Tequila Sunrise: The Beach Drink That Earned Its Reputation Back

This one is built, not shaken, and that matters. You assemble it in the glass and you leave it alone. Fill a Collins with cubed ice, pour two ounces of blanco tequila, top with four ounces of orange juice, stir once if you must. Then comes the only piece of theater the drink allows. You pour a half ounce of grenadine slowly down the inside wall, or over the back of a spoon, and let it sink. Grenadine is denser than juice, so it pools at the bottom and climbs in a gradient, red bleeding up into gold. That layered sunrise is the whole point, and stirring it kills the effect, so don't. Cubed ice over crushed because you want slow dilution and a long drink, not a slushie that waters out in five minutes. Fresh orange juice is non-negotiable. The carton stuff tastes like flat candy and the drink has nowhere to hide it. And use real pomegranate grenadine if you can, not the corn-syrup-and-Red-40 bottle that tastes like a cough drop. The tequila has personality; let the other two players keep up.

Look past the costume and the Tequila Sunrise is a highball, plain as that. The highball is the easiest family to understand and the hardest to fake: a spirit, stretched long by a mixer, served tall over ice. What usually does the stretching is something carbonated, soda or tonic or sparkling wine, the fizz in a Bourbon Rickey or an Aperol Spritz. But carbonation was never the rule. The rule is dilution and length, a base spirit given room to breathe. Here the bulk comes from juice. Four ounces of orange does the stretching that club soda does in a Tom Collins, turning two ounces of sharp blanco into a six-ounce drink you can sip in the sun without falling over. That bulk-juice body is exactly what puts it in the same room as the Bay Breeze, the Bahama Mama, and the wine-and-juice end of the Bellini family. The grenadine isn't structure, it's seasoning and showmanship. Strip it away and you've got a tequila-and-OJ highball, the most stripped-down member of a very large clan.

The drink most people picture was born at the Trident in Sausalito