I still remember my first daiquiri. I was on a cruise ship in the Caribbean, and at 21 years old, I didn’t know much about cocktails (or beer or life or anything else for that matter). Flipping through the picture-filled menu at a poolside bar, I stumbled across what looked like a grown-up version of an Icee –bright red without any sign of real fruit–, so of course I ordered it.
When the drink arrived, it was sixteen ounces of frozen strawberry syrup covering up a single shot of white rum. I enjoyed it at the time, and candidly, I’d probably still enjoy it now under the right circumstances. There’s a lot more potential and variety to the daiquiri though (especially if you have a great rum that you want to showcase), so let’s reconsider the daiquiri as part of this summer of the mason jar.

Made from fermenting and distilling molasses, rum played a huge part in the colonial era. Forming a trade triangle in the northern Atlantic, sugarcane grown in the Caribbean would be brought to New England for processing and then taken to England (the old one) for distilling and distribution. George Washington famously had a taste for rum, and though he primarily made whiskey at Mount Vernon, he had plenty of high quality rum served there as well. While Cuban rum is some of the most legendary, the world’s largest rum distributor (Bacardi) moved to Puerto Rico following the Cuban Revolution, making Puerto Rico the new hub of the rum world.

There are countless varieties of rum. White or silver rums (produced using charcoal filtering and continuous distillation) will be light and neutral in flavor, making them easy cocktail ingredients. Gold rums tend to be a bit more flavorful and complex. You can also add spices to rum, age it longer, use different base sugars– the possibilities are limitless.

And then there are the cocktails. Mojitos, mai tais, pina coladas, punches– rum appears in a wide range of drinks, but one of the simplest and most widely available is the daiquiri. Developed in the 1900s in Cuba, the basic daiquiri contains just three ingredients: white rum, lime juice, and simple syrup. Like rum itself, the daiquiri has an infinite number of variations. For the mason jar version, I’ll be sticking close to the original recipe with four important departures: I’m going with a gold rum, I’m leaving the lime hulls in the drink for taste and presentation, I’m adding bitters for complexity, and I’m introducing carbonation.
Here we go:

Triple Dog Daiquiri
2 oz 3 Howls gold rum
3/4 oz turbinado syrup
1 lime quartered
3 dashes Angostura Orange bitters

Pour all ingredients into a mason jar over ice.
Seal, shake, and reopen.
Top with 2-3 oz soda and serve with a cocktail straw.
(For extra credit, float about 6 drops of Woodford Reserve Spiced Cherry bitters on top.)

The Triple Dog Daiquiri is a simple drink for a hot summer afternoon made and served in one mason jar. It’s pretty different from the strawberry syrupy delight I had nine years ago, but sometimes it’s nice to taste the rum.