The RHUM DIARIES

Fishing for Hemingway daiquiris on a 100-year-old sailing yacht

- DUNCAN QUINN

Legend has it that one of our favorite cocktails, the Heming-way Daiquiri, was dreamt up in a bar in Havana. Ernest Hemingway, World War I volunteer, writer, boozer, fisher-man, and celebrated bon vivant, nipped into La Floridita sometime in the 1930s to answer nature’s call. He noticed that patrons were bragging about the fantastic daiquiris being served. So he ordered one, and took a sip. Never a man of meager appetites, he then ordered another. And another. As he had a hereditary aversion to sugar and death by diabetes, he asked for these to be made with no sugar—and double the amount of rum.

And so the Hemingway Daiquiri, in its original incarnation, was born. Lime juice and lots of rum. Nothing more. Nothing less. According to Phillip Greene, author of the book To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion, Hemingway proudly boasted to have downed 17 “Papa Dobles” as they were also affectionately known, over the course of one afternoon in 1942. As Greene notes, “that’s a hell of a lot of daiquiris.”

Hemingway is a man dear to any rapscallion’s heart. And dearest to our heart is his tale of The Old Man and the Sea. In which a humble old fisherman sets out to prove the younger, stronger, cockier men wrong in their assertion that he is all washed up. And catches the fish of a lifetime. Unfortunately for him, it then drags him far out to sea before he conquers it. And he has to strap it to the side of his all-too-small boat to bring it home. Many a trial, tribulation and challenge ensue as he battles mother nature to return to shore.