I have read before that a rum & Coke becomes a Cuba Libre when you put some lime in it. I've been reading Gary Regan's The Joy of Mixology and trying some of his recipes for basic drinks, as a sort of starting point, so I thought I'd see what he had to say for the Cuba Libre. To me, it looked like a lot of lime and not much Coke. Hmmmm. Turns out that changing that ratio is what makes a not very interesting rum & Coke into a rather delicious, refreshing, and well-balanced highball.
Cuba Libre
2 oz white rum
1 oz lime juice
3-4 oz cola
Some will say you can't make a Dark & Stormy unless you're using Gosling's Black Seal rum and Gosling's ginger beer. I've never had one made this "official" way, but dark rum with ginger beer or ginger ale and lime is a great basic highball that you shouldn't avoid just because you don't have any Gosling's. Call mine a Dim & Drizzly if you must. I used Kraken, which is a spiced rum, but the spiciness is pretty subtle. I often use it in a recipe that calls for dark rum, just because we happen to like it. We have been known to have homebrew ginger beer in the house, and we enjoy Fever Tree's ginger beer, too, but we didn't have any of that stuff right now, and we did have a bottle of Blenheim's ginger ale. Blenheim's has a spicy kick to it, so it's not a bad stand-in for ginger beer. I consulted Gaz Regan again:
Dark & Stormy
2 oz dark rum
3-4 oz ginger beer
squeeze of lime wedge
It was interesting to have these two drinks back-to-back -- the Coca-Cola in the Cuba Libre and the dark rum in the Dark & Stormy both have that sort of brown sugar/coffee/caramel flavor that tastes like the Caribbean and goes so perfectly with rum and lime. Now that I've had these with the right proportions, they are definitely both going into my regular rotation.
