Paloma

Novice

★Signature Cocktail

The Paloma is Mexico’s most popular cocktail by volume, considerably outselling the Margarita in the country that produces the tequila both are built on. Outside Mexico its profile is lower, partly because the defining grapefruit soda is less universally available than lime and triple sec. The name means dove, and the origin is most often attributed to Don Javier Delgado Corona of La Capilla in the town of Tequila, Jalisco, though the precise date and the accuracy of that attribution are not clearly established anywhere. What is established is that tequila and grapefruit have been a fixture of Mexican drinking long enough to become the country’s default tequila serve, which is a more meaningful endorsement than any bar guide. The salt rim is the element most often omitted by versions that miss what the drink is doing. Salt suppresses bitterness, which makes it a structural decision rather than a flavouring one.

High-ABVSessionableLong DrinkBuiltPartyAperitifClassic

Glassware: Highball Glass

Garnish: Grapefruit Slice, Lime Wheel and Salt Rim

Ingredients

Serves

Blanco tequila

50ml

A quality blanco with genuine agave character. The tequila leads here, and a thin or characterless bottle produces a flat drink regardless of how good the grapefruit is.

Fresh lime juice

5ml

Squeezed to order. It adds acid brightness and a secondary citrus note that lifts the grapefruit without competing with it for the same space.

Pink Grapefruit Soda

100ml

The official build, and the Mexican one: grapefruit soda rather than juice lengthened with soda water. It carries its own sugar and carbonation, which is why the recipe needs no syrup and only a token of lime.

Salt

A pinch

A pinch in the drink rather than only on the rim, which is what separates a Paloma from a tall tequila and grapefruit. Salt suppresses bitterness and lifts the fruit, and its absence is why a home version often tastes thinner than one poured in Mexico.

Instructions

Squeeze the lime immediately before building the drink.

Run a spent lime half around half the circumference of a highball glass and roll that half in flaky sea salt.

Fill the salted glass fully with large cubed ice.

Add the tequila, the lime juice and a pinch of salt directly over the ice, and stir briefly.

Pour the chilled grapefruit soda gently down the inside of the glass.

Stir once with a single slow upward lift of the bar spoon.

Garnish with a grapefruit slice and a lime wheel, and serve immediately.

Source: the IBA (Official IBA specification; method ours). Last checked 13 August 2026.

Expert Tip

Half-rim the glass with salt rather than salting the full circumference. A full rim forces salt into every sip regardless of preference and masks grapefruit's natural bitterness too completely on the initial approach; a half-rim leaves the choice with the drinker and turns the contrast between salted and unsalted sips into a feature rather than a fixed condition. That contrast is part of the design. The pinch of salt in the drink itself matters as much as the rim, and it is the step most versions skip entirely. Beyond that the soda is the whole quality question: it carries the sweetness, the carbonation and most of the flavour, so a thin or oversweet bottle has nowhere at all to hide behind five millilitres of lime.

Flavour Profile

GrapefruitCitrusAgaveEffervescentBitter

The Origin

The Paloma’s origin is less precisely documented than most of the classical canon, which fits a drink that emerged from everyday bar culture rather than from a documented creative tradition.

Don Javier Delgado Corona of La Capilla in the town of Tequila is the creator most commonly cited, and whether he created it or simply became the bartender most associated with it is not clearly established. What the record does confirm is that tequila and grapefruit became Mexico’s most widely consumed tequila cocktail, outselling the Margarita at home by a considerable margin while the Margarita dominated everywhere else.

Fresh Versus Soda

The Paloma is built on a Mexican grapefruit soda, which combines flavouring, carbonation and sweetness in a single ingredient and is genuinely how the drink is drunk at home. That is the official specification and the honest one.

The fresh juice and soda water version is a legitimate variation and an interesting one, for the same reasons fresh lime beats sour mix in a Margarita: the volatile aromatics, the natural bitterness from the naringin in the pith, and the clean directness of fresh juice are not replicated by any carbonated soda. It costs two ingredients, a squeeze and a measure of syrup in place of one bottle, and it makes a different drink rather than a better one. Build it that way and the syrup wants calibrating rather than pouring, because grapefruit swings a long way in sweetness across its season and between pink and white fruit.

Tequila Selection

Blanco is the correct choice and not a budget one. Unaged or very lightly rested, it retains full agave character without the vanilla and caramel that oak introduces.

That vegetal, slightly earthy, distinctly herbal character sits against grapefruit’s bitterness and sweetness in a way reposado or añejo simply does not: the barrel notes read as competing rather than complementary. A quality blanco with genuine agave presence produces a Paloma in which the tequila is as audible as the fruit. A thin or neutral one produces grapefruit soda with tequila as a delivery mechanism.

