Welcome to the weekend
Our cocktail for the weekend.
The cocktail for this weekend is the classic Daiquiri. One of my very favorites. Just three ingredients: simple syrup, lime juice, and rum, shaken with ice and poured into a coupe or over ice into any glass you’d like.
Because nothing masks the ingredients, you don’t want to cut corners. The simple syrup can be white sugar or demerara. The lime should be squeezed fresh, not a while ago and definitely not in a mix of some kind. As for the rum, any good rum, usually blanco, will work.
Going back to the limes for a minute, if the lounge you are visiting has no fresh citrus or if there is no juicer, don’t order a Daiquiri, or any other sour cocktail for that matter. Turn your attention to an old fashioned or some other cocktail that doesn’t include citrus.
We don’t know where or when the Daiquiri was created. Some say the drink was created around 1900 in a Cuban mining village and that its name comes from a beach of the same name at the southeastern tip of Cuba, near Santiago de Cuba. Others point to the fact that Grog, a drink favored by British sailors that contained watered down rum with lime juice and sugar predates the beach story by more than a hundred years. Does it matter where it came from? Nope. The Daiquiri is a great cocktail however or whenever it came about.
Our recipe is ¾ ounce of simple syrup, an ounce of lime juice and two ounces of rum. Simple syrup is the wild card. Adjust the volume up or down to suit your taste being mindful that the acidity of the lime will vary by where the lime was grown and how long its been since it was harvested. Also, if you don’t measure your juice, the amount you’re using can vary by 25% or more (half a lime might give you ¾ of an ounce of juice or maybe just a half an ounce).
Daiquiri
.75 oz simple syrup (white or demerara)
1 oz freshly squeezed lime juice
2 oz rum blanco
Pour the ingredients into a shaker, add ice and shake ten or twelve times to fully chill.
Strain into a chilled coupe or into a rocks filled glass of your choosing. Garnish, if desired, with a lime wheel.
We’ll add a couple of variations in a month or two, both of which are just a delicious and as almost as simple.
Our song for the weekend:
In 1996 Ry Cooder and Nick Gold were developing an album that would demonstrate the connections between Cuban and West African music. A group of musicians from Mali were scheduled to visit Cuba to collaborate with Cuban musicians in recording an album. Visa problems arose and the Malinese musicians couldn’t get to Cuba. Cooder and Gold were left with a studio and an engineer but no musicians. They put together a group of great, but mostly forgotten musicians, some in their 70s and 80s who hadn’t played in years and they went ahead with the recording. The songs showcased music that had been popular in Cuba during the 1940s, styles such as son, bolero and danzón. They called the group the Buena Vista Social Club.
The recording was more successful than anyone dreamed and Buena Vista Social Club became an international success selling millions of copies and becoming the best selling album of Cuban music in history. Our song for the weekend, entitled Chan Chan, written by Compay Segundo in 1984, is the opening tune on the album and probably its best known song.
Links to Chan Chan:
Friday, finally playlist on Apple
Friday, finally playlist on Spotify
Thanks for stopping by.
’Til next week.