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!
Daiquiri is a family of cocktails whose main ingredients are rum, citrus juice (typically lime) and sugar.
- Tasting of sunshine and beaches, it might be hard to believe the daiquiri was likely invented by men blasting away in the mines of a small community off the coast of Cuba. Jennings Cox, an American engineer, supervised a mining operation located in a village named Daiquiri in 1898 during the Spanish-American War. Every day after work Cox and his employees would gather at the Venus bar. Then one day Cox mixed up Bacardi, lime, sugar in a tall glass of ice. Naming the new beverage after the Daiquiri mines, the drink soon became a staple in Havana. Eventually, shaved ice was used and sometimes lemons or both lemons and limes.
- Cox dubbed the new drink “Ron Bacardi a la Daiquiri,” which has shortened to simply “Daiquiri”
- 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.
- Thirsty party-goers and responsible parents lookin’ for a frosty, fruity thrill can find drive-thru strawberry daiquiri stands just about anywhere in New Orleans.
- Drive-thrus now limit customers to only one straw per visit, and they can no longer pack adult-strength strawberry daiquiris with kids’ meals.
- 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.
- It is one of six basic drinks listed in David A. Embury’s classic The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks.
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