Blinker
The Blinker is rye, grapefruit juice and grenadine, and it is one of very few classic sours where grapefruit does the whole job on its own. Lemon is the default for a reason: it is sharp and neutral. Grapefruit is sharp and opinionated, bitter as well as sour, and putting it against rye produces something considerably drier and stranger than a whiskey sour. It comes from Patrick Gavin Duffy's Official Mixer's Manual of 1934 and then disappeared for most of a century. Its return is generally credited to Ted Haigh, whose Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails put a good many repeal-era specs back into circulation in the 2000s. The grenadine decides whether it works. Made from pomegranate, it brings a tart, slightly astringent fruit that meets the grapefruit halfway. Made from corn syrup and red dye, which is what most of the twentieth century sold, it turns the drink into cordial. That is most likely why nobody made it for seventy years.
Glassware: Coupe Glass
Garnish: Grapefruit Twist and Lemon Twist
Ingredients
60ml
Rye rather than bourbon. Grapefruit is bitter as well as sour, and rye's dry pepper meets that where bourbon's sweetness argues with it.
30ml
Squeezed to order, and taste it first. Grapefruit varies more through the year than any other common cocktail citrus, and the recipe assumes juice with genuine bite.
15ml
Real pomegranate, and this is the ingredient the drink stands or falls on. The commercial red syrup is sugar and colouring, and it turns a dry sour into a cordial.
Instructions
Add the rye, grapefruit juice and grenadine to a shaker.
Fill with cubed ice and shake hard for 12 seconds.
Double strain into a chilled coupe.
Express a grapefruit twist over the surface and drop it in.
Expert Tip
Read the grenadine label before you buy. If pomegranate is not near the front of the ingredients, the bottle will not make this drink. Real grenadine is tart as well as sweet and has a faint astringency that stands up to grapefruit; the commercial red syrup is sugar with flavouring, and it flattens everything it touches. Taste the grapefruit before you build. It swings enormously through the year and between varieties: a ruby in season can be almost sweet, while a white one out of season is punishing. The grenadine measure is the adjusting screw, and moving it three or four millilitres either way is a normal part of making this drink rather than a failure to follow the recipe. Double strain it. Grapefruit throws a lot of pulp.
Flavour Profile
Where It Comes From
Patrick Gavin Duffy published The Official Mixer's Manual in 1934, the year after repeal, and it is one of the better records of what American bars were actually pouring as they came back into legal business. The Blinker is in it, and there is no story attached: no bar, no bartender, no explanation of the name.
It then vanished. The drink is absent from the mid-century books almost entirely, and its reappearance is generally credited to Ted Haigh, whose Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails did more than any other single volume to put repeal-era specs back on menus in the 2000s.
Grapefruit Doing Lemon's Job
Almost every sour uses lemon or lime, and the reason is that both are sharp and relatively neutral. They provide acid and then get out of the way.
Grapefruit does not get out of the way. It brings bitterness alongside the acid and a faint sulphurous edge that reads as savoury. In a sour that changes the whole structure: the citrus is no longer just the frame, it is one of the flavours, and the sweetener has to balance bitterness as well as acid.
That is why grapefruit sours are rare and why the ones that exist are memorable. The Hemingway Daiquiri and the Brown Derby are the other two worth knowing, and all three taste more grown-up than their ingredient lists suggest.
The Grenadine Question
Grenadine is pomegranate syrup. That is what the word means, from the French for pomegranate, and it is what the 1934 recipe assumed.
What the twentieth century sold under the name was corn syrup, water, citric acid and red dye. Against grapefruit that is a disaster: there is no fruit character to meet the bitterness, so the drink reads as sweetened juice with whiskey in it. With real pomegranate the syrup brings its own tartness and a slight astringency, and the two fruits meet in the middle rather than one covering the other.
You can make it easily enough: pomegranate juice and sugar, equal by weight, warmed just enough to dissolve.
Balancing It
Fifteen millilitres of grenadine against thirty of grapefruit is the printed spec, and it is a starting point rather than a rule.
Grapefruit is the most variable common citrus behind a bar. Ruby varieties in season are noticeably sweeter and less bitter than white ones, and the same fruit in February is a different ingredient from the same fruit in August. Taste the juice and move the grenadine to suit. Anyone insisting a fixed measure works year-round with this fruit has not made it very often.
