An Old Cuban Is the Cocktail You Need for Sad, Dark Winter Times

In the dark night of the year’s soul, during the thing we call winter, many people will try to feed you cocktails full of bourbon and dark things. These are the Big Boy Cozy Cocktails that a Husky Man would drink by his prototypical fireside: an old fashioned, a manhattan, a boulevardier. The sort of stuff you drink in a rocks glass while watching snow fall or deeply considering your own existence.

And listen, these people aren’t technically wrong. There is certainly something nice about drinking brown liquor in the cold months. But you know what’s better? Drinking something bubbly and rummy and lime-y that will make you briefly, if only for the half second during which it first hits your mouth area, forget that winter exists and that you’ve been sad and cranky ever since Thanksgiving ended. Enter the Old Cuban.

While sparkling wine cocktails often feel like a summer-exclusive item—you know, like shorts, or novelty sunglasses, or freckles—an old cuban somehow feels winter-escapist rather than winter-averse. You’ve got your aged rum for depth, your champagne for fancy-feelingness, your mint lime juice to wake you up from your hibernation, your bitters to add a splash more burliness to what is otherwise a daiquiri with mint and champagne. (Remember that the whole point of citrus is to cheer humans up with bright colors and large doses of tangy stuff.) This is a far more adult version of a mojito, and it will pull you out of whatever sad winter sweatpants-clad doldrums you’ve gotten yourself into.

The drink comes from Audrey Saunders, a bartender at Manhattan's vaunted Pegu Club, and it's one of the best non-daiquiri drinks you can make with a bottle of good rum. It's bubbly and tart and just sweet enough, the sort of thing you should be ordering any time you go out to a bar and it's below freezing but also the sort of thing you should stock up for in your home bar. Because if you're going to come home after a long, dreary, dark-and-cold day, a cup of bourbon with some other stuff in it is gonna just remind you that it's dark and cold out. A glass of rum and lime and mint and champagne (okay, you can use prosecco and the world won't end) offers the option of remembering that good things can happen, that warm weather will come again, and that escapism is an extremely viable coping mechanism.

So muddle a few sprigs of mint in a cocktail shaker, add 3/4 ounces of lime juice, an ounce of simple syrup, 1 1/2 ounces of amber rum, and a few dashes of angostura bitters, and shake the hell out of it. Strain it into a coupe, top with bubbly, and spend the next five to ten minutes feeling actually happy.