Remember the Maine

Whenever a recipe calls for a rinse, it means that you want to add the ingredient to the glass and swirl it around to coat it, then discard the excess. Alternatively, you can keep it in the glass to increase the flavor of the rinsed ingredient.

If you don’t have Cherry Heering you could try using cherry brandy, however you will need to adjust for the fact that Heering is sweeter.

The cocktail’s name refers to the sinking battleship U.S.S. Maine in  the Havana, Cuba  harbor, on February 15, 1898. The explosion killed 266 crew members and it led to the Spanish-American War a few months later.

The phrase “Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain” was common around the time.

This recipe appears in Charles H. Baker, Jr’s The Gentleman’s Companion from 1939 (p.116). In the book he describes the sounds of bombs going off as he first tried it in Havana around the time of the Cuban Revolution of 1933.

According to Baker, you should “stir briskly in clockwise-fashion— this makes it sea-going, presumably!”