The Daiquiri

The final recipe

If you’re just here for the recipe, the perfect Daiquiri is:

Ingredients

Ingredient	Amount
Blended rum, with low fruitiness and high alcohol burn, aged 1-4 years Our pick: Banks 5 Island Blend Rum	1 ½ oz
Unaged, pot-still, Jamaican-style overproof rum Our pick: Wray & Nephew Overproof White Rum	⅙ oz
Juice of a Persian (a.k.a. Tahitian) lime (fresh, and squeezed without expressing oil from the peel by holding the fruit with one’s fingers and working a fork back and forth to release the juice)	½ oz
2:1 (by volume) white sugar syrup	⅓ oz
Room-temperature water	⅙ oz

Preparation

To make one Daiquiri:

1. Chill a coupe glass in a freezer for at least 30 minutes.

2. Mix all ingredients above in a 2-piece shaker.

3. Fill the shaker ⅔ full with ~1-inch ice cubes directly from a freezer.

4. Shake the shaker vigorously for 15 seconds.

5. Using the tab on the strainer to push the “gate” closed, so that the liquid pours over the outer ring of of the solid-metal plate rather than directly through the strainer’s spring, strain the drink from the shaker into a pre-chilled coupe glass using a Hawthorne strainer.

6. Do not garnish.

7. Serve immediately.

For 2-4 servings, ingredient proportions do not change, and preparation instructions are identical.

The goal of a perfect Daiquiri

The Daiquiri, like most of the popular canon, is comprised of ingredients with sharply-contrasting flavor profiles. In order to achieve a “perfect” recipe, these components—rum, lime, sweetener—must all be optimally balanced. But balance must be achieved both below and above the level of a single sip: the flavor signature of the Daiquiri must remain balanced at each step of the journey, from nose, to initial taste, through the full blossoming of all the flavors across the palate, and on to the final fade after the liquid is swallowed. Plus, to be the perfect Daiquiri, it must also remain balanced across the minutes-long series of sips which amounts to “having a drink.”

A review of the sources

Below is a comparison of the published Daiquiri recipes that we judge to be either representative of the evolution of the drink over time or influential on how the drink is commonly served today, from the first known written recipe in 1896 to best-selling cocktail books of the current decade.

Through these sources, you’ll see those three primary components of the Daiquiri have barely changed; rum, lime and sweetener are still the requisite parts of the drink. (Although the original recipe called for “lemon,” this is most likely due to a mistranslation of the Spanish word for lime, limón; lemons were not native to Cuba, where Jennings Cox was stationed.) Since its first wide publication in Ensslin’s Recipes for Mixed Drinks in 1916, the Daiquiri has had a surprisingly stable 2-oz rum base, with Trader Vic’s 1972 version and Simon Difford’s 2020 version being the only ones to use a different amount. Difford’s was the best of all the recipes listed here—in our view, probably attributable to his design method of iterating with the ratio among all the ingredients as his anchor point, rather than being tied to a fixed-size spirit base or a target glass volume—and thus served as our jumping-off point.

Besides the proportions of the requisite ingredients and the type of rum, the primary difference among the recipes is the type of sweetener. Sugar, powdered sugar, sugar syrup and gum syrup have all been used to offer a counterbalance to the citrus tartness. In another variation, the Hemingway Daiquiri, sugar is swapped out entirely for maraschino liqueur; this was enough of a departure from the original that we consider it a separate drink entirely.

