Papa Doble Revisited

For this month’s Mixology Monday, Rick over at Kaiser Penguin has chosen the theme Limit One as a nod to those classic tiki drinks that came with such a warning label attached. Of course, this had less to do with the patron’s concern for the customer’s well-being and more to do with marketing and generating what today we would call “buzz”. I believe the first drink to bear this warning was Don the Beachcomber’s Zombie, but many followed in this vein, normally mixing enormous quantities of different rums together to make drinks that would leave you hung-over if you happened to glance in their direction.

I didn’t want to do a tiki drink, because I reckon that about 80% of this month’s entries will be tiki, so I’m going to talk about the Papa Doble, even though I actually already covered it way back in June last year. If you read that post you’ll notice that I highlight a discrepancy with that recipe, because it contains the same amount of rum as a regular Daiquiri, yet the drink supposedly owes part of its name to being a double.

This Drinkboy forum thread has a convincing explanation in the form of a different recipe to the one I originally posted, this one from a book called Papa Hemingway - A Personal Memoir by A.E. Hotchner. Actually, I recommend you read the Amazon extract of that book to get a little vignette both of Hemingway and also of Havana back in the good old days.

Back to the recipe, this new one comes in at a sturdy 4 ounces (well, 3 3/4, but I rounded up) of rum, which is about twice as much as a normal Daiquiri takes, and also twice as much lime juice, so it now passes the “double” test. As well as much more grapefruit juice, another variation is that this drink is blended, whereas I mixed up the first version in a shaker.

So how does it measure up? Well, it’s not that different from just making two of my first recipe, but somehow it’s missing something. I’m going to notch it up to the fact that it’s still winter, and you really need to be in the searing heat to fully enjoy this ice-cold wonder…

Recipe:

4 oz. White Rum
2 oz. Lime juice
1 oz. Grapefruit juice
1/4 oz. Maraschino liqueur

Blend with 3/4 cup of crushed ice and serve in a large goblet.

Notes:

Very cold, sour and bitter. A killer combination in the summer, but maybe overkill in March.

Rating:

- Make the smaller version, at least that way you can have twice as many…

Head on over to Kaiser Penguin to see the rest of this Monday’s entries.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 8:53 pm and is filed under sour, lime, 2star, mxmonday, strong, cuban, recipe, tropical, summer, rum. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.