Tired of the doom and gloom? The beached whales, the self-immolations, the… uh… the whatever this is? Well, the ben tapeworm’s almanac team (me) has decided to run a special (recurring?) feature this week called…
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BEN TAPEWORM’S BAR CART
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That’s right, folks. Every week doesn’t need a meditation on the void! Sometimes it’s important to make cold rum drinks and take the subway to the beach with your friends!
This summer, instead of drinking White Claws or Hawaiian Punch nutcrackers or shitty margarita mix or whatever corny thing the Times is telling you to drink, why not whip up a daiquiri? Not the frozen ones that come in big plastic bongs but the timeless Cuban cocktail: rum, lime juice, sugar.
The drink is named after the Cuban mining town of Daquirí, and is similar to the grog—a mixture of diluted rum, citrus, and spices—once rationed to sailors in the Royal Navy.
For my own daiquiris, I usually use an aged white rum (like Denizen) cut with an overproof Jamaican rum (like Wray & Nephew). Or I’ll use a rhum agricole (like Neisson), which are earthier rums distilled from sugarcane juice rather than molasses. Or I’ll just use whatever I have lying around. The original called for a 4:1:1 ratio of rum, lime juice, and sugar. I use closer to 3:2:1, especially with the overproof rum, but you should adjust the ratio to your liking:
1 oz Denizen Rum
.5 oz Wray & Nephew 126° White Overproof Rum
1 oz fresh lime juice (about the juice of one lime)
.5 oz simple syrup (1:1 sugar:water)
Shake with ice, strain into a cold glass, and put this on.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
90 minutes of exquisite beachside tunes to enjoy your daiquiris to:
from the discourse
A great interview with Tobi Haslett in The Point:
TH: […] Trends come and go with rapacious velocity. I think the world itself is facing much more important and greater challenges. But insofar as the “creative class” exists, its major problem right now is not just impaling itself on the absolute reification of everything. Can you have an intellectual life that dares to take a stance vis-a-vis this or that trend or take exception to this or that thing in a way that isn’t simply the photonegative of a compulsory celebration? Is it possible to be critical without being an unthinking provocateur? Is it possible to dissent without having that position flatten into yet another card to be shuffled in the same deck?
Jill Lepore in The New Yorker on the history and practice of biking:
In the absence of bike lanes, cyclists in all states but one have to follow the rules of something known as the Uniform Vehicle Code, first adopted in 1926. Like jaywalking, a crime invented by the automobile industry to criminalize being a pedestrian, the U.V.C. treats bicycles as cars that go too slow.
Will Harrison on Dimes Square end-times malaise for The Baffler:
One thing is certain: we are living in a time of shibboleths, of passwords. Lately, language is being thrown about like confetti, like all those business cards for boutique weed delivery services scattered on the sidewalk; it is being stretched out and reshaped, made to mean everything and nothing all at once. We are quirked, we are goated, we are bruh, we are bestie.
from my incoming texts
“Don’t need floaters”
“I have a date with three Haim sisters or I would.”
“We don’t see eye to eye on Grasshopper taxonomy.”
“Trouser Peter loves bachata.”
weekly wiki
Read back about rum & tonics in the archives, NYC summers, and Pliocene visions at the beach. Share this post with friends. Follow @bentapeworm on Twitter.
Love the haslett quote. Love that “haslett” autocorrected to “basket”