Let’s Make a Daiquiri Riff With Pineapple Rum, Mezcal, and Fig and Cinnamon Bitters

…And then let’s simplify it with ingredients you’re more likely to have.

At the beginning of last summer, I declared the Daiquiri the ultimate summer cocktail. Yet somehow we have made it almost all the way through this summer without much in the way of Daiquiri-related content. So this week’s newsletter is an attempt to rectify that omission.

This week’s Daiquiri is a fairly simple riff, provided you have the right ingredients. It’s built with pineapple rum, mezcal, and an unusual bottle of bitters that adds a subtle fig and cinnamon flavor to the mix. (Don’t be intimidated — we’ll also talk about substitution options for people who want to approximate this with somewhat more common ingredients.) 

It’s fruity, smoky, spicy, sweet, and deeply satisfying. With its tropical sensibility and its hints of smoke and fall spice, it’s a great drink for late summer transition weather, when summer won’t quite go away, but fall in clearly on the horizon. Cocktails are often best when paired with the weather: This is a drink for a week when the high on any given day might be a muggy 90 degrees or a cloud-covered 71. 

It’s also another testament to the durability, flexibility, and blueprint-like nature of the Daiquiri structure — and the many, many ways that the Daiquiri can be bent and transformed to fit practically any scenario.

So this week, we’ll refresh on the Daiquiri, then look at how to go about building variations, including a simplified version of this week’s cocktail. 

A Classic Daiquiri

This newsletter has gained quite a few new subscribers since last summer, so let’s review a bit, and then do some structural breakdowns. 

Although many drinks go by the name, the classic version of the Daiquiri is just a three-ingredient combination of rum, fresh lime juice, and sugar or sugar syrup, shaken and served up. That’s it. It’s not, red, blue, or purple, and it’s not blended or served over ice. The Daiquiri is the most basic, elemental sour cocktail, and it’s not for nothing that it’s the Daiquiri — not some elaborate nine-ingredient banana-liqueur cocktail — on which cocktail-focused bartenders tend to judge another bartender’s skill. You either get it right, or you don’t. 

That doesn’t mean you can’t add anything to the mix. I much prefer a Daiquiri with a few drops of homemade saline (salt) solution or, failing that, a pinch of salt. I also like a single drop of Pernod or absinthe, but I consider that less critical than the salt.

Still, in its classic form, it’s a pretty spare cocktail.