The Salt Function

Salt’s role on the rim is pharmacological as much as it is about flavour. Sodium chloride suppresses the perception of bitterness by blocking the bitter receptors, independently of its own savoury contribution.

In a drink built around grapefruit, whose bitter edge comes from naringin, a flavonoid in the pith and juice, the rim reduces the perceived bitterness of every sip that crosses it and lets the sweetness and the agave through. That is precisely why a half-rim beats a full one: the contrast between a salted sip, where sweetness leads, and an unsalted sip, where the full bitter edge arrives, is part of the design, and a full rim removes it.

How to Serve It

Built over ice in a half-salted highball, soda poured carefully, stirred once, with grapefruit and lime on the rim. Serve it cold and serve it immediately.

It is among the most refreshing drinks there is and one of the most forgiving to build, requiring no specialist technique beyond a squeeze of lime and a careful soda pour. Give it a quality blanco and a grapefruit soda worth drinking on its own and it rewards both consistently, which is not true of every drink that asks for good ingredients.

The Spirit

Tequila

Read the label before the price. Tequila only has to be 51% agave sugars, and no bottle is ever labelled mixto, so the words 100% agave are the only thing separating a spirit made from the plant from one made half from cane or corn.

Learn more

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Paloma?

Blanco tequila, a squeeze of lime and pink grapefruit soda over ice with a salt rim. It is Mexico’s most consumed tequila cocktail, outselling the Margarita at home by a considerable margin despite being far less known abroad.

What does Paloma mean?

Dove, in Spanish. The drink is most often attributed to Don Javier Delgado Corona of La Capilla in Tequila, Jalisco, though the precise date and the accuracy of that attribution are not clearly established anywhere.

Why the salt rim?

Salt suppresses bitterness, blocking the bitter receptors independently of its own savour. Against grapefruit’s naringin edge it lets the sweetness and the agave through, which makes it a structural decision rather than a flavouring one.

Can I use fresh grapefruit juice instead?

It is what the official build calls for and genuinely how the drink is drunk in Mexico, carrying the sweetness and the carbonation in one bottle. Fresh juice with soda water is the interesting variation, because no carbonated soda replicates fresh grapefruit’s aromatics or its natural bitterness.

Master the Techniques

Understanding Cocktail Balance

Margarita

The Margarita is the most ordered cocktail in the United States, and that status has done to it what it did to the Mojito: margarita mix, bottled lime and the frozen resort serve have created a whole category of drink that carries the name without the substance. Made properly it is three ingredients: blanco tequila, fresh lime juice and orange liqueur, shaken cold with a salt rim. That is a sour at its most direct, and in a build this bare the quality of everything is immediately apparent. There is nowhere to hide a neutral tequila, a bottled lime or a cheap triple sec. The choice that matters most is not up versus rocks, which is a matter of preference. It is blanco versus reposado. Blanco is cleaner and more agave-forward and the lime meets the tequila directly; reposado is rounder, its oak putting vanilla and caramel against the lime in a different register. Both are correct, and blanco is the more coherent with fresh lime.

Gin Rickey

The Gin Rickey is gin, fresh lime juice and soda water over ice, and there is no sugar in it of any kind. That absence is the whole drink. It is what separates a Rickey from a Fizz, and it is why the gin matters more here than in almost anything else you can build. It is named after Colonel Joe Rickey, a Missouri lobbyist who drank his bourbon with lime and soda at Shoomaker's on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1880s Washington, consistently enough that the bartenders named the order after him. The gin version came shortly afterwards and overtook the original so completely that a Rickey now means gin unless you say otherwise. Rickey himself, by most accounts, thought the gin version was worse. He was outvoted. With no sweetener and only three ingredients, the freshness of the lime is the most consequential thing in the build. Squeezed to order it is bright and genuinely refreshing. Squeezed an hour earlier it is flat and slightly bitter, and nothing else in the glass can cover for it.

Tom Collins

The Tom Collins is a gin sour lengthened with soda: gin, fresh lemon, sugar syrup and soda water over ice in a tall glass. The simplicity is deceptive. Built with a quality London Dry, lemon squeezed to order and well-chilled soda poured carefully, it is one of the most refreshing long drinks there is. Built with bottled juice and flat soda, it is one of the most disappointing. The name comes from one of the odder stories in the canon. The Great Tom Collins Hoax of 1874 involved telling somebody that a man called Tom Collins had been disparaging them in a nearby bar, then sending them off to find a person who did not exist. It spread across American cities fast enough that the name entered everyday speech, and a long gin drink already being served as the John Collins acquired it almost by association. Old Tom gin, the sweeter style that preceded London Dry, was the format's original base and makes a rounder, gentler drink. Both are correct.