The weather’s been unbearably warm these days and that always means I go looking for something cool and refreshing to drink. Funnily enough, the answer to the problem isn’t usually water, but a cocktail of some sort. There’s nothing like a great gin and tonic or margarita to bring the heat down to bearable levels. Nothing of course, except the daiquiri.
The humble daiquiri is a classic cocktail from the early 1900s, which makes it over a century old at this point. In that halcyon age, near the town of Santiago in Cuba was a beach named, not entirely coincidentally, Daiquiri. A bar there catered to Americans who worked at the nearby mine, including one Jennings Cox. Legend has it that one warm day, Cox and his friends found themselves stuck with only three ingedients: rum, sugar and limes, and decided to put them together- which they then christened (what else) the Daiquiri, thereby proving that cigars are only one of the great things to come from Cuba.
The timelessness of the Daiquiri lies in its simplicity. Three basic components: a mixture of rum, sugar and lime juice, shaken with ice. Of course, with only three ingredients to balance, there’s an itch to impress one’s own preferences upon it. Many have scratched this itch since the 1900s, one of whom was Ernest Hemmingway, he of The Old Man and the Sea fame. While Hemmingway was known for his elegant and minimalist prose, he was almost as well known for his love of fine drinks, one of which was the Daiquiri. In his own variant, he doubled the rum, added grapefruit and swapped the sugar for maraschino liqueur.
I don’t claim to the same fame as he, but that didn’t stop me from experimenting. I was of the mind that I wanted to add in a new flavour that was unique, but yet similar to the other flavours in the classic cocktail.
The answer was surprisingly close at hand, and it came from the land of the Hobbits. The kiwifruit has a unique taste of its own; sweet like a cross of a canteloupe and grape, but with a sour bite not unlike unripe strawberries.
The only difficulty was of course to figure out whether to use the regular, tart green kiwis or the honey-sweet yellow kiwis. Naturally, I couldn’t resist doing both.
Kiwi Rum
8 Kiwifruit (Yellow or Green)
700ml White Rum
200ml White Sugar Syrup (Made of equal parts sugar and water)
Leave all ingredients in a sealed mason jar to infuse for 6 weeks, then filter through a fine strainer and bottle.
The two infusions tasted surprisingly similar, with the green kiwi infusion surprising me by being simultaneously sweeter and more sour. The golden kiwi infusion had a slight bittersweet note to it that persisted in the aftertaste. I thought that the green, absent the bitter notes, would serve the needs of the daiquiri better.
For my riff on the Daiquiri, I chose to stick with one of my favourite combination of classic flavours. There’s nothing much that beats the medley of kiwi, lime and strawberry. The fruits have notes that reinforce each other- just ask every ice cream maker who ever froze a popsicle!
Kiwi Daiquiri
50ml of Kiwi Rum
20ml Fresh Lime Juice
20ml Sugar Syrup
Add the ingredients into a shaker and shake vigorously with ice. Double strain into a cocktail glass and garnish with a lime or strawberry.
With only three ingredients, it’s vitally important that we strive for quality in all of them. Each piece of the puzzle is immediately distinguishable from the others, and it’d be criminal to compromise the drink and its balance on the account of any one of them. I suggest using a fresh lime, preferably of the large Persian variety. The strawberry should preferably be a ripe one, Korean if possible.
If all goes well, the result should be a nice balance of sweet and sour notes. The mellower tones of the kiwi soften the harshness of lime and add another dimension that you just can’t find in a regular Daiquiri, yet still preserving the character of a timeless classic.
Bold yet structured, intertwined but distinct, it’s like a tropical tango on the tongue. Cheers!
