Old Cuban

Aged rum, lime, mint, Angostura bitters, and champagne — Audrey Saunders' c. 2001 Carlyle Hotel creation elevating the Mojito into the French 75's formal register.

The Old Cuban was created by Audrey Saunders at Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue in New York City around 2001, where Saunders was working before she opened her own Pegu Club in SoHo in 2005. Saunders — who had been mentored by Dale DeGroff and became one of the most influential figures of the American craft cocktail revival — designed the Old Cuban as an elevated, champagne-finished variation on the Mojito, bringing the Cuban classic into the same formal register as the French 75 or the Seelbach. The formula combines aged rum (rather than the Mojito's white rum), fresh lime juice, sugar syrup, fresh mint, and Angostura bitters, stirred with ice and strained into a cocktail glass, then topped with a float of champagne or dry sparkling wine. The use of aged rum instead of white rum gives the drink a deeper, more complex spirit base whose barrel-derived vanilla and caramel notes interact with the bitters' clove and spice in a way that the lighter white rum of the Mojito does not achieve. The champagne float provides effervescence and a wine complexity that elevates the preparation into genuinely celebratory territory. The Old Cuban is regularly listed among the most significant cocktail creations of the early 21st-century craft movement.