The Art of the Simple Summer Cocktail

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.