Screwdriver
The Screwdriver is the simplest cocktail with a proper origin story: American engineers and oil workers in the mid-century, spiking cans of orange juice with vodka and stirring the result with the nearest tool to hand. The name was in print by 1949, Smirnoff's marketers took it up alongside the Moscow Mule, and vodka and orange became the default easy drink of the western world. Two ingredients leave nowhere to hide, which makes this a referendum on its juice. Fresh-squeezed orange turns it from a spiked carton into something genuinely worth ordering, bright and sweet-sharp and alive, and the vodka asks only to be clean and honestly measured. Fifty millilitres against a hundred and twenty is the ratio that keeps it a cocktail. It is also the trunk of a family tree. A Galliano float makes it a Harvey Wallbanger, sloe gin once made it a Slow Screw, and a good deal of the brunch canon descends from this glass.
Glassware: Highball Glass
Garnish: Orange Slice
Ingredients
50ml
Clean strength, honestly measured. In a two-ingredient drink the pour is the recipe, and an expensive bottle contributes nothing a decent mid-range one does not.
120ml
The whole drink by volume. Fresh-squeezed is the difference between a cocktail and a spiked carton, and there is no second ingredient here to cover for it.
Instructions
Fill a highball glass with ice and add the vodka.
Top with the orange juice and stir once.
Garnish with an orange slice.
Expert Tip
Squeeze the oranges. It is very nearly the only instruction the drink has, and it is the difference between a cocktail and a glass of juice with vodka in it. Two oranges make one drink, they take about ninety seconds, and nothing else you do to this recipe will matter half as much. Measure the vodka. In a two-ingredient drink the pour is the recipe, and eyeballing it is how a Screwdriver ends up either boozy and thin or barely alcoholic at all. Fifty millilitres against a hundred and twenty of juice is the balance; move toward the juice for a long session, never away from it. Build it in the glass over plenty of ice and stir once. There is nothing here to emulsify and nothing to aerate, so more agitation only warms it up.
Behind the Screwdriver
Flavour Profile
Where It Comes From
The story puts the drink among American engineers and oil workers posted overseas in the 1940s: vodka into canned orange juice, stirred with the screwdriver in a pocket for want of a bar spoon. The name reached print in a Time magazine dispatch in 1949, which is the earliest firm date anybody has.
Whether the tool story is literally true is unknowable and slightly beside the point. What is documented is that Smirnoff folded the drink into the campaign that made vodka America's spirit through the 1950s, and the Screwdriver became shorthand for the easiest possible drink, which is exactly what a brand selling a neutral spirit wanted.
The Juice Referendum
Every two-ingredient drink is a test of its dominant part, and here the dominant part is the juice: nearly two and a half times the volume of the spirit.
Fresh oranges, squeezed at build time, bring acidity, a little texture and a perfume that carton juice simply does not have. Commercial juice is pasteurised for shelf life, and the heat drives off the volatile aromatics. What is left is sugar and acid, which is why a Screwdriver made with it tastes flat and slightly cloying no matter how good the vodka is.
The upgrade costs two oranges and about ninety seconds, and it moves the drink into a different category.
The Family
The Screwdriver is a template as much as a drink, and most of its variations are one addition deep.
Float Galliano on top and it is a Harvey Wallbanger, the version that conquered the 1970s. Add sloe gin and it was, for a while, a Slow Screw, one of a run of drinks named for the joke rather than the flavour. Put sparkling wine where the vodka goes and the same juice underpins the mimosa family.
Learn the baseline properly and the variations explain themselves, because every one of them is answering the same question: what to do about a drink that is mostly orange juice.
Getting the Ratio Right
Fifty millilitres of vodka against a hundred and twenty of juice is a little over one to two, and it is the point where the drink reads as a cocktail rather than as breakfast.
Push the vodka up and the balance goes quickly, because there is nothing in the glass to absorb it: no sugar, no bitters, no second spirit. What you get is a thin, hot drink that tastes of alcohol and orange separately rather than together.
If you want it longer, add juice rather than reducing the vodka. That keeps the proportions honest and simply makes a bigger drink.
How to Serve It
Cold, tall and immediately. Fill the highball properly with ice, because a half-filled glass warms within minutes and the juice goes dull, then vodka, then juice, then one stir.
Brunch is its natural habitat and it has no shelf life beyond the ice melting, so there is no reason to make it in advance. An orange slice on the rim is traditional and does no harm. If you are pouring several, squeeze all the juice at once but build each glass separately, because juice standing in a jug loses its edge within about half an hour.
Make it at home
The Spirit
VodkaThe only major spirit whose legal definition asks for character to be taken away rather than built. UK law requires it to be distilled so that the raw material's own qualities are selectively reduced, and sets the floor at 37.5%. What is left is strength, texture, and whatever survived the process.
Master the Techniques
More to explore
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is it called a Screwdriver?
Does fresh juice really matter?
What is the right ratio?
Does the vodka need to be expensive?
You Might Also Like
Greyhound
The Greyhound is older than its vodka. Harry Craddock printed the grapefruit-and-gin original in the 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book, and the drink took both its name and its second spirit in post-war America, where the story ties it to the diners of the Greyhound bus terminals and vodka was busy eating gin’s market share. Grapefruit makes it interesting where orange makes drinks friendly. The juice brings genuine bitterness along with its sugar and acid, so the finished drink runs dry, brisk and slightly stern, closer in temperament to a Paloma than to a Screwdriver. Fresh-squeezed matters even more here than elsewhere, because bottled grapefruit flattens exactly the bitter brightness that is the entire point. It is the connoisseur’s default among the juice highballs, and it sits one rim of salt away from being a Salty Dog, which turns out to be a structural decision rather than a garnish and is worth testing with two glasses.
Harvey Wallbanger
The Harvey Wallbanger is a Screwdriver that took a swerve: vodka and orange juice with a float of Galliano, the tall golden Italian liqueur, and the most successful drinks-marketing campaign of the 1970s attached. The recipe is credited to Hollywood bartender Donato “Duke” Antone in the 1950s, but the fame belongs to Galliano’s importers, whose surfing cartoon mascot Harvey put the drink on every American bar and airline by 1975. The float is the whole idea: fifteen millilitres of Galliano’s vanilla-anise gold resting on the surface, so the drink opens herbal-sweet and finishes as a plain Screwdriver, the same descent-through-a-layer trick the New York Sour plays with wine. Stirred in, it is merely sweetened orange juice; floated, it is a drink with a beginning, middle and end. It collapsed with the decade and returned with the revival’s soft spot for honest kitsch: the modern reading pours fresh orange juice, keeps the float floating, and lets a very silly name introduce a rather clever structure.
Tequila Sunrise
The Tequila Sunrise in its famous form was born at the Trident in Sausalito around 1971, where Bobby Lozoff and Billy Rice mixed tequila, orange juice and a sinking grenadine gradient for a Rolling Stones launch party. Mick Jagger approved so thoroughly that the band’s 1972 tour became, by their own account, the cocaine and tequila sunrise tour, and the drink went around the world with them. It is the most photographed cocktail of its decade for the same reason it is the most underestimated: the grenadine does not mix, it sinks, building the red-to-gold gradient that named the drink. The eye drinks first, and by the time the palate arrives, tequila and fresh orange have already made their simple, sunlit case. The rescue job is the ingredients. Fresh orange juice and real pomegranate grenadine make an honest drink of it; the bottled-juice and neon-syrup version earned every sneer it received. It is the same argument in its brightest colours: the recipe was never the problem.
Where this one sits
Recipe by Jerry Can Spirits