Or is that rickey?
Anyways…at Clare and Don’s Beach Shack last weekend I had this drink. It was – as they made it there – black cherry Smirnoff vodka, Nellie & Joe’s Famous Key Lime Juice, sours, Sprite, and grenadine.
Well, you know here in the Den we don’t do “sours mix”, and our grenadine tends to be the real stuff. Still, I wanted to give this drink a shot – it was quite refreshing.
Here’s what I have right now, and I can tell you – it needs a bit more Sprite to be as light as the one at Clare and Don’s (I just added some Sprite, and yes, I was right) and it won’t be as lively color of pink because I’m using rich simple syrup and not throwing in an artificial maraschino cherry, but it’s still pretty darn good.
In a collins glass, over ice, build:
2 ounces Smirnoff Black Cherry vodka [1]
1 ounce lemon juice
1 ounce simple syrup
1 1/2 ounces key lime juice
1/2 ounce grenadine
Stir briskly for a minute or two. (This could probably be shaken – they shook it, but the bartender used the glass she was pouring into to strain it out, and I’m feeling rather lazy – and low on ice.)
Top with Sprite.
Give it another stir or two.
Garnish, if you’d like, and drink.
If you have enough Sprite in there, it’s a very light, beguiling drink. IF you don’t, it can get a bit sticky thick, but is still good. I’d recommend, actually, probably halving the ingredient sizes I have here. That might work well.
If you make it, or make a variant of it, let me know!
[1] – This is what they used at the bar, and in a moment of laziness (detect a trend?) I just went ahead and bought a bottle, especially as I could find nothing particularly “black cherry” to flavor vodka with at the store. However, I would love to try this with black cherry infused light rum, homemade black cherry infused vodka, or maybe something else I haven’t thought of yet…
I tried a similar sort of experiment with a Lynchburg Lemonade, and ended up with a reasonably tasty and refreshing rye-based drink which I’ll have to write up some day over on Dave’s Drinks..
What I did about the Sprite was to use seltzer instead, and just up the simple syrup+citrus a bit. It worked out reasonably well, and enabled me to keep using “classic” ingredients, which was kind of the point.
That’s a good idea there with the seltzer. Why’d you pick that over club soda or tonic water?
My first goal was to recreate the drink. Sleeping on it, I really think the trick is to halve all the ingredients I listed except the vodka, and reduce that to 1 1/2 ounces.
I really want to try a variant though using, maybe, black cherry infused rum.
Seltzer is what I had around, although I hadn’t really thought of tonic. Maybe ginger ale would work well also…
Man, now I’m going to have to try them out..