But the third rule — that it require only easily available ingredients — is a slight stretch. You may have to visit a decent grocery or package store to provision one key ingredient.
To make a proper Measured Spirit Moscow Mule, you must use Fever Tree ginger beer. You must not use a large copper mug.
Happy Hour Quickie recipe: Moscow Mule
2 oz vodka [1.5 oz for the more sessionable version — which is to say a drink of which you can have more than two without having to summon Lyft]
As with nearly all vodka drinks, brand just doesn’t matter. But Smirnoff’s is the original. Don’t use any of those high-priced Gray-vedere-roc-whatever brands. Total waste.
Juice of 1/2 lime
Most recipes call only for a lime wedge garnish. I like the addition of citrus juice. Eliminate it if you wish.
4 oz [measured] Fever Tree Ginger Beer
Use only this product, which has a high-spice, make-your-lips-tingle buzz. Most easily available ginger beers [Barrett’s] are too wan to carry the drink.
Squeeze the lime juice into an Collins glass, a double Old Fashioned, or a small copper mug. Add the vodka. Fill the vessel with cracked ice. Top with the Fever Tree.
This week’s fast, easy, and effective recipe. Hey, you’ve got only an hour
This week’s Happy Hour Quickie — in addition to meeting the strict HHQ rules that the drink must be made from easily available ingredients, come together quickly, and be impossible to screw up — is a seasonal classic.
Happy Hour Quickie Daiquiri recipe
This week I offer my favorite version, an evolved/stolen/tweaked Daiquiri that meets my preference for tart over sweet:
1.5 oz white rum
Mid-shelf, ol-dependable, easy-on-the-wallet Bacardi works just fine
1 oz lime juice
Fresh-squoze only — you knew that
.75 simple syrup
1 oz for the more common, sweeter, arguably more balanced version
Shake and strain into a Martini glass or coupe [stronger], or over fresh ice in an Old Fashioned glass or, with cubes, into a Collins glass [more “sessionable“].
This week’s fast, easy, and effective recipe. Hey, you’ve got only an hour.
I’d say “everybody loves a Margarita,” but first, it’s demonstrably untrue. And there are at least 4,000 instances of that exact phrase in digital circulation, per Google. So instead I’ll say it’s a popular, cheerful drink — a bright and balanced classic of the “sour” type, and endlessly riffable.
More to the point, it also meets our immutable Happy Hour Quickie criteria: Easily gettable ingredients, fast assembly, and hard to screw up.
Classic Margarita recipe
2 oz. silver Tequila
.75 oz lime juice
.75 Cointreau
Garnish: Salted rim, if you want. Float a lime wheel for some visual interest.
Margarita: Essential details
Always 2 oz. Tequila. This is ideally a boozy drink, and you want the tequila to push forward.
Absolutely, positively, fresh, squoze-on-the-spot lime juice only. No pre-mix permitted. But you knew that.
Use Cointreau for the orange liqueur. Triple sec, especially the cheap stuff, just doesn’t have the clean zip.
Don’t use one of those Margarita glasses with the well at the bottom. They look cheap and silly. I have no idea why this glass exists. Can either of the regular A Measured Spirit readers explain?
Quickie happy tweaks
Agave Margarita
Replace the Cointreau with agave syrup.
You’ll lose the orange-y notes, but gain a sort of earthy, vegetal authenticity. Agave is made of the same plant as Tequila.
You’ll want to back off on the agave a bit — it’s sweeter, drop for drop, than Cointreau. Start with .25 oz and taste your way up into the zone.
Agave also dials down the alcohol content of the glass without sacrificing the tequila vibe, since you’re replacing a liqueur bottled at 40% alcohol by volume with a virgin sweet.
Elegant, slightly exotic — without messing with the classic profile. Cut a piece of ginger root and run it around the rim to create a slight ginger lip tingle. Go ahead, I dare you.
A Measured Spirit’s Margarita Oscuro ™:
Swap in reposado tequila [a lightly golden version, barrel aged for less than a year] and Grand Marnier [an orange liqueur whose brandy base produces more of a “bottom” than Cointreau, at least in my humble estimation].
Oscuro roughly translates to “dusky.”
This transforms a bright and happy party drink into a darker, richer sipper. Perfect for a solo cocktail hour contemplating a summer sunset.
This week’s fast, easy, and effective recipe. Hey, you’ve got only an hour.
The Negroni: A classic that’s easy to provision, fun to modify, and hard to screw up. Courtesy wikimedia.
This was my gateway cocktail, a classic. Equal parts of three ubiquitous ingredients, so it’s easy to gather the booze and assemble fast, with zero risk of screwing up.
.75 oz gin
Any London dry is fine
.75 oz Campari
One of the bitterest of the at-any-county-liquor-store aperitifs
.75 oz sweet vermouth
aka Italian or red vermouth
Fast build: Add all ingredients over ice in Old Fashioned glass. Stir gently. Orange peel garnish. Lemon will work in a pinch.
You can also stir the ingredients in a mixing glass and strain over fresh ice. I find there’s virtually no difference in outcome.
If this makes me a vulgarian, I accept the title.
Quickie happy tweaks
Note: Each of the following at least slightly unsettles a classically balanced drink, but provides a different profile.
Use a flavor-rich American small-batch gin. My favorite of this type, D.C.’s Green Hat, can stand up to the other two ingredients.
Some people make this with Hendrick’s gin. For me, its subtle, eccentric [cucumber!], soft notes are completely wasted here. But Hendricks’ own “Unusual Negroni” recipe splits the Campari with Aperol [see below]. I haven’t tried this. Who knows?
Try Carpano Antica vermouth. Dark, herbal, a bit dense. Adds big body to the drink. Expensive, sadly.
Feeling frisky? Go way off script and do equal parts gin and Punt e Mes, a dark, bitter, brown vermouth that acts as both the sweet and the bitter in one swoop. Some try 3 equal parts and replace the sweet vermouth with Punt e Mes. But that slides the drink toward a bitterness I can’t abide. Add a bit of regular sweet vermouth as needed.
Campari too bitter for you? Swap in Aperol, a sweeter apertif, with less of that woolen tongue thing you get with a potent bitter.
Aperol edges the drink’s color from ruby toward orange.
Aperol also has lower alcohol by volume [11%], yielding an in-the-glass ABV of around 30.
Dial down the buzz even more: Cut the gin, top with soda. This devolves the drink into an “Americano.”
Frisky fact: The Americano was the first drink ordered by Bond, James Bond in Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale.
A more elegant look: Stir and serve up, in a coupe.
Impress your happy hour friends with these fun facts
The widely circulated story is that the Italian Count Negroni ordered the first one in Florence in 1919. A boozehound, he asked for gin to be added to his Americano. The rest is history.
Or myth. Most cocktail Creation Stories carry a strong whiff of bullshit at the nose. For what it’s worth, here is a rollicking takedown of the story, from a culinary perspective, by Food Republic.
Freaky fact-ish thing: Whether he invented the Negroni or not, the good Count developed a preference for strong liquor when he was an American rodeo clown. That is what at the Washington Post we used to call a story “too good to check.”
This week I offer my favorite version, an evolved/stolen/tweaked Daiquiri that meets my preference for tart over sweet:
