60s — The Cocktails — Beyond Reproach

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.

2 ounces Cognac
1 ounce Cointreau or similar orange liqueur
1 ounce lemon juice
orange twist or wedge (optional garnish)

Combine the cognac, cointreau, & lemon juice in a cocktail mixing glass or shaker. Add plenty of ice and stir until frosty cold. Strain into a chilled coupe or cocktail glass with a sugared rim (if desired) * see note.
Garnish with an orange twist or wedge.

*note: To rim the glass with sugar, dip the rim into a plate with a small amount of water, and then dip the wet rim into another plate with sugar. If you want to do half the rim, you can wipe the other half dry before dipping into the sugar. This allows the drinker to decided if and how much sugar they’d like.

The sidecar was wildly popular in the 1960s, but the recipe had been around for a good long time. In fact, the recipe actually evolved from a 19th century classic called the Brandy Crusta.

The Crusta was a huge deal when it came on the scene because it actually changed the entire idea of what people thought a cocktail could be. The original formula for a cocktail dictated that it should include strong spirits, water, sugar, & bitters. The Crusta however, used lemon juice instead of water, which was practically ground breaking at the time. It was also served in a sugar rimmed glass, which was also seen as an innovation.

When Jerry Thomas included the recipe for the Crusta in his cocktail book, their popularity skyrocketed. Over the years, the recipe evolved. Generations of bartenders put their own spins on it to make it their own, playing with the balance, ingredients, and presentation. Before you knew it, the recipe looked more like today’s Sidecar than yesterday’s Brandy Crusta.

The origins of the name of the sidecar are disputed, but it was likely invented around the end of World War II, either in Paris or London. The common belief is that it was named after an army captain who liked to ride to the bar in the sidecar of his motorcycle.

However, in The Essential Cocktail Dale DeGroff wrote, “The word sidecar means something totally different in the world of the cocktail: if the bartender misses his mark on ingredient quantities so when he strains the drink into the serving glass there’s a bit left over in the shaker, he pours out that little extra into a shot glass on the side – that little glass is called a sidecar.”

As the Sidecar morphed from the Crusta, it was originally still made with brandy, but brandy can vary a lot in flavor depending on where and how it was made. Just like wine, Brandy can be sweet, fruity, dry, earthy, etc.
So, depending on the brandy used, bartenders would need to adjust the amounts of the other ingredients to ensure a balanced cocktail that wouldn’t be too sweet or too tart.
While Cognac is a type of brandy, the flavor from brand to brand tends to be much more steady, so eventually the brandy was swapped with cognac to ensure a more reliable, balanced final product.

A lot of sidecar recipes call for a sugared rim just like a Brandy Crusta, but some bartenders prefer to leave the sugar off. We’re not exactly certain if the sugar would have been popular in the 60s, so we decided to only coat half of the rim in sugar to give the drinker the option of choosing whether they want the sugar or not.