One of my favorite restaurants here in Atlanta is a little place tucked inside the popular Krog Street Market in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward — the Ticonderoga Club. Founded by Regan Smith and Greg Best, Greg single-handedly launched Atlanta’s cocktail renaissance in 2014 running the bar at Holeman & Finch. This take on the julep is their namesake drink and features pineapple syrup, sherry, and aged rum. Try it – I promise you will love it.
The daiquiri is actually a very refined drink and one of the best tests of a barkeep’s skill in terms of balance, technique and dilution. This recipe is from the late Sasha Petraske of NYC bar Milk & Honey. He doesn’t tell us to use 3/4 oz. of simple syrup – instead, he gives a range dependent on how acidic your specific lime tastes at the time the cocktail is made. His book, Regarding Cocktails, was published posthumously by his wife, and from what I’ve heard, truly captures the kind, gentle, and exacting person he was in life.
This drink features Plantation Spirits Stiggins Fancy Pineapple Rum – a flavorful rum blend infused with ripe pineapple that tastes nothing like those crappy mass-produced and artificially- flavored versions on the bottom shelf of your local liquor store. Stiggins Rum is fantastic as the base for a rum Old-fashioned but equally marvelous in this daiquiri.
