A variation on the Papa Doble / Hemingway Daiquiri.
The Story: A Rumored Visit to the Diogenes Club
The story goes that on some unrecorded stopover in London — between a Spanish bullring and a Parisian café, in the years nobody quite agrees on — Ernest Hemingway found himself deposited at the doorstep of a Pall Mall club he had no business entering.
He’d been told, by a source as unreliable as the rumor itself, that the Diogenes Club kept the finest rum in England, smuggled in decades earlier by a member with interests in the Caribbean.
Hemingway, never one to let a closed door stand between him and good rum, walked in.
He lasted four minutes.
The Diogenes Club’s founding rule — no member shall take the least notice of any other one, on pain of expulsion — was, as legend has it, explained to him by a porter in a whisper so quiet Hemingway leaned in twice to catch it.
He straightened up, looked around at a room of men reading newspapers in total silence, and reportedly said nothing at all — a silence so uncharacteristic that the porter later called it the strangest thing he’d witnessed in thirty years of service.
The rum, when it came, was poured without a word and set down without a glance. Hemingway drank it standing, since no one offered him a chair and he wasn’t about to ask.
He left before the ice had fully melted, muttering — just past the threshold, where the silence rule no longer applied — that he’d rather duel a bull than sit through another round of that particular quiet.
What he did with the rum afterward, nobody in the club recorded. What we do know is that a daiquiri bearing his name turned up in Havana not long after, heavier on the rum, lighter on the sugar, built for a man who’d apparently had enough of quiet rooms.
