The Art of the Simple Summer Cocktail
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For summer cocktails, I like doing kind of nice, simple ones. I’ll end up having quite a few people over and those 30-minute cocktails sometimes just are a little too much. So I’ve got a few different ones.
One that I like is just getting seltzer water or carbonated water, like a Pellagrino or something that you can get at the grocery store. I like a Tito’s and seltzer water with a splash of lemonade. And you can serve it with a lime, nice and easy. You can crank out 10 of them, lickety-split. And I also am a big fan of the John Daley, which is an Arnold Palmer with a shot of Tito’s. It’s half lemonade and half iced tea, with a little slice of lemon with it. That’s a great summer cocktail, very refreshing.
My standby that I always go to is Tito’s and Seltzer with a lime and an orange. And don’t ask me why, but it always tastes better with a lime and an orange as opposed to just a lime or just and orange.
I drink it warm at the distillery just to make sure it’s right. But when it comes to cocktailing, I always like to drink something that hydrates me at the same time because I usually forget to drink water. I’m usually drinking more than a couple of cocktails at a time. And so I go with the Tito’s and seltzer or sparkling mineral water with the lime and the orange.
The reason I do seltzer instead of soda is because it doesn’t have all the sodium in it and you find that if you go out and you drink a bunch of cocktails and you’re drinking soda, in the morning you wake up and you’re actually kind of bloated just from all the sodium that you’ve consumed.
I had a cocktail the other day that I thought was real interesting. It was Tito’s with seltzer, but they put in a little bit of simple syrup and you can put in maple syrup or agave nectar instead. So it was Tito’s, seltzer, a little bit of simple syrup or agave nectar and then they had muddled the Tito’s with a couple of slices of cucumber and they have a couple of slices of red jalapeno. And they muddled that together.
And it was really delicious and interesting because cucumbers kind of have an earthy tone. And the jalapenos have a little zippity-zest. It had that little sweetness kind of balancing it. And they served that with just a little bit of lime. That was a lovely cocktail. So, those are some good, simple ideas for the summertime.
In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think’s studio.