Mojito

Cuba's gift to the cocktail world: white rum, fresh mint, lime, and effervescence in perfect harmony. The muddling ritual is half the fun, the refreshment is the other half.

The Mojito is among the oldest documented Cuban cocktails, with a lineage that traces from 16th-century aguardiente preparations to its modern internationally recognized form. The earliest documented predecessor is the Draque — named for the English privateer Sir Francis Drake — which combined aguardiente de caña (raw sugarcane spirit), lime, sugar, and mint as a medicinal and refreshing preparation documented in Cuba from the 1580s onward; whether Drake himself had any direct connection to the drink is historically unverifiable. The modern Mojito using distilled white rum rather than raw spirit developed through Cuban bar culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the IBA recognizing it as a Contemporary Classic. Ernest Hemingway's associations with two particular Havana establishments helped cement the Mojito's international fame: La Bodeguita del Medio on Calle Empedrado, which he frequented and where a handwritten note reading my mojito at La Bodeguita, my daiquiri at El Floridita is mounted on the wall (though its authenticity as Hemingway's own writing is debated by scholars), and La Floridita. The Mojito's global commercial peak arrived in the late 1990s and early 2000s when it became one of the most ordered cocktails in the world, driven partly by Caribbean tourism, partly by growing rum category interest, and partly by its fresh, accessible flavor profile.