The Bahamas Daiquiri isn't a colonial-era classic dressed up with a place name — it's a 21st-century bar creation. Difford's Guide traces it to Yannick Miseriaux, who was running the Fifth Floor Bar at Harvey Nichols in London in 2002 when he built the original, martini-format drink the recipe adapts from. Difford's own daiquiri-format version — overproof rum, coconut liqueur, and a whisper of coffee liqueur against pineapple and lime — is what circulates today, and it's the one filed in the guide's tiki directory.
A daiquiri that reads more like a dessert course than a classic — and it works because it doesn't apologize for that.
A 2002 Bar Invention, Not a Regional Classic
Search past Difford's Guide and one other recipe blog restating the same facts, and the trail stops — there's no independent tiki-history source, no Beachbum Berry citation, no earlier print appearance. What is consistent across the sources that do exist is the creator's name, bar, and year: Yannick Miseriaux, Fifth Floor Bar at Harvey Nichols, London, 2002. Beyond that, no bartender, publication, or Bahamian bar claims the drink as their own — it earned its tiki-directory placement on ingredients (rum, pineapple, coconut), not lineage.
Difford's own listing frames the daiquiri as an adaptation of Miseriaux's original, which was built as a Bahamas Martini. The name persisted through the format change, which is why a drink invented in a London department store carries a Caribbean-sounding name it never earned through geography.
The Spec
Overproof rum instead of the standard 80-proof daiquiri base, because it's the only thing strong enough to stay audible next to two liqueurs and a full ounce and a half of pineapple juice.
Why overproof rum
Drop to a standard 40% rum and the coconut liqueur and pineapple juice bury it completely — you'd be drinking a coconut-pineapple cocktail with a rum aftertaste instead of a rum drink with tropical accents. The overproof pour is what keeps this reading as a daiquiri at all.
Coffee liqueur, sparingly
A quarter ounce is close to the original bar-spoon dash, and that's deliberate — any more and the drink tips into dessert-shot territory. It should register as a dark background note under the coconut and pineapple, not a headline flavor.
Bottom Line
No pedigree beyond a named bartender, a real bar, and a real year — which, honestly, is more documentation than plenty of "classic" tiki drinks can produce. Judge it on the glass: a boozy, coffee-flecked, coconut-and-pineapple daiquiri that tastes exactly as indulgent as it sounds.