Author	Source	Year	Rum oz	Rum type	Lime juice	Sweetener oz	Sweetener type	Anything else?	Garnish
Jennings Cox	Personal diary	1896	1 ½	Bacardi Carta Blanca rum	¾ (1 "lemon")	¼ (1 tsp)	sugar	½ oz water	none
Hugo R. Ensslin	Recipes for Mixed Drinks (as the “Cuban Cocktail”)	1916	2	Bacardi rum	½ (½ lime)	¼ (1 tsp)	Gum syrup		none
(presumably) Constantine Ribalaigua	Bar la Floridita Cocktails (as “Daiquiri Num. 1”)	1934	2	Bacardi rum	Juice of half a lime	¼ (1 tsp)	sugar		none
David A. Embury	The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks	1948	2	White Label Cuban Rum	½	¼	sugar syrup (implied on p. 101 to be 3:1)		none
Victor Jules “Trader Vic” Bergeron, Jr.	Trader Vic’s Bartender’s Guide, Revised	1972	1	Light Puerto Rican rum	¾ (1 lime)	¼ (dash)	Not specified	¼ oz (dash) Maraschino liqueur	Thin lime slice
Gary Regan	The Joy of Mixology	2003	2	Light rum	¾	¼	Not specified	¼ oz (dash) Maraschino liqueur	Lime wedge
Dave Arnold	Liquid Intelligence	2014	2	White rum	¾	¾	1:1 cane sugar to water		none
Alex Day, David Kaplan, and Nick Fauchald	Death & Co.	2014	2	Flor de Caña extra-dry white rum	1	½	2:1 cane sugar to water		Lime wedge
Martin and Rebecca Cate	Smuggler’s Cove	2016	2	Blended lightly aged rum	¾	½	SC demerara syrup (2 pt water: 1 pt demerara sugar: 3 pts granulated sugar)		none
Jim Meehan	Meehan’s Bartender’s Manual	2017	2	Bacardi Heritage white rum	¾	¾	1:1 white sugar and water		Lime wheel
Alex Day, David Kaplan, and Nick Fauchald	Cocktail Codex (“ideal” version)	2018	2	1 ¾ oz Caña Brava white rum ¼ oz La Favorite Rhum Agricole Blanc Coeur de Canne	1	¾	1:1 white sugar and water		Lime wedge
Simon Difford	DiffordsGuide.com	2020	1 ⅔	Bacardi carta blanca	½	⅓	2:1 white sugar and water	4 drops Difford’s Daiquiri bitters	Lime wedge
Dale DeGroff	The New Craft of the Cocktail	2020	2	Mount Gay white rum	¾	¾	1:1 white sugar and water		none

Experimenting with the variables

Here are the independent variables we tuned to perfect the Daiquiri:

• Overall proportions of rum, lime, and sweetener

• Primary rum used for the spirit base

• Whether to split the primary rum with another type of rum, and if so what type to split it with

• Choice of sweetener

• Whether to add water, and how much

• Lime-squeezing method

• Type of strainer and method of straining

• Type of shake

• Garnish

We’ll explore them all here.

A few other variables might be open to debate in other classic cocktails, but are sufficiently easily-settled for the Daiquiri that we don’t delve into them here:

• Type of glass: While we don’t always hold with tradition regarding the best glassware to use for classic cocktails, there is no compelling reason related to taste, smell, ergonomics, or aesthetics not to serve the classic Daiquiri in the conventional vessel: a coupe.

• Whether to chill the glass: Chilling the glass keeps the drink colder for slightly longer, works well with the white, slightly-cloudy tint of the drink, and can be done easily in a standard home kitchen.

• Type of lime: Persian limes (also known as Tahitian limes) are not the only variety of lime. However, they are the primary variety that is easily found in grocery stores across the United States, simple to juice, and sour enough to stand out in most cocktails containing lime juice.

• Type of ice: As a resource primarily intended for home bartenders, we use standard (~1 inch on each of 3 dimensions) home-refrigerator ice-machine cubes for shaking rather than large or crushed ice.

Proportions

We began working outward from Simon Difford’s 10:3:2 rum:lime:sweetener proportions as the best recipe that emerged from our historical review. We halved the amount of water added to ⅙ oz to achieve the optimal intensity for the other ingredients.

Finding the best rum

Rums enter and exit the market, and specific products change their production techniques over time, either deliberately in response to consumer tastes or inadvertently due to technique decay within producers. Rather than mandating one specific rum for the Perfect Daiquiri, our goal was to understand exactly which underlying properties in a rum make it ideal for this drink.

All candidate rums for the base spirit of the classic Daiquiri are lightly- (4 or fewer years) aged rums made from molasses (as opposed to from sugarcane juice, or other similar bases). But even this seemingly-narrow category has a wide variety in manufacturing processes and flavor profiles.

