Cuban Cocktail No. 1 and Daiquiri

The next drink after the Cuba Libre is the Cuban Cocktail No. 1. It contains rum, lime, and sugar.

Wait a minute, isn't that a Daiquiri? And there is a recipe for Daiquiri on the same page! The only difference were proportions.

So I decided to try an experiment and make both.

The appearance is about the same for both. I put a lime spiral in the Cuban, and a wheel on the Daiquiri to tell them apart.

Recipes:
Cuban Cocktail No. 1          Daiquiri
.5 oz lime juice               1 oz lime juice               
.5 tsp simple syrup             1 tsp simple syrup         
2 oz light rum                1.5 oz light rum             

Shake with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

It turns out I didn't need the garnishes to tell them apart. The Cuban's predominant flavor was rum. The lime and sugar were just small notes, keeping the drink from being just a cold shot of rum. The Daiquiri's main flavor was lime; in fact, it was overly limey in my opinion, so I added a couple of dashes of simple syrup until it tasted right to me.

But the key think here is that although the ingredients are the same, the proportions make these two completely different drinks. The Daiquiri is to the Cuban Cocktail No. 1 like a margarita is to a martini. Both are good, just very different. I can't even tell you which I preferred, since I liked them both and found that I couldn't really make a comparison. However, I did find myself drinking the Cuban first.