How to Serve It
Shaken hard for twelve seconds, double strained into a chilled coupe, with a grapefruit twist expressed over the surface.
It is an aperitif rather than a nightcap, despite the whiskey. The bitterness makes it sharper and more appetising than its colour suggests, and it works considerably better before food than after.
The Spirit
Whiskey (Rye)The whiskey the American classics were written for. Rye is dry and peppery where bourbon is sweet and broad, and a Manhattan or a Sazerac built on the wrong one is a noticeably different drink rather than a near miss.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Blinker cocktail?
Rye whiskey, fresh grapefruit juice and grenadine, shaken and served up. It appears in Patrick Gavin Duffy's Official Mixer's Manual of 1934 and is one of the few classic sours built on grapefruit rather than lemon or lime.
Why does the grenadine matter so much?
Because real grenadine is pomegranate syrup, which is tart as well as sweet and stands up to grapefruit's bitterness. The commercial red syrup is sugar and colouring, and against grapefruit it produces something closer to cordial than a sour.
Can I make my own grenadine?
Yes, and it is worth doing. Equal weights of pomegranate juice and sugar, warmed just enough to dissolve and no further. It keeps a couple of weeks in the fridge and improves several other drinks besides this one.
How is it different from a Brown Derby?
Both are whiskey and grapefruit sours. The Brown Derby uses bourbon and honey, which makes it rounder and warmer. The Blinker uses rye and pomegranate, which makes it drier and sharper. Same fruit, opposite moods.
Master the Techniques
You Might Also Like
Brown Derby
The Brown Derby is 1930s Hollywood in three ingredients. It was created at the Vendôme Club on Sunset Boulevard, the film colony’s lunch canteen, and named in neighbourly tribute to the Brown Derby restaurant across town, the one shaped like the hat. Bourbon, fresh grapefruit and honey: a drink engineered for a town that wanted its indulgences to photograph well. The structure is a sour that swapped both its standard parts for better ones. Grapefruit stands in for lemon, bringing bitterness along with its acid; honey stands in for sugar, bringing floral weight along with its sweetness. The two substitutions lean into each other, honey rounding exactly the bitter edge grapefruit brings, and the bourbon underneath gets to be entirely itself. It reads today as a period companion piece to the Hemingway Daiquiri, the same decade’s other great grapefruit drink, and as bourbon’s answer to it: drier than it looks, brighter than bourbon drinks are expected to be, and about ninety seconds of work from bottle to coupe.
Hemingway Daiquiri
Ernest Hemingway wandered into El Floridita in 1932, tried the house daiquiri and issued his amendment: no sugar, double the rum. The bar named the result the Papa Doble, and its most loyal customer reportedly worked through them in scarcely credible quantities, a drink for a man who distrusted sweetness and wrote like it. The honest truth is that the original Papa Doble is a punishing drink: 120ml of rum, no sugar, all austerity. The version the world now calls the Hemingway Daiquiri is the civilised descendant, with grapefruit joining the lime and maraschino carrying all the sweetness, and it is a better cocktail than its patron ever ordered. He would probably have objected, which is part of the charm. What survives from the great man’s spec is the drink’s character: bone-dry, citrus-forward and bracing, the daiquiri stripped of its plush. Alongside its sibling, the maraschino-kissed Floridita No. 3, it shows how far one bar in Havana stretched three ingredients and a lime press.
Sazerac
The Sazerac is one of the oldest documented cocktails in American history, originating in New Orleans in the mid-nineteenth century and taking its name from the Sazerac de Forge et Fils cognac that formed its original base. The switch from cognac to rye came gradually, accelerated by the phylloxera epidemic that devastated French vineyards in the 1870s and made cognac scarce across the American market. By the time cognac returned, rye had become the standard and has remained so ever since. It is a three-ingredient drink dressed with an absinthe rinse and a lemon peel expressed and discarded. The absinthe coats the glass, the lemon oils land on the surface, and neither remains in the drink in any measurable volume, yet both are present in every sip in a way that adding them directly cannot replicate. That indirection is the technique. New Orleans has argued about the correct build for as long as the drink has existed. The version here uses rye, Peychaud's with a single dash of Angostura, and a sugar cube.
Where this one sits
Recipe by Jerry Can Spirits
Enjoyed This Recipe?
Explore our full collection of cocktails and discover your next favorite
Browse All Cocktails