What apricot liqueur should I actually buy?

Skip anything labeled apricot brandy that tastes like cough syrup and almonds, because a lot of the cheap stuff is flavoring rather than fruit. You want a real apricot liqueur made from the actual stone fruit, something with tartness and a little bite. Rothman & Winter and Giffard both make versions that taste like apricots instead of a candle. The liqueur is doing structural work here, so a bad one sinks the whole drink.

Can I use aged rum instead of white?

You can, and it'll be a different animal. A lightly aged rum adds a vanilla warmth that's pleasant, but go too heavy and the oak and caramel will bully the apricot and pineapple into the corner. If you want the drink to taste like Havana in 1932, stay with a clean white or a soft Cuban-style rum. If you want something richer for a cold night, a gold rum is a defensible cheat.

Is this basically a tiki drink?

It predates the tiki craze and has none of its excess. There's no overproof float, no five rums, no garnish you could lose a child in. It's a tightly built sour with one liqueur and a whisper of pineapple. Tiki borrowed this kind of thing and buried it under garnish later. The original is restrained, which is exactly why it still tastes good ninety years on.

The Hotel Nacional Special: A Daiquiri That Checked Into a Better Hotel

Most people have never ordered this drink, and that's a shame bordering on negligence. The Hotel Nacional Special is a daiquiri that went to Havana, got a tan, and came back with apricot on its breath. It is tart, soft, faintly tropical, and built with the kind of restraint that tiki forgot existed. Drink one and you'll wonder who hid it from you.

1.5 ozWhite Rum

0.75 ozLime Juice

0.5 ozPineapple Juice

0.5 ozApricot Liqueur

0.25 ozSimple Syrup

Garnish: Lime wheel

Shaken, hard, over good ice. Everything in this glass is a juice, a syrup, or a liqueur, which means it's all about texture and dilution, and a lazy shake gives you a sad, flat puddle. You want the tin to frost and the drink to come out cold and faintly foamy from the lime. The proportions are doing quiet work. A pineapple juice float at half an ounce keeps the drink from reading as a candy bomb, while the apricot liqueur at half an ounce sits underneath the rum rather than over it. That quarter ounce of simple is a correction, not a sweetener. Taste before you pour it. Ripe pineapple and a juicy lime might mean you skip it entirely. Fine-strain into a chilled coupe so no pulp rides along, and lay a lime wheel on top. White rum is the move here. Something clean and a little funky, not a heavy aged barrel bruiser that would stomp on the apricot.

Here is what no cocktail blog will tell you. This drink belongs to two families at once, and it does it honestly. Start with the Daiquiri spine: rum, lime, sugar. That's a complete sour, the whole load-bearing wall of the thing. Then somebody adds a structural liqueur, apricot, sitting at half an ounce, never louder than the base rum. The moment you bolt a liqueur onto a finished sour like that, you've built a Sidecar in structure, the daisy template where a liqueur does the sweetening and adds its own flavor. So this is a daiquiri reinforced into a daisy, and at that half-ounce floor of apricot it reads as both at the same time. It is the same architecture holding up an Aviation or a Bramble or a Hemingway Daiquiri. Sour plus a liqueur that pulls double duty. Once you see the skeleton, the whole tropical costume stops being a mystery.

The drink is named for the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, the grand pile of a place perched over Havana's seawall that opened in 1930 and promptly became the playground for everyone with money and questionable friends. Prohibition was choking American throats dry, so Americans with cash went where the rum was legal, and Cuba obliged. The cocktail is usually credited to Wil P. Taylor, the hotel's manager, or to the bartenders working its bar in those years, depending on which dusty source you trust. The early versions wobble. Some used apricot brandy, some leaned harder on pineapple, and a few added a splash of something extra. That's how these things go. A drink born in a working bar gets tweaked nightly by people trying to use up what's on the shelf and please whoever's in front of them. What survived is elegant and a little melancholy, a snapshot of a Havana that was glamorous and rotten in equal measure. The hotel is still there, by the way, having outlasted gangsters, revolutions, and several decades of being ignored by cocktail menus that would rather sell you a Lemon Drop. The Hotel Nacional Special deserves better, and so do you.

Open the Hotel Nacional recipe card on Speed Pour

Related drinks

FAQ

What apricot liqueur should I actually buy?: Skip anything labeled apricot brandy that tastes like cough syrup and almonds, because a lot of the cheap stuff is flavoring rather than fruit. You want a real apricot liqueur made from the actual stone fruit, something with tartness and a little bite. Rothman & Winter and Giffard both make versions that taste like apricots instead of a candle. The liqueur is doing structural work here, so a bad one sinks the whole drink.
Can I use aged rum instead of white?: You can, and it'll be a different animal. A lightly aged rum adds a vanilla warmth that's pleasant, but go too heavy and the oak and caramel will bully the apricot and pineapple into the corner. If you want the drink to taste like Havana in 1932, stay with a clean white or a soft Cuban-style rum. If you want something richer for a cold night, a gold rum is a defensible cheat.
Is this basically a tiki drink?: It predates the tiki craze and has none of its excess. There's no overproof float, no five rums, no garnish you could lose a child in. It's a tightly built sour with one liqueur and a whisper of pineapple. Tiki borrowed this kind of thing and buried it under garnish later. The original is restrained, which is exactly why it still tastes good ninety years on.