A tropical rum sour served cold and up, where white rum rides the bright, juicy sweetness of pineapple and a sharp squeeze of lime keeps it lively. Apricot brandy lends a soft stone-fruit roundness that smooths the citrus edge, while a hard shake whips the pineapple into a light, frothy body.
Garnish: Pineapple Wedge, Maraschino Cherry
Shaken · Coupe · Up
add
Combine white rum, pineapple juice, lime juice, and apricot brandy in a shaker.
shake
Add ice and shake well until cold and frothy, about 10-15 seconds.
strain
Double-strain into a chilled coupe.
garnish
Garnish with a pineapple wedge and a cocktail cherry.
The drink is named for the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, the grand Havana hotel above the Malecon that welcomed its first guests in December 1930, in the thick of the city's Prohibition-era cocktail boom. Competing stories credit different bartenders, Wil P. Taylor and Eddie Woelke among them, but none is reliably documented, and the Woelke tales are dated to the 1920s, before the hotel had even opened. A Cuban bartending manual published in 1959 still carried the recipe as a simple four-part mix with no added sugar or bitters — a drink that belongs to the house rather than to any one hand.