The best rum taxonomy we’re aware of is in Martin and Rebecca Cate’s Smuggler’s Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki. The genius of the Cates’ scheme is that it classifies rums by what they are made of and how they are made, not by color descriptors (e.g. “white,” “gold,” “dark”) decoupled completely from taste, nose, and mouthfeel. Example categories include:

• Pot still unaged

• Blended lightly-aged

• Column still long-aged

• Cane pot still aged

The Cates point out (p. 196):

You will notice that in the Prohibition-era cocktails and in exotic cocktails that might normally call for “light Puerto Rican rum,” we do not use column still lightly aged rum as one might expect. The house style at Smuggler’s Cove calls for...a blended, lightly aged rum with a hint more body[, which] better captures a more historical taste profile. But if you prefer a lighter taste, then you can easily substitute.

We don’t need to go into a full description of rum distillation methods here; suffice it to say that pot-distilled rums tend to have flavors and smells that stand out more strongly from the baseline of ethyl alcohol, column stills tend to exhibit the reverse, and blended rums combine products from both types of still to achieve a medium between the two.

In our tests, we experimented with the following rums from the two categories suggested by the Cates:

Category	Product	Selection Notes
Blended lightly aged	Banks 5 Island	Recommended by Smuggler’s Cove for general-purpose use in its category, and specifically for the Daiquiri by Dave Wondrich’s Imbibe!, this is our home bar’s standard-reference lightly-aged molasses rum.
	Plantation 3 Stars Artisanal Rum	Recommended by Smuggler’s Cove for general-purpose use in its category.
Column still lightly aged	Flor de Caña Extra Dry 4 Year	Recommended by Smuggler’s Cove for general-purpose use in its category, and recommended specifically for the Daiquiri by Death & Co.: Modern Classic Cocktails.
	Ron Del Barrilito 2 Star	Recommended by Smuggler’s Cove for general-purpose use in its category, this—despite being lightly-aged—has much more of a barrel-y taste and mouthfeel than most similarly-aged rums (as you can tell from its name).
	Bacardi Superior Carta Blanca	In order to make the mixing of cocktails as easy as possible for home bartenders, we often test out offerings with near-universal availability at retail in the U.S. Bacardi Carta Blanca was the original rum used in Cox’s Daiquiri recipe, although the production process has greatly changed in the 100+ years since.

We began by sipping these rums on their own to get a sense of which qualities, when compared across the set, would be most important in properly balancing a Daiquiri.

Here’s what we found:

Product	Selection Notes
Banks 5 Island	Very balanced and sippable, but still has some alcohol burn. Banana on nose. A little bit barrel-y.
Plantation 3 Stars Artisanal Rum	Best sipping rum of all of the rums in this table. Pineapple on nose; banana on tongue. Very fruity overall, with lots of complex, intertwined tropical fruit flavors, as well as subtle spice notes such as clove.
Flor de Caña Extra Dry 4 Year	Nothing going on here. Nail polish on the nose, and nothing complex in terms of sugarcane flesh, fruit, or barrel flavor afterwards. “Inoffensive” is probably the best term.
Ron Del Barrilito 2 Star	Woody with thick mouthfeel. Relative to the others, lots of barrel-y flavors like vanilla and caramel. Smells a lot like a bourbon, with the corn replaced with sugarcane flesh notes.
Bacardi Superior Carta Blanca	By far the most salinic of all that we tried. Very faint strawberry on tongue. Pretty alcohol burn-y. Grassy, more grassy (as opposed to “sugarcane flesh”) of any of the other rums in this table.

There are many dimensions along which to compare even just these five rums; some of the ones we’re not considering here are mouthfeel, funk/yeastiness, and degree and nature of barrel taste. However, to collapse the problem space to a manageable size, we elected to evaluate our candidate rums along only the two dimensions most critical to their balance in a Daiquiri:

• Fruitiness, which blossoms into complexity when combined with the lime’s sourness

• Alcohol burn, which balances against the sweetener

The below chart is what we’d get if we rated each rum for its properties of fruitiness and alcohol burn, on an absolute scale from 1-5. This specific method of evaluation, relying on general qualities rather than simply on recommending a SKU, should help readers select a rum to use if their options are limited, or if some or all of these go off the market.

