Ernest Hemingway, born in the last year of the 19th century, seemed to embody the kind of gruff masculinity that John Wayne would’ve looked up to. In pictures, he looks like he wore sweaters made of brillo pads. He participated in three wars. He had strong opinions about all kinds of things—guns, fine art, boxing, European cities—and was always up at dawn, claiming to have seen every sunrise since he’d been born. He was never happier than when hunting or fishing, really anything murderous. He survived two plane crashes in two consecutive days and after the second was believed dead, until he emerged from the jungle holding a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin, Time magazine would report later, “battered but unbowed.”He was also, as noted, a famous and exuberant drunk, the kind of guy who orders a cocktail at the airport he arrives at, who drinks Champagne with breakfast and goes on epic, several day benders, and whose habits inspired an entire book just about his relationship to alcohol. Everything was outsized, everything turned fantastic: Hemingway was the kind of guy who could tell a story about how when he was in Montana he lived with a bear, got drunk with him, slept side by side and were indeed close friends, and you suspect he’s probably telling the truth.His fame, combined with his nomadic nature and his gargantuan appetite for drink, has led to cottage industries in a half dozen cities, Hemingway Drinking Tours, with some bar or another claiming to be the author’s favorite haunt in Venice or Paris or Key West or, in the case of the Hemingway Daiquiri, Havana, to which the author decamped in 1939. Hemingway came to Cuba to leave his second wife and write what would ultimately become For Whom the Bell Tolls, and for his first few months, he set up at a hotel just up the street from a little bar called La Florida (affectionately referred to as “La Floridita”), which was already famous for making the best Daiquiris in Cuba.In 1934, the bar had published Bar La Florida Cocktail Book, featuring four different house versions of the Daiquiri. In an updated printing in 1939, they’d add a Daiquiri No. 5, as well as an entry a few pages later, the “E. Henmiway Special,” which was identical to their Daiquiri No. 3 except it had no sugar syrup and was blended, as opposed to shaken and strained.
Source: Hemingway Daiquiri Recipe: How to Make a Rum and Maraschino Cocktail – Robb Report
