Good catch, Scrumpet, that should absolutely be late ’90s, not late ’80s, for Sex in the City’s influence. I’ll fix that. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, and thanks for reading Cold Glass.

Please let me know how you like them.

Red Sky at Night
a cocktail by Chip Dykstra (Aka Arctic Wolf)

2 oz Premium White rum
1 oz Cointreau
1 oz lime juice
1 oz Red Cranberry juice
1/2 oz Grenadine
Ice
Lime slice for garnish

Shake all the ingredients over ice
Strain into a cocktail glass
Garnish with a small slice of Lime
Yumm!

I hadn’t put much thought into variants that switch the base spirit. Your tequila “Metro” sounds intriguing, and the rum version seems a natural. I’ll look forward to trying them out. Thanks!

I’d say go ahead and make it with your favorite vodka, citrus or not. Though legend has it that the drink really started to become popular as part of an Absolut Citron promo campaign, switching out the Citron for “regular” vodka doesn’t seem to harm the drink.

1 1/2 ounces Blanco Tequila
3/4 ounce Grand Marnier
1 ounce Cranberry juice
1/2 ounce Lime Juice
Teasspoon of sugar syrup (optional)

I have a couple rum variations, a few gin variations, and even a whisky variation (using an aged white whisky) that are for me simply fantastic cocktails to serve when I have friends over. I will say though, that a teaspoon of sweetener (usually grenadine) always seems to make the cocktail more appealing to a wider range of guests. As you say in the posting, it is better to err on the side of the sweet, than on the side of the tart and sour.

Great Posting Dave!

I’m excited to try this, thanks for the idea, and the recipe.

I highly doubt that the person who crafted the 1985 Cosmo had a copy of Mixing in Elite Bars: 1903-1933, and honestly there are 4 other drinks that are called the Cosmopolitan (or have it in the name) in that 5-volume book alone (all pretty different). The similarities of a white spirit, pink, fruit flavored Sour with the same name is curious though.

For raspberry syrup, I used a modification of a recipe I found in the NY Times: http://cocktailvirgin.blogspot.com/2009/12/knickerbocker.html. Unless the berries are in season, frozen is your best bet since they were picked (and frozen) while ripe, and not picked pre-ripened for cross country shipment. And once you heat things, the processing won’t matter. With the vodka added as a preservative, my batch has lasted a year and a half without a contamination issue.

Yes, I agree about the pink connotations, and it is very unfortunate.

It sounds like you’re in Gary Regan’s “one or two dashes cranberry juice, for color” camp.

It’s hard to figure out if that gin version is a precursor, or just another thing called Cosmopolitan. It seems to be in the same vein as the modern incarnation, yet there are so many substitutions… I struggled with that, and finally cut the whole history mess out of this article for being long on maybes and short on facts. By the time I was done, it was ten miles of bad road to nowhere. That’s why they invented delete keys, I guess.

But your note reminds me—I do want to try that 1933 gin version. How did you make the raspberry syrup?

That’s interesting, about Absolut’s marketing campaigns. I haven’t seen anything like that here.

I’m not sure I’ve seen a Cosmo being made with anything other than sweetened cranberry juice (a/k/a cocktail). We’ve made in it home years ago with unsweetened organic stuff and it had a crisper, more lively feel to it (unsweetened is inaccurate — not high fructose corn syrupped away but mellowed with other juices I believe). But most Cosmo drinkers want something on the sweeter side. And given Absolut’s marketing here in Boston (they take out ads putting two bartenders and their recipes head to head in a competition), they seem to prefer sweeter drinks as well.