Seabreeze

Cape Codder

A Cape Codder is vodka and cranberry juice with a squeeze of lime: 50ml vodka and 120ml cranberry juice, built over ice in a highball, with a lime wedge squeezed over the top and dropped in. The lime is the difference between a cocktail and vodka in juice. Cranberry sold for drinking is sweetened, and the squeeze puts back the edge. The drink began as a sales idea, by the account in Chilled Magazine. Chilled Magazine says it first appeared in print in 1945, in the newsletter of Ocean Spray, a cooperative of around 700 family farmers by its own account, as the Red Devil, and quotes a New Yorker advertisement of 1965 that already uses the Cape Codder name, after the cranberry-growing peninsula. It is the parent of the Seabreeze and the Bay Breeze, and a more distant relative of the Cosmopolitan. Each drink carries about 2.0 UK units. Check the label on the juice: the drink is only as good as the cranberry in it.

Greyhound

A Greyhound is 50ml of vodka and 120ml of fresh grapefruit juice in a highball full of ice, stirred once and garnished with a grapefruit wheel. About 2.0 UK units. Salt half the rim and the same drink becomes a Salty Dog. Without the salt, nothing softens the grapefruit’s bitterness, and that bitterness is the point: this is a sharp, bracing drink, nearer an aperitif than a Screwdriver. Difford’s Guide’s earliest Greyhound recipe, from Stanley M. Jones’s 1977 Complete Barguide, is a Salty Dog without the salt, made with vodka. The Oxford Companion says some Salty Dog recipes call for gin, and the Savoy Cocktail Book of 1930 prints a Colonial Cocktail of dry gin, grape fruit juice and maraschino. Gin at the same 50ml gives a drier glass with more perfume.

Vodka Collins

A Vodka Collins is 50ml of vodka, 25ml of fresh lemon juice and 20ml of sugar syrup, shaken hard for 10 to 12 seconds, strained over fresh ice in a collins glass and topped with 90ml of soda water, with a lemon wheel and a cherry. About 2.0 UK units. It is the Tom Collins with vodka in the place of gin. The Oxford Companion traces the Collins to Limmer’s Hotel in London, says the Old Tom version reached New York in 1872 and split into the John Collins and the Tom Collins, and says the Vodka Collins began to emerge in the 1930s and became ubiquitous in the 1950s. Harry Johnson printed a John Collins and a Tom Collins in 1882. Vodka adds strength and little flavour, so the lemon, sugar and soda carry the drink. That makes it a plain, clean long drink, and a useful control beside a Tom Collins: the only real change is the spirit.