Episode 46: Sea Breeze

March 3, 2022 Tux Loerzel

2 oz vodka
3 oz cranberry juice
1 1/2 grapefruit juice
Lime slice for garnish (optional)

Fill a tall glass with ice. Pour Vodka and Cranberry into glass and stir. Top with Grapefruit juice. Garnish with lime and serve with a straw.

Most of us think of the Sea Breeze as a cocktail from the 1980s, and while they certainly were very popular then, they actually first blew up at the end of the 1960s thanks to some high profile marketing.

In the early 60s, vodka’s popularity hit a stumbling block thanks to the cold war and the fact that Americans saw vodka as a Russian liquor. So, the people at Smirnoff threw a bunch of money into rebranding, and by the end of the decade, gin was out, and vodka was taking over as America’s clear liquor of choice.

Part of the reason they were so successful was a push to find vodka based cocktails that were easy to make and easy to drink. Thanks to big vodka’s marketing dollars, a whole category of vodka based “coolers” took off at the end of the 60s. It started with the cape codder, or vodka & cranberry which used to go by the name “Harpoon” when it was made with gin. But there was also the greyhound – vodka and grapefruit juice, and the salty dog, which added a salt rim to a greyhound. Then there was the sea breeze, which combined the cranberry and grapefruit juices, and the bay breeze, which was made with cranberry and pineapple juice.

This on its own probably would have been enough to make these vodka based coolers into American cocktail classics, but as it turned out, vodka wasn’t the only beverage in the 60s that needed a rebrand.

In 1959, a bunch of cranberries in the Pacific Northwest were found to contain traces of an herbicide called aminotriazole, which is basically a bog weed killer that caused cancer in lab rats. The U.S. Secretary of Health told people to stay away from cranberries if they didn’t know exactly where they were coming from, and cranberry farmers took a huge hit.

Enter a little cranberry farmer’s collective that formed in 1930 called the Cranberry Growers Cooperative. Today we know them better as Ocean Spray. In the 60s, to try to get people to start buying cranberries again, they started publishing recipe cards, booklets, and newsletters with all kinds of cranberry and cranberry juice recipes.

At the same time that vodka was pushing for simple fruity cocktails, Ocean Spray was also pushing cranberry juice as a great mixer for boozy drinks. That’s why so many of the vodka coolers that became so popular at the time called for cranberry juice. By the end of the 60s, these “breeze” drinks started appearing in the top ten most popular mixed drinks of the era.

Episode 21: Mai Tais Two Ways

May 28, 2020 Tux Loerzel

The Original 1944 Mai Tai

1 1/2 oz White rum
3/4 oz Orange curaçao
3/4 oz Fresh lime juice
1/4 - 1/2 oz Orgeat Syrup
1/2 oz Dark rum
Garnish: Lime wheel, Mint sprig

Add the white rum, curaçao, lime juice and orgeat syrup into a cocktail shaker with plenty of ice and shake to combine.
Strain into a double Old Fashioned glass filled with finely crushed ice (if available). Gently pour the dark rum over the top trying to float it on top.
Garnish with a lime wheel and mint sprig.

1953 Royal Hawaiian Mai Tai:

½ oz Curaçao Liqueur (Triple Sec)
1½ oz Gold/ Amber Rum
1 oz Dark Rum
¼ oz Lime juice
1½ oz Pineapple juice
1½ oz Orange juice
¼ oz Orgeat syrup
1 teaspoon maraschino cherry juice (red) or grenadine for color
Garnish: Orange slice, pineapple, red maraschino cherry

Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker with plenty of ice and shake to combine.
Strain into a large whiskey glass filled with finely crushed ice (if available).
Garnish with a wedge of pineapple, an orange wheel, and a maraschino cherry.

Tiki culture and it’s quintessential cocktails all started in 1933 when Ernest Beaumont-Gantt opened a Polynesian-themed bar and restaurant in Hollywood called Don the Beachcomber. The restaurant featured Cantonese food with a decor of flaming torches, rattan furniture, floral leis, and carved tiki masks and wooden sculptures of Polynesian gods.

This was also the first restaurant to ever focus an entire drink menu on mixing rum with flavored syrups and fresh fruit juices, which they originally called "Rhum Rhapsodies", but were later called Tiki cocktails. These drinks were usually served in fancy glasses, hollowed out pineapples, or drilled coconuts, and sometimes even giant fish bowl sized communal glasses with long straws for sharing.

Perhaps the best known and most popular Tiki cocktail ever is the Mai Tai.

It was originally invented by another restauranteur namedTrader Vic in Oakland California in 1944. Don Beach later accused Trader Vic of stealing the recipe from him, saying that his punch, the Q.B. Cooler, which he invented in 1933, was suspiciously similar. But even if it was inspired by the Q.B. Cooler, they’re very different drinks and the Cooler has almost twice as many ingredients. Vic Bergeron later wrote in his book, "anyone who says I didn’t create this drink is a dirty stinker."

The Mai Tai became so popular that within a few years of its invention, the world ran out of the aged rum called for in the original recipe, so most recipes today call for a mix of light and dark rum.

In the beginning, the Mai Tai was a simple and rum forward drink, but In 1953, a cruise company hired Vic Bergeron to oversee their cocktail menus at their hotels in Hawaii. He reworked the drink adding orange juice and pineapple juice to make it feel more Hawaiian and to sweeten the recipe, so it’d be more tourist friendly.

The Hawaiian version became even more popular than the original and now most people think that’s what a Mai Tai is supposed to taste like. Both versions are absolutely delicious, although they’re so different that they probably shouldn’t both have the same name.

Episode 6 - The Old Fashioned

January 21, 2019 Tux Loerzel

1 sugar cube
3 or 4 drops aromatic bitters
2 or 3 drops orange bitters (optional)
Water
2 oz rye whiskey
Orange twist

Place sugar cube in an old fashioned or rocks glass. Add bitters and enough water to moisten cube, then crush with a bar spoon or muddler. Add whiskey, stir to combine, and finish with an orange twist and a large ice cube.

Interesting fact:

When the word “cocktail” was originally coined, it didn’t mean a category of drinks, but was actually referring to a specific mixed drink that we know today as the Old Fashioned.

The recipe first appeared in print in The Balance and Columbian Repository in Hudson, New York in 1806.

“Cock-tail is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters—it is vulgarly called bittered sling, and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion, in as much as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time that it fuddles the head. It is said, also to be of great use to a democratic candidate: because a person, having swallowed a glass of it, is ready to swallow any thing else.”