 The Recipe 2 ounces 504Hibiscus 1 ounce raw sugar simple syrup 1 ounce lime juice Pour into a cocktail shaker. Add ice. Shake vigorously. Serves 1. The Story In 2015, Mark and I landed with about 25 family members on the island of Martinique in the French West Indies to get married. Realizing that we were on a French-speaking island with only four fluent French speakers in our party and the full cast of characters that is our family and friends, we looked at each other and said, "This will be interesting." In the following week, we discovered that the stress-free wedding we naively planned on is actually an impossible dream that could only have been imagined by lunatics (that's us). However, the stunning beachside Caribbean ceremony we dreamed of was 100% achieved. After the ceremony, we hiked a volcano, walked the beaches, toured historic sugar mills, sampled some of the best rum in the world, ate so many fritters, and strolled through markets filled with colorful discoveries. Most notably, we brought back two really important things from that trip: a packet filled with hibiscus and spices that we were instructed by the shop owner to infuse in a bottle of our favorite white rum, and a new sense that our lives are what we make of them. When we got home, we infused our first-ever bottle of rum and made a traditional daiquiri with it. Then we made a few more. Then Mark got obsessed with daiquiris and interrogated every poor bartender we met about their different rum lists in the process. (If you're one such bartender and you're reading this, we're sorry.) Eventually, that little infusion became the first inspiration for Happy Raptor Distilling. By the time we really talked about opening a distillery, the wrapper that listed the ingredients were long gone and we have about 6 ounces left of the original bottle. Mark spent almost two years recreating and perfecting the recipe that would become 504Hibiscus, and the three of us (Mark, Peter, and I) tested every new batch with a hibiscus daiquiri. We tasted, corrected, and tasted again. The 504Hibiscus Daiquiri is a labor of love in its truest form. Years of complexities and thought have created a beautiful drink that is otherwise so simple, and it's definitely the closest to my heart. I hope you'll love it, too! And if you don't, you're probably more of a Rum Old-Fashioned person. More on that cocktail later. -- Meagen
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