The Screwdriver: Vodka, Orange Juice, and Nowhere to Hide

Built in the glass, the way it should be, because there is no reason to dirty a shaker for this. Fill a Collins with cubed ice, pour two ounces of vodka, top with four ounces of orange juice, and give it one honest stir to marry the layers. The only decision that matters happens before you touch the bottle. Use fresh-squeezed juice or do not make the drink. The pulp, the slight bitterness from the pith, the acid that hasn't been pasteurized into oblivion, that is the entire personality here. Cartoned juice is sugar water with a memory of fruit, and it shows instantly. Big cubes melt slow and keep the thing from going to flat dilution before you finish it. Garnish with an orange slice on the rim, more cue than decoration. The two-to-one ratio is the standard, but if your oranges are sweet, drop the juice to three ounces and let the vodka stand up.

The Screwdriver is a Highball, and it is almost the purest example the family has. A Highball is a spirit lengthened by a larger volume of something nonalcoholic, built tall over ice, and the structural job of that bulk liquid is to carry the booze and set the tone. Usually that role goes to a carbonated mixer—soda, tonic, ginger beer in a Bourbon Rickey—but the Highball doesn't require bubbles. It requires bulk. Here the bulk is juice, and that single choice puts the Screwdriver in the same room as the Bay Breeze and the Bloody Mary, drinks where fruit or vegetable volume does the lengthening instead of seltzer. The vodka leads, the orange juice bodies it out, and the proportions stay firmly in Highball territory rather than tipping into sour or punch. Once you see the bulk-juice body as the engine, the whole family snaps into focus. The Aperol Spritz, the Americano, the Bahama Mama, they're all spirit plus volume, just dressed differently.

The name is the only good part of the origin story, and even that is folklore. American oil workers in the Persian Gulf in the mid-twentieth century, the legend goes, spiked their orange juice with vodka and stirred it with the screwdriver in their pocket because nobody packs a barspoon to a rig. It is almost certainly tidied up after the fact, the way every great drink name is. What's true is that the Screwdriver became the gateway drug of mid-century American drinking, the cocktail you ordered when you wanted alcohol to taste like breakfast. That reputation has haunted it ever since. The drink got lumped in with brunch shame and sorority parties and the general 1970s vodka boom, and serious drinkers learned to sneer. The sneer is lazy. A Screwdriver made with vodka you'd actually sip and oranges squeezed that morning is a clean, bright, genuinely refreshing thing, and the people who dismiss it have usually only met the carton-juice version served warm. Respect the drink that asks for almost nothing. It has nowhere to hide its sins, which means it can't hide your effort either.