Our ideal Daiquiri has some fruit flavor from the base rum, so we ruled out the Ron del Barrilito and Flor de Cana from these tests. The next step was to try our remaining three contenders in a standard Daiquiri recipe:

Product	Selection Notes
Plantation 3 Stars	Although the result was very smooth and drinkable, the fruitiness and sweetness of this rum is somewhat lost in the lime and powerful sweetener of the Daiquiri. It lacks the bite of the alcohol to cut through the other citrus and sweet components.
Bacardi Superior Carta Blanca	Less sweet and complex than the Plantation. Very clean and fresh tasting, but verging on watery, without the fruit notes or the barrel notes of the Banks.
Banks 5 Island	The most complex of the three. Funkier than the Plantation, with more barrel notes. The alcohol cuts through the other flavors without being too pronounced or harsh on the palate. We both agreed that this was the winner.

Splitting the base

Now that we had our primary rum—Banks 5 Island—we had to determine whether to split the base with another style of rum. There are several varieties of rum which, if used in smaller proportions than the lightly-aged molasses rum base, might plausibly enhance the overall drink but still preserve the flavor identity of the classic Daiquiri. These are:

• Rhum agricole

• Molasses rum aged more than 4 years

• Overproof unaged rum

Each of the options contributes a different element to the drink’s flavor profile:

Product	Selection Notes
Rhum agricole	Unlike other rums made by fermenting molasses, rhum agricole is made from fresh-pressed sugarcane juice that is then fermented and distilled. As such, it retains more of the vegetal, grassy notes of the sugarcane, and can add freshness with a little funk.
Molasses rum aged more than 4 years	While our base rum, Banks 5 Island, falls in the lightly-aged category, an aged rum spends more than 5 years in the barrel (as opposed to the Banks’ 3-to-5 years. This can contribute both flavor and color from the barrel’s wood.
Overproof rum	Although many think of overproof rums for their potency, the proof isn’t the only defining factor of these rums. Containing more than 50% of alcohol by volume (that is to say, 100 proof or greater), they can lend a heavier mouthfeel, as well as additional flavor from a different production process (for example, Wray & Nephew’s only using a pot still).

We decided to try mixing Banks 5 Island with one example of each of these, and also tested our runner-up for the base rum, Plantation 3 Stars.

Base rum: Banks 5 Island (oz)	Other rum (oz)	Lime juice (oz)	2:1 white sugar syrup (oz)	Room-temperature water (oz)
1 2/3	None	1/2	1/3	1/6
1 1/3	⅓ Rhum Agricole (Clément Canne Bleue)	1/2	1/3	1/6
1 1/3	⅓ Molasses rum aged more than 4 years (Diplomatico Exclusiva Reserva)	1/2	1/3	1/6
1 1/3	⅓ Overproof rum (Wray & Nephew White Overproof Rum)	1/2	1/3	1/6

Here’s what we found:

Rum Type	Product	Selection Notes
Rhum agricole	Clément Canne Bleue	The grassy notes of this rhum agricole seemed to operate on the same frequency as the lime; we lost the characteristic Daiquiri tang. The result was surprisingly similar to the aged rum split base: a sweeter drink than we wanted, although with funkier, more savory notes.
Molasses rum aged more than 4 years	Diplomatico Exclusiva Reserva	The rich flavor of this rum surprisingly threw our base off-balance; the vanilla notes of the oak barrels amplified the drink’s sweetness and reduced the bite of the lime too strongly. It also contributed to a darker, more dishwatery color.
Overproof unaged rum	Wray & Nephew White Overproof Rum	The flavor of the overproof created a more complex profile at the beginning of the sip, softening the tang of the lime and creating a more balanced flavor throughout. A richer mouthfeel made this one our winner.

Once we settled on a mix of Banks 5 Island and Wray & Nephew, we experimented with the proportions to get the balance right. With ⅓ oz overproof and higher, the alcohol esters became more pronounced in a way that masked the complex flavors of the rum. With just ⅙ oz overproof, the combination had a very smooth finish, allowing the tropical fruit notes of the rums to shine while still retaining the unctuous mouthfeel of the Wray & Nephew.

We had our winning combination: 1 ½ oz Banks 5 Island and ⅙ oz Wray & Nephew.

