threefold figure, one from patristic literature: perichoresis—an image for expressing the relationship of the Trinity. Etymologically, the term denotes rotation. It pictures the divine persons as spiraling in a dance of mutual indwelling (symbolized classically in the Triskelion).
The distinction I wish to make via perichoresis is that the three persons of the Trinity do not fuse in such a way as to “mean something else, something more interesting”; they commune in such a way as to manifest and mediate the plenitude of each at once. Their essence and existence one, the outpouring whereby each makes space for the other is what the persons, at their fullest, are. We know the dancers through the dance.
We reach instinctively for the concept of gestalt because for us “there is only the dance.” We experience the dancers of a Daiquiri as a synaesthetic unity—indeed, as a saturated excess—and it is only through a reduction or suspension (epoché) that we attend now to rum, now to lime, now to this interaction, now to that aspect, and so on.
All the same, to practice this epoché is to steadily discover how rum, lime, and sugar, when mixed in a well-made Daiquiri, receive from one another an increase in being. Each acts as a frame or horizon through which the other can appear more luminously. Lime and sugar reveal particularities of a rum that can elude even the most developed palates when sipping rum neat. Sugar and lime, tasted on their own, are too concentrated, respectively too sweet and sour, to unfold their complexity. The water and spirits not only lengthen and liberate the sugars and acids: a good rum (itself the distillate of sugarcane juice, its byproducts, and their fermentates) enriches our understanding of the sweetness and bitterness of the earth. One simply has not recognized rum, lime, and sugar—has not participated fully in the reality of each—before tasting them in a Daiquiri. In this taste, their forms have life and breath.
For sugarcane is more than the product of its disaccharides, lime more than the sum of its citric and malic acids, rum more than the percentage of its alcohol by volume. All are densely networked biological phenomena that carry not just other compounds, but entire histories within their flavors—ecological, agricultural, technical, and social.
The Daiquiri rhapsodizes these narratives. To sip a Daiquiri is to sit at the feet of a master storyteller.
Prosit.
David Kaplan, Nick Fauchald, and Alex Day, Death & Co.: Modern Classic Cocktails (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2014), 260.
On ice, dilution, and shaking technique, see Dave Arnold, Liquid Intelligence: The Art and Science of the Perfect Cocktail (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2014), 65-100.
See again the “Daiquiri Variations” section in Kaplan, et al., Death & Co., 260-265.
Toby Maloney and the Bartenders of the Violet Hour, with Emma Janzen, The Bartender’s Manifesto: How To Think, Drink, and Create Cocktails Like a Pro (New York: Clarkson Potter, 2022), 32.
Ibid.
I'd like an invitation to the dance!
I must have one... now!