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.
Glassware: Highball Glass
Garnish: Orange Slice and Maraschino Cherry
Ingredients
45ml
The spirit the drink was named around: a peppery 100 per cent agave blanco whose brightness fresh orange juice flatters. This is where the rescue begins.
90ml
The whole middle of the drink: fresh-squeezed brightness that three generations of bottled-juice versions concealed. The formula was never the problem.
15ml
The sunrise itself: real pomegranate grenadine, poured last and slowly so it sinks and grades from red to gold. The neon syrup sinks the same and tastes of the 1980s.
Instructions
Fill a highball glass with ice and add the tequila.
Top with the orange juice and stir once.
Pour the grenadine slowly over the back of a spoon against the inside of the glass, and let it sink.
Garnish with the orange slice and cherry, and serve unstirred with a straw.
Source: the IBA (Official IBA specification; method ours). Last checked 13 August 2026.
Expert Tip
Do not stir the sunrise. The grenadine is denser than the juice, so poured last and slowly it sinks and grades on its own, and the drinker's straw brings the dawn up through the glass on the first pull. Stirred behind the bar, it is orange juice with tequila in it. Pour the grenadine over the back of a spoon against the inside of the glass. Straight in, it punches through and mixes on the way down; slowly against the glass wall, it settles cleanly and blurs upward. Use real pomegranate grenadine. The neon syrup sinks exactly the same way and tastes of the 1980s, which is most of how this drink got the reputation it has.
Behind the Tequila Sunrise
Flavour Profile
The Origin
An earlier Arizona drink held the name, but the sunrise the world knows is the Trident’s: Sausalito, 1971, built for a Rolling Stones party, adopted by Jagger on the spot and carried across America on the 1972 tour. The Eagles sang it the following year, and by mid-decade it was the best-selling cocktail in the United States, a run few drinks have matched since.
The Gradient
Grenadine is denser than orange juice, so poured last and slowly it settles to the base and blurs upward: physics as presentation. Real grenadine, pomegranate juice and sugar, sinks true and tastes of dark fruit; neon syrup sinks the same and tastes of the 1980s. Serve it unstirred and let the first pull of the straw do the mixing.
The Ingredients Rescue
Fresh orange juice is the whole middle of the drink, and its brightness against a peppery 100 per cent agave blanco is genuinely good in a way three generations of bottled-juice versions concealed. The formula needs nothing changed, only honoured.
How to Serve It
Tall, cold, photogenic and early: it is a brunch and pool drink by birthright and does its best work before sunset, irony aside. For a crowd, build the tequila and juice in a jug and add the grenadine glass by glass: the gradient is per-serve theatre and refuses to batch.
The Arizona Original
There was an earlier Tequila Sunrise, and it was a different drink. Poured at the Arizona Biltmore in the 1930s, it ran tequila, crème de cassis, lime and soda: sharper, drier and with no gradient at all.
The name survived and the recipe did not, which happens more often than the canon usually admits. What the two versions share is the tequila and the idea of a drink that looks like a sunrise; everything else was rebuilt from scratch in Sausalito forty years later.
The original is worth making once. It is a decent drink, and it explains why the 1971 version needed a different recipe to carry the same name.
The Backlash and the Rescue
By the mid-1970s this was the best-selling cocktail in the United States, which meant it was being made at volume by people with a bottle of sour-tasting orange concentrate and a bottle of red syrup.
That is the version most people met, and it is why the drink spent thirty years as a byword for everything wrong with the era. Neither ingredient in the bad version is in the recipe. Bottled juice replaced fresh orange, and cherry-flavoured colouring replaced pomegranate grenadine.
The rescue is entirely a shopping exercise. Fresh orange juice, real grenadine and a 100 per cent agave blanco produce a bright, simple, genuinely likeable drink in about ninety seconds. There is nothing to fix in the formula, which is a point worth making about a good many drinks of its generation.
Make it at home
The Spirit
TequilaRead 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.
Master the Techniques
More to explore
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you get the sunrise effect?
Is the Tequila Sunrise any good made properly?
What is the Rolling Stones connection?
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Where this one sits
Recipe by Jerry Can Spirits