Adding sweetener and water

With our two rums chosen, it was time to add our other ingredients. In our survey of the literature, sugar syrup, gum syrup, powdered sugar, orgeat and/or falernum have all been used to balance out the citrus and add mouthfeel. Even within sugar syrups, the sugar used (white sugar or Demerara) and the proportion of the sugar to water (3:1, 2:1, or 1:1) have been up for debate.

Then there’s the addition of water. Some Daiquiri recipes control the proportion of water in the ingredient blend through choosing a sugar syrup with a specific ratio of water to sugar; others control it through the more straightforward expedient of adding water directly; others do both. We choose to do both, since a 2:1 sugar: water ratio (by volume) for sugar syrup is, for reasons enumerated by Simon Difford in his excellent article on sugar and sugar syrup, our standard-reference ingredient when it comes to white-sugar syrups. To put it simply: One can always add water, but one can’t un-add it; thus using the more concentrated syrup gives the bartender the greatest flexibility.

We tested both white sugar and Demerara sugar in a 2:1 sugar:water ratio, as well as powdered sugar as recommended in The Savoy Bar Book (1930).

(A couple tips when working with powdered sugar: Stir the sugar with other ingredients to dissolve well. Make sure to let the mixture run all the way out when straining.)

Here are the recipes we tried:

Banks (oz)	Other rum (oz)	Lime juice (oz)	Sweetener (oz)	Room-temperature water (oz)
1 1/2	⅙ (Wray & Nephew White Overproof Rum)	1/2	⅓ 2:1 white sugar syrup	1/6
1 1/2	⅙ (Wray & Nephew White Overproof Rum)	1/2	⅓ 2:1 Demerara sugar syrup	1/6
1 1/2	⅙ (Wray & Nephew White Overproof Rum)	1/2	10 ml (2 tsp) powdered sugar	1/6

The results:

Product	Selection Notes
2:1 white sugar syrup	The more muted flavor of the white sugar works well in a more delicate drink like the Daiquiri. The sweetness comes in late, letting the rums shine, and balances the onset of the lime’s tartness just enough, at just the right moment.
⅓ 2:1 Demerara sugar syrup	Unlike the lighter touch of the white sugar, the Demerara’s sweetness comes in early and hangs out the entire time. While the caramel sugar note adds some flavor, it absorbs too much of the slight citrus shock that is part of the essence of the Daiquiri, where a weak sweetness and sourness should crescendo together. It also contributed to a darker color, which we didn’t find as light and bright as the drink wanted to be.
10 ml (2 tsp) powdered sugar	Did Prohibition have something to teach us? Here, the answer is no: With a thinner mouthfeel and no nuance in taste, the result was a flat sweetness without the sugar “journey” the other options offered.

Our conclusion: white sugar provides the right level and arc of sweetness across the course of a sip.

How to squeeze a lime

After much rum drinking and sugar testing, lime juice might seem like the most straightforward ingredient in our Perfect Daiquiri. It’s not. Although all recipes call for freshly-squeezed lime juice (e.g. not from a bottle), how fresh is fresh-squeezed? One minute ago? One hour ago? Four hours ago? Ten? Dave Arnold has done research indicating that lime juice oxidizes fast enough that drinkers notice a difference after at least four hours. We didn’t explore this variable, choosing to go with just-squeezed juice for accessibility reasons.

But there is one thing we could easily control: the squeezing method. Arnold also discusses, in the same article, the clear taste difference between a juicing machine versus a hand juicer. The explanation? It was likely that the machine was also extracting some of the bitter oils from the lime pith along with the juice, while the hand-powered juicer was more gentle.

We decided to take this a step further, and test lime juice from two different squeezing methods: in a hand juicer, and juiced with a fork. Squeezing with fingers and fork would, in theory, apply even less pressure on the rind and pith, and might minimize the transfer of the bitter oils.

In fact, both David Embury (in The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks) and Trader Vic mention that Constante Ribalaigua, codifier of the frozen Daiquiri (and popularizer of the classic Daiquiri), squeezed all of his Daiquiri limes with his hands. However, they explicitly contradict one another as to the reason! Embury claims, in line with Arnold, that “”[Ribalaigua’s] limes were gently squeezed with his fingers lest even a drop of the bitter oil from the peel get into his drink”; Vic writes that by “using his fingers, he got the oil of the lime into the drink; and that was just enough of the oil of the lime to give the drink its wonderful bouquet.” Who was right?

