The origin of the classic daiquiri

The widely-accepted creation myth goes like this: In the 1890s, an American mining engineer named Jennings Cox was working for the Spanish-American Iron Company in the small village of Daiquiri, Cuba. He mixed up a drink with local rum, lime juice, and sugar over ice. "The daiquiri cuts through the humidity, heat, and haze of the tropics with an uncanny precision," Curtis writes in his book. "It has an invitingly translucent appearance when made well, as cool and lustrous as alabaster." The cocktail didn't hit American shores until 1909, when Admiral Lucius W. Johnson brought the drink back from Cuba to the Army and Navy Club in Washington, DC. "The main problem with [the story]," Curtis told Yahoo! Shine, "is that somebody in the 1890s did not invent mixing lime and sugar and rum. That's been done for a long time. Probably the one thing that he did add to it was the ice. Before that it would have been drunk warm." / YAHOO! Shine