The Tale of the Daiquiri
How a simple three-ingredient drink forever changed the cocktail culture of New Orleans
Today industrial machines filled with brightly colored high fructose corn syrup, call-brand liquors, and additives only a food scientist can pronounce line the walls of Bourbon Street bar rooms lit with pastel neon signs and accented with vague tropical decor. Their humming motors churn the frozen blends that sport names like Jungle Juice, Banana Banshee, and Blue Bayou. Tourists stumble down French Quarter streets with large Styrofoam cups, sucking the inebriating nectar from oversized straws like hummingbirds at a red plastic feeder. The collective term for these warm-weather concoctions is the daiquiri, but this modern adaptation is a near-nuclear mutation of the original drink, invented in Cuba around 1898.
Although locals had been imbibing drinks containing rum and citrus for years, an American engineer, Jennings Cox, who was set to make his fortune in the iron mines of Cuba, is credited with its invention. As legend has it, Cox was entertaining one night when he ran out of gin; he quickly saved the evening by combining light rum, lime, and sugar in a glass with shaved ice. The drink became a local phenomenon, and Cox named his libation after the nearby town of Daiquiri on the southeastern Cuban coast. In 1909, Rear Admiral Lucius W. Johnson brought the recipe to the Army and Navy Club in Washington, D.C.
The daiquiri quickly became a literary darling. Although F. Scott Fitzgerald was the first to mention the cocktail in his debut novel This Side of Paradise in 1920, it was his ultimate frenemy, Ernest Hemingway, who had a lifelong love affair with the drink. While in Cuba, he visited the Floridita Lounge and observed bartender Constantino Ribalaigua crafting his fresh fruit daiquiris. The writer was not a fan of sugar; he was diabetic. So Ribalaigua created a daiquiri with double the rum, grapefruit, and lime juices with just a touch of maraschino cherry liqueur for sweetness. The Papa Doble, or Hemingway Daiquiri, was born.
The open secret surrounding the Ribalaigua/Hemingway invention is that it was served frozen. Hemingway went so far as to describe his signature cocktail in his novel Islands in the Stream. He writes, “This frozen daiquiri, so well beaten as it is, looks like the sea where the wave falls away from the bow of a ship when she is doing thirty knots.”
The 1930s also saw the rise of Tiki culture in the United States. Tiki historian and mastermind of the recently opened Latitude 29 bar and restaurant in the French Quarter, Jeff “Beachbum” Berry considers the daiquiri one of his favorite subjects. “The original daiquiri is just rum, sugar, and lime. You can’t get any simpler, but the exact combination of the three ingredients is the key,” he said. “It is the foundation of all tropical drinks. All Tiki drinks are more or less a complicated version of the daiquiri.”
While Berry admits that the libations available to New Orleanians at local drive-thrus and walk-up French Quarter bars are far from Cox’s recipe, he cautioned, “You wouldn’t think of a big, burly guy like Hemingway drinking frozen daiquiris, but he did. And if a frozen daiquiri is good enough for Hemingway, it is good enough for all of us.”
Around the same time the Tiki movement took a foothold on the West Coast, New Orleans bar owner Pat O’Brien was struggling to sell the rum he was forced to buy from distributors in order to be allowed to purchase more popular spirits like whiskey. He needed a signature cocktail that would showcase his rum stockpile. The inspiration for the drink that would change New Orleans cocktail culture was the humble three-ingredient daiquiri combined with an array of fruit juices. The potent result was a true force of nature aptly called the Hurricane.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the daiquiri maintained its stronghold on America. JFK sipped them on his sailboat, the Honey Fitz. Jackie Kennedy even trained White House staff to make hers with artificial sweetener instead of sugar in order to keep her svelte waist. But it was the dawn of disco that signaled the decline of Tiki, the daiquiri, and other tropical beverages.
Then in the early 1980s—the same time period that gave America the Members Only jacket, Max Headroom, and Cool Ranch Doritos—an appropriately fitting cocktail emerged in South Louisiana when Houston real-estate developer David Briggs Jr. read about a small Ruston liquor store, Wilmart, that was taking the state by storm with frozen drinks produced by slush machines. Demand was so high for these frozen treats that the owner of the store, Dolph Williams, patented a larger machine, capable of producing 12 gallons per hour. Upon visiting the store and observing the never-ending stream of customers, Briggs moved his family to New Orleans and opened the first New Orleans Original Daiquiris in Hammond, Louisiana, in 1983. The modern incarnation of the daiquiri was born.
Despite being a sugar-infused bastardization of the original, the New Orleans version of the cocktail classic fits into the culture of the city astoundingly well. Ann Tuennerman, founder of Tales of the Cocktail, an international cocktail convention/festival held every July in New Orleans, said, “The daiquiri is just naturally New Orleans. It is a great match for our climate, and you can easily carry it around with you. Plus you have to remember most Louisianans grew up gorging on snow cones. Frozen daiquiris are pretty much the grown-up version of [snow cones].”
Tuennerman has unofficially coined 2015 the year of the daiquiri. “With the craft cocktail revolution, many bartenders are redefining the daiquiri by using fresh ingredients,” she said. This year the festival features a cocktail competition entitled Redefining the Daiquiri as well as a daiquiri happy hour with different takes on the iconic cocktail using some of the world’s best rums.
So this summer, no matter if you’re sauntering into the Hotel Monteleone’s Carousel Bar to enjoy a Papa Doble as Hemingway did, checking out the best that the Tiki renaissance has to offer in the form of the Luau Daiquiri (recipe on right) at Beachbum Berry’s Latitude 29, or dancing down Bourbon Street with thirty-two ounces of pure frozen delight in a Styrofoam cup, raise a glass to Jennings Cox and a classic cocktail that makes our hot, humid summer bearable.
Details. Details. Details.
Tales of the Cocktail
July 15—19
Latitude 29
538 Louisa Street
New Orleans, La.