We did a blind taste test, and the finger-squeezed method won in both rounds, clarifying the impact that even a hand-juicer can have on the lime peel oil transfer to the drink. The hand-juiced Daiquiris were more bitter, while the fork-juiced Daiquiris had a clearer, sweeter citrus flavor. It may not be the method for a high-volume bar, but for a home Daiquiri, it’s our preferred approach.

Shaking and straining

Shaking methods other than the basic “shake once with ice in a shaker”—e.g., the dry shake and reverse dry shake—are most commonly used to increase the amount of froth in drinks with frothing ingredients such as egg white. We didn’t start with a firm theory of how these might affect the final consistency or flavor of the daquiri, but elected to test them regardless.

We initially tested the extremes of what shaking could do to the mouthfeel of the drink, comparing the traditional shake (over ice) to the triple reverse dry (dry-wet-dry). In the end, neither of us could discern any real difference in texture. The most noticeable difference was that the traditional wet shake was, without the intervening dry shake, just plain colder and more refreshing. No reason to mess with tradition here.

Straining was more complicated. The tool used to strain a drink after shaking determines the maximum size of ice crystals that end up in the finished drink, and subsequent dilution from those crystals while drinking it. Strainers can also guard against errant citrus pulp that might end up in the citrus juice added to a drink. Our testing options included a Hawthorne strainer, the strainer built into a three-piece cobbler shaker, a fine sieve, and combinations of the above.

In our initial tests, it became clear that the holes in the cobbler shaker lid were just too large, letting rogue bits of lime pulp and large ice particles through. The Hawthorne strainer performed better. Its spring effectively filtered out most of the pulp for a clearer-looking cocktail. It also noticeably changed the mouthfeel, removing large ice crystals for a more luxurious texture. We tested the Hawthorne both with an open gate (leaving the spring uncompressed, thus allowing larger crystals through) and a closed gate (compressing the spring to increase filtration). Closing the gate removed the last of the lime pulp, so while it didn’t noticeably change the texture for us, it was worth the visual impact to close the gate while straining.

Smuggler’s Cove’s Daiquiri recipe calls for a fine-mesh strainer as a final step: essentially a double-strained drink to remove any remaining ice crystals, for an especially velvety finish. But in comparing this double-strained version to a Daiquiri strained one through the gated Hawthorne strainer, neither of us could tell the difference. Smuggler’s Cove is right about a lot of things, but for the Perfect Daiquiri, a single strain is all you need.

Garnish

According to our review of historical recipe sources (above), the Daiquiri existed for decades without mention of a garnish. Trader Vic’s 1972 recipe added a “lime slice”; since then, garnishes have been popping up in recipes and photos regularly. The most common is a lime wedge notched with a knife and tucked on the edge of the glass. We ruled this out for several reasons: Flavor-wise, we didn’t want additional lime juice added to the drink after it was balanced; craft-wise, we generally subscribe to the notion that the patron shouldn’t need to finish making the drink after it’s been handed to them.

Other options we’ve encountered include:

• Lime zest

• Kaffir lime leaf

• A dehydrated lime wheel

• Freshly-cracked black pepper

In an effort to focus on ingredients available in the typical home bar, we tested three garnishes—expressed lime zest, unexpressed lime zest, and black pepper—against a control with no garnish.

In both lime zest tests, although the garnish added to the lime on the nose, it detracted from the drink as a whole, rendering it too bitter in an unpleasantly vegetal way. This was even true, to a lesser extent, of the unexpressed zest. Having lime peel anywhere near your Daiquiri is just a bad idea. We excluded further tests of lime wheels, wedges, and the like.

Black pepper seemed like a great way to add some complexity to the drink’s nose of citrus and tropical fruit. But in testing, the pepper was a letdown; it didn’t change the nose at all, and instead just looked unappealing floating in a drink we had so carefully prepared to be pulp- and ice-free.

We had a final, garnish-free recipe: one that would have been familiar to Daiquiri fans of the 1930s, but with a more nuanced spirit base, and some fine-tuning of key variables that gave it a perfect blend of tart, sweet and smooth.