Best Old Cuban Recipe: How to Make the Rum and Champagne Cocktail – Robb Report

The cocktail was invented somewhere in the early 2000s by Audrey Saunders, most famous as the owner of the legendary Pegu Club in SoHo, one of the early pioneers of our little mixology renaissance. These days, measuring your cocktails and using fresh juice is the minimum acceptable standard—to brag about it would be like bragging that you brush your teeth every single day—but at the time, it was a revelation. Saunders created some of the earliest of what we now refer to as the neo-classics, the first cocktails with any real staying power beyond a particular season’s menu. She was known for meticulously workshopping her drinks, making subtle tweaks to classic cocktails and testing dozens of variations until the flavors lined up just so.The Old Cuban is the product of such experiments and perhaps her most famous. She started with a Mojito, essentially: rum, lime, sugar, mint and sparkling water. She darkened it with a couple dashes of aromatic bitters, the spice-heavy stalwart typically used in Old Fashioneds and Manhattans, which gave it a heavy cinnamon-clove complexity. Some people do this to their Mojitos, so we’re not in uncharted territory here, but the next two decisions are what make it an Old Cuban—her choice to trade out the soda water for Champagne is very often cited as the one that makes it what it is (and what inspires the endless French 75 comparisons), but I don’t think so. I think the true genius move, and what inspired her to call it an Old Cuban instead of the working title of “El Cubano,” was to use aged rum instead of white rum.This may sound like a trivial distinction. It is not. Both the French 75 and the Mojito are fresh and radiant—the former is bright exuberance, a firework contained in a glass, and the latter is practically made of sunshine. Not so with the Old Cuban. The Old Cuban is darker, more complex, a meditative and ultimately more seductive drink. The bitters add spice and texture, and it’s the aged rum, round and redolent with vanilla and oak, that moves it from poolside to inside, as if under a slowly twisting ceiling fan in a smoky room, long narrow beams of light through the wooden shutters. It’s still festive with Champagne but not extravagantly so; it’s not in sequins, it’s in a long slinky dress, like a dame in a noir film, not looking for trouble but trouble always manages to find it.

Source: Best Old Cuban Recipe: How to Make the Rum and Champagne Cocktail – Robb Report