To Serve Man
Rum

Original Daiquiri (Cox 1898)

Glass
Highball

The original Cuban Daiquiri, rum, lime, and sugar built over cracked ice and sipped through a straw.

rum cuban classic built lime sour
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Ingredients

  • cracked ice (1 cup)
  • superfine sugar (1 tsp)
  • fresh lime juice (0.75 oz)
  • white Cuban-style rum (2 oz)

Instructions

  1. Fill a tall highball glass with cracked ice.
  2. Pour superfine sugar over the ice.
  3. Squeeze fresh lime juice (juice of one to two limes) over the sugar.
  4. Add white Cuban-style rum and stir until the sugar dissolves.
  5. Drink from the glass with a straw.

Sources

  1. Curtis, And a Bottle of Rum (2006), Daiquiri chapter, narrates Jennings Cox's 1898 invention at the Daiquirí mining village near Santiago de Cuba, including the surviving Cox household-recipe written record. ↩
  2. "Daiquiri." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daiquiri (accessed 2026-05-03), secondary-source summary of the Cox attribution and the original built-in-glass form (cracked ice, sugar over ice, lime juice, white rum, frosted with a long-handled spoon); paired here with Curtis as supporting context. ↩
  3. Wondrich, Imbibe! (2007), Daiquiri / Cuban-cocktail material, documents Constantino Ribalaigua's El Floridita refinement of the shaken-coupe Daiquiri canon (Daiquiri No. 1 through No. 4) in the 1910s–30s. ↩