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POURCRAFT BAR

MOCKTAIL

Citrus Spritz Soda

Four parts soda water to one part citrus cordial, with the aroma coming off a peel rather than out of the bottle.

  • 4Soda water73%5 oz, very cold
  • 1Citrus cordial18%1 1/4 oz
  • 1/2Grapefruit juice9%3/4 oz
Ice
One large cube
Glass
Large stemmed glass, or a 12 oz tumbler
Serves
1
Garnish
A wide expressed peel, left in the glass

Ingredients

Batch size

1 serving
  • 5 ozsoda water, from a bottle opened within the hour
  • 1 1/4 ozcitrus cordialSwap: 1 oz simple syrup plus 1/4 oz lemon juice
  • 3/4 ozfresh grapefruit juiceSwap: Blood orange juice, which is sweeter and less bitter
  • 1wide strip of grapefruit or orange peel
  • 1large ice cube

Method

  1. Cut the peel before you build anything

    Take a wide strip with a peeler, skin only. Doing this first means the peel is ready at the moment it is needed rather than after the bubbles have had thirty seconds to escape.

  2. Cordial and juice over the cube

    Both go in first and get a single stir. This is the only stirring the drink gets, so it happens before there is any carbonation to lose.

  3. Tilt the glass and pour the soda down the wall

    Angled pouring keeps far more gas in solution than pouring straight down. It is the difference between a drink that is still lively after five minutes and one that is not.

  4. Express the peel across the whole surface

    Hold it skin-down about three inches above the glass and squeeze it in half. The fine spray that comes off is what the drink smells like for the first several sips.

  5. Wipe the rim, then drop the peel in

    Running the outside of the peel around the rim puts the oil exactly where the nose meets the glass. Then it goes in, oil side up, and keeps working.

The one thing that ruins it

Taking the peel with a knife and bringing the white pith along with it. Pith carries no aroma and a great deal of bitterness, and in a drink this delicate one strip of it is enough to dominate.

Tools you actually need

If you need one

01Cleanest cut
Microplane Premium Classic Zester & Grater

Microplane

Microplane Premium Classic Zester & Grater

An 18/8 stainless blade with a soft handle, the reference tool for this job. A sharp photo-etched blade cuts the colored layer and stops, which is exactly the behavior the category exists for: oil without pith.

Best for
Fine zest over the surface of a finished drink
Key spec
18/8 stainless steel blade, soft handle, citrus and hard cheese
  • Sharp enough to take the colored layer without pressing into the pith
  • 18/8 stainless resists the staining that citrus acid causes
  • Soft handle gives control at the shallow angle this job needs
  • Equally at home on hard cheese, so it earns its drawer space
  • No blade cover listed, so it needs careful storage
  • A fine zester cannot take the wide strips that expressing calls for
  • One blade profile only, unlike a multi-piece set
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Technique behind this drink

Make it ahead, or batch it

Cordial keeps refrigerated for a couple of weeks and improves in the first day or two. Peels can be cut up to two hours ahead if kept covered — beyond that the edges dry and the oil yield drops off sharply, which you notice immediately in a drink this lightly flavored.

There is a clean split here between what scales and what does not. Cordial and juice batch perfectly: mix them at the same one-to-half ratio, bottle, and refrigerate. Soda water does not scale at all, and pre-mixing it into a pitcher gives you flat cordial water within twenty minutes. The other thing lost at volume is the peel, which has to be expressed over an individual glass to do anything — expressing a dozen peels over a pitcher puts the oil on the surface of a liquid that then gets stirred, and the aroma disappears. Build these one at a time from a bottle of pre-mixed base and small bottles of soda, and reckon on about twenty seconds each.