Each year on July 19, people across the United States fill their glasses with a rum-based cocktail and toast to National Daiquiri Day. So, raise your glass and join all of the others in this celebration!
- Back in 1898, men blasted away in the mines of a small community off the coast of Cuba during the Spanish-American War. One American engineer, Jennings Cox, supervised a mining operation located in a village named Daiquiri. Every day after work Cox and his employees would gather at the Venus bar. Then one day Cox mixed up Bacardi, lime, and sugar in a tall glass of ice. He named the new beverage after the Daiquiri mines, and the drink soon became a staple in Havana.
- In 1909, Admiral Lucius W. Johnson, a U.S. Navy medical officer, tried Cox’s drink and subsequently introduced it to the Army and Navy Club in Washington, D.C. The popularity of the Daiquiri then increased over the next few decades.
- The Daiquiri was one of the favorite drinks of writer Ernest Hemingway and President John F. Kennedy.
- John F. Kennedy drank them even after the Cuban embargo.
- The daiquiri became popular in the 1940’s because wartime rationing made whiskey, vodka, etc., hard to come by. Because of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy (which opened up trade and travel relations with Latin America, Cuba and the Caribbean), rum was easily obtainable.
- Although the drink didn’t gain popularity in the U.S. until around the 1940s, it was well loved in Havana and beyond, becoming the signature drink of historic cocktail bar El Floridita. Constantino Ribalaigua Vert, El Floridita’s head bartender at the time, is credited with inventing the frozen daiquiri around the 1930s, and for serving frequent visitor Ernest Hemingway himself.
- The Hemingway Daiquiri was originally a frozen drink.
- Hemingway spurred one of the daiquiri’s classic variations, known as the Papa Doble, because he was famous for ordering doubles
- The cocktail was further made famous at Hotel Venus in Santiago de Cuba, where it was christened in 1932, and Feliza Bar in Havana, where Spain-born owner Constante Ribalaigua created variations on the cocktail (the #2, #4 and Hemingway Daiquiris), all made with BACARDÍ rum.
- Bartender David Embury, in the 1948 “The Art of Mixing Drinks,” lists the Daiquiri as one of the six basic cocktails to master, along with the Martini, Manhattan, Jack Rose, Old Fashioned, and Sidecar.
- The Cuban pronunciation is “dye-ker-ree.”
- The drink is named after a beach in Santiago, Cuba.
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