Episdoe 64: Greyhound

  • 2 oz Vodka

  • 4 oz Grapefruit Juice (pink is sweeter and prettier) 

  • Lemon or grapefruit twist

Pour the vodka and grapefruit juice into an old-fashioned glass over ice and stir to combine and chill. Garnish with a twist if desired.

We know that the first published recipe for a cocktail made with grapefruit juice similar to the greyhound was in 1930 in Harry Craddock’s Savoy Cocktail Book. This recipe wasn’t called a greyhound though, and it was made with gin, not vodka. It wasn’t until 1945 that Harper’s magazine finally published a recipe for a Greyhound made with vodka.

As it turns out, the Greyhound bus line used to own a chain of restaurants called Greyhound Post House that were located in their bus terminals so people could eat during their travels without having to leave the bus station. When Harper’s published their Greyhound recipe in 1945, they wrote that the recipe was popular in the Post House Restaurants and that’s why they called the cocktail a greyhound. Who knew this delicious classic was named after a bus line?

In the following decades, greyhounds remained popular, thanks largely to vodka marketing dollars. In the 1960s, most Vodka brands had Russian sounding names, and they were worried about public perception during the cold war, so they put a ton of money into marketing and PR to help people forget the Russian ties. A large part of their marketing was finding recipes that were super simple and easy to make at home with just a handful of ingredients, which is part of the reason the Greyhound remains such a classic even to this day.

Episode 63: Brown Derby

  • 2 oz. bourbon

  • 1 oz. fresh grapefruit juice

  • 1/2 to 3/4 oz. honey syrup (to taste, see note)

  • Optional garnish: Grapefruit twist

Combine bourbon, grapefruit juice, and honey syrup in a cocktail shaker and fill with ice. Shake until well chilled, about 20 seconds. Strain into a chilled stemmed cocktail glass. Pinch grapefruit twist over top of glass to express oils and add twist to drink. 

Note:
Honey syrup: simply mix equal parts hot water and honey, stirring or shaking until dissolved, and let cool completely before using. Syrup will keep, refrigerated, up to 2 weeks.

According to Dale DeGroff’s 2002 book, “The Craft of the Cocktail,” the Brown Derby was created at the Vendôme Club in Los Angeles in the 1930s, and it was named for a popular Hollywood Haunt called the Brown Derby. The Brown Derby was a diner chain in LA with domed buildings built to look like brown derby hats.

While the recipe for the Brown Derby cocktail appeared in the book “Hollywood Cocktails” in 1933, it turns out that an identical cocktail called the De Rigueur was published in England’s “The Savoy Cocktail Book” in 1930. There’s no way to be certain if the Brown Derby was ripped off from the De Rigueur or if they were both just invented independently of one another. Either way, the Brown Derby became way more famous and popular than the De Rigueur.

A bartender and cocktail authority Jeffrey Morgenthaler said,
“Honey is this weird ingredient that can tie flavors together when you need it to. And by some miracle it sits in this perfect place between bourbon and grapefruit.”

Episode 46: Sea Breeze

  • 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.

sea breeze

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.