fruit juice has long been an essential component for mixing drinks, starting in the seventeenth century with punch and blooming in the mid-1800s with the advent of cobblers, sours, slings, and rickeys. At the turn of the twentieth century, the orange juice in the Bronx Cocktail took the cocktail from the saloon into the home. During Prohibition, fruit juice gained even more traction as a way to disguise the taste of bootleg liquor; after Repeal, consumers continued gravitating from boozy to fruity drinks (in a 1953 Collier’s magazine cartoon, a hostess serving cocktails to her guests assures them, “I kept the rum down, so as not to spoil the taste of the fruit juice”). See Prohibition and Temperance in America. In the 1990s, the cranberry- and lime-juice-driven Cosmopolitan brought the cocktail back from the brink of extinction. And while the twenty-first-century cocktail renaissance has returned spirit-forward drinks to center stage, fruit juice still plays an important role in contemporary mixology, if more as supporting actor than headliner. See cocktail renaissance.
While one would be hard-pressed to name a fruit that hasn’t found its way into a mixed drink, some fruits are harder to press than others: apple, pear, cherry, and apricot, for example, are so labor-intensive to juice that they’re most often deployed as drink ingredients in the form of fruit-flavored liqueurs. The following fruit types are likelier to be juiced into today’s drinks.
Lime and lemon are the most cocktail-friendly members of the citrus family, because their acidity makes an ideal counterbalance to any sweetening agent. See citric acid. Entire drink categories would cease to exist without this symbiosis, particularly punches and sours. Use only fresh fruit; commercially bottled lime and lemon juice always results in an inferior drink (the sole exception is the Gimlet). See Gimlet. Grapefruit juice is another matter; pink and ruby red grapefruit lack the bitterness of the more elusive yellow grapefruit, bitterness that most mixed drink recipes require. In the absence of fresh yellow grapefruit, choose bottled yellow over fresh pink or red. Some orange varieties are also better than others for mixology; given the choice, opt for Valencias over the less flavorful navels. To juice citrus fruit, use a standard kitchen reamer with a ribbed dome and seed trap; in high-volume situations, scale up to a lever-operated citrus press.
Strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries lend a welcome additional flavor layer to cocktails, cobblers, and sours. Because they’re too small for juice reamers, fresh berries are usually integrated into drinks by muddling the fruit in the mixing glass, as you would express mint in a Mojito or lime in a Caipirinha. In fact, these two particular drinks are ideal vehicles for berries (yes, Blackberry Mojitos have become a cliché, but that doesn’t make them any less tasty). See
Banana, mango, papaya, lychee, and their ilk lend exotic interest to frozen fruit daiquiris, margaritas, coladas, and batidas. Juicing these dense, fibrous fruits is well-nigh impossible with a reamer or muddler. Purée them in a food processor, or simply toss the diced fruit directly into a blender with your other frozen-drink-recipe ingredients. Passion fruit and guava, both common in tiki drinks, are not commonly available fresh; in a pinch, purchase them in the form of frozen 100 percent fruit pulp. Fresh pineapples are easy to find but not easy to liquefy; store-bought unsweetened pineapple juice is a perfectly reasonable alternative for the casual drinker who is disinclined to skin, dice, and pummel a fresh pineapple for a thimble full of juice—no matter how much more delicious that thimble may be. See frozen drinks, blender drinks; and tiki.
Like pineapples, extracting juice from tomatoes (essential to the Bloody Mary) and cranberries (de rigueur for the Cosmopolitan) is a chore better left to professionals; opt for unsweetened, organic bottlings. See Bloody Mary and Cosmopolitan. So too with pomegranate juice, which plays a crucial role in mixology when combined with sugar into a pomegranate syrup called grenadine. See grenadine.
Clarke, Paul. The Cocktail Chronicles. Nashville, TN: Spring House, 2015.
Regan, Gary. The Joy of Mixology. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2003.
Schumann, Charles. Tropical Bar Book: Drinks and Stories. New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1989.
By: Jeff Berry