How to Make a Rye Whiskey and Grapefruit Cocktail

“This book is being published… in the hope that it will contribute at least a little to the standardization of drinks and to the promotion of that happy state of affairs where, when you order your favorite cocktail, you will get exactly the sensation your hopeful taste-buds have been anticipating, no matter what corner of this bright and beautiful land you happen at the moment to be inhabiting.”

— The Official Mixer’s Manual, 1934

The Blinker is, ironically, one of those cocktails that everyone makes differently, in every corner of this bright and beautiful land you happen to be inhabiting at the moment.

The one thing it always has is grapefruit—usually juice, sometimes zest, occasionally both—and beyond that, all bets are off. Is it rye or bourbon? Do you add other citrus, like lemons or limes? There’s a red fruit component—is it raspberries or pomegranates (or Rose’s Grenadine, which is high-fructose neither)? Even structurally it’s up for grabs. Is it tall and juicy like a highball or short and snappy like a sour? The Blinker is all over the place. There’s no standard. 

There’s irony in all this ambiguity. The book that introduced the Blinker—Patrick Gavin Duffy’s The Official Mixer’s Manual, quoted up top—was specifically designed to standardize the American cocktail canon. It was 1934; barely a year after the so-called “noble experiment” of Prohibition was deemed an abject failure and uniformly repealed. Alcohol had been illegal for 14 years, and almost everyone who was literate in the great tradition of tending the American bar had either fled to Europe or changed careers. Additionally, it was feared that “good automobiles and good roads have made us almost a nomadic people,” further atomizing the cocktail knowledge base and losing that “much-to-be-desired homogeneity,” so a couple publishers joined forces with an old pro—Duffy was 66, and enjoyed 35 years of experience before Prohibition hit—to create an authoritative work, and re-establish the culture of serious American cocktails. 

Duffy’s The Official Mixer’s Manual did succeed, in a way, becoming immediately influential and remaining in print for 40 years. But, sooner or later, everything changes. They were right that the culture of mixed drinks was threatened, just wrong about the time frame. Ultimately the book and everything like it succumbed to the onslaught of neon disco vodka shooters, and by the new century, the Mixer’s Manual and its Blinker cocktail wasn’t so much a North Star guiding the way as it was a time capsule, waiting to be discovered.

The Blinker was unearthed by “Dr. Cocktail” Ted Haigh, in his Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, first published in 2004. Haigh encountered Duffy’s original Blinker as three parts grapefruit juice, two parts rye whiskey, and one part grenadine, and it was he who first changed the recipe to be raspberry as opposed to grenadine’s pomegranate (“raspberry syrup was a common substitute for grenadine,” he writes, “I experimented with it in this recipe—and never looked back”).

As for all the ambiguity, why not just use Duffy’s original? Because despite his 35 years of experience, the original Blinker just doesn’t taste very good. As with the Brown Derby, grapefruit juice (like orange juice in the Blood and Sand) doesn’t have the acidity to make the flavors in a cocktail pop, at least not with the grapefruits we have today. This is why there are so many different Blinkers out there. Some bartenders try to honor the original three-ingredient recipe and pile on the grapefruit juice, making a whiskey greyhound with too much sweetness, while others either reduce the fruit component to almost nothing or else add acidity with lemons or powdered citric acid. It’s like a riddle to solve.

After trying all of them, I think the one below not only tastes best, but does so by a fairly wide margin. As far as I’m concerned, a modern Blinker must pay homage to the original flavors—rye, grapefruit, and pomegranate/raspberry—but not necessarily the original proportions, and my recipe is the one I most want to drink or would feel most confident giving to others. Is it precisely what the word “Blinker” will get you in bars across this bright and beautiful land of ours? No, it’s not. But it might be better.

Blinker

Add all ingredients including grapefruit peel to a cocktail shaker and shake hard on ice for eight to 10 seconds. Strain off the ice into a chilled cocktail or coupe class, and garnish with a grapefruit peel.

NOTES ON INGREDIENTS

Grenadine: Grenadine is a syrup made from equal parts pomegranate juice and sugar, and as with the incredible Jack Rose, the quality of your pomegranate juice matters a lot. If you make a grenadine with freshly pressed, unpasteurized pomegranate juice, your Blinker will be amazing. If you don’t have that, it will be less so, even if you make it with a high-quality bottled juice like Pom Wonderful. Grenadine is just one of those ingredients that needs to be fresh to be really great.

If you don’t have fresh juiced grenadine, consider making this with raspberries instead. Haigh is correct that raspberries and pomegranates are used interchangeably before globalization (the former in season in summer, the latter in winter), so if it’s too inconvenient to juice a pomegranate, just replace the measure of grenadine with simple syrup and add four to five raspberries to the cocktail shaker, to get smashed up along with the grapefruit peel and the ice.

Grapefruit Peel and Juice: I made a bunch of versions of this with grapefruit juice and some were quite good, but none of them came close to just using lemon juice and doing a “regal” shake, which is to say, shaking with a grapefruit peel in the tin to get beat up by the ice. You need acidity to make the flavors pop, and most of the flavor of the grapefruit is in the peel anyway. Like with the Gold Rush, shaking with a grapefruit peel infuses grapefruit’s textured bitterness into each sip, honoring the spirit of the recipe, if not the letter.

Now, if you’re feeling scientific and you have a scale that can measure to the tenth of a gram, what you can do is “acid-adjust” grapefruit juice to be as sour as lemon juice. For every 100ml of grapefruit juice, add 4g citric acid, and stir to dissolve the acid. We do this in bars to get the flavor of the juice but to avoid making it too juicy (by adding both lemon and grapefruit), but honestly, even if I were acid-adjusting the grapefruit juice, I’d still shake with a grapefruit peel. There’s just no better way to get that flavor in there.

Rye Whiskey: You want rye, not bourbon—bourbon and grapefruit work too, but it’s the spice of the rye, combined with the tart red fruit and bitter grapefruit, that makes this cocktail what it is. As for styles, this was delicious across every style of rye I tried it with, but my favorite was the “Canadian” style of rye, a high-rye, no-corn mashbill like Dickel Rye, Redemption Rye, Bulleit Rye and others, with a soft, grain-forward herbaceousness that mixes beautifully with the grapefruit.

Grapefruit Bitters: I wouldn’t buy a bottle of grapefruit bitters for this, but if I had some lying around, I’d use a couple dashes here, especially if I’m using lemon juice instead of “acid adjusted” grapefruit. A touch more bitterness helps sell the idea of the grapefruit flavor. A dash of orange bitters would work too, depending on the brand, but it’s a good idea to try it out and see if you like it. I wouldn’t use the heavy spice of an aromatic bitters like Angostura, though. It tastes pretty good, but it adds noise, especially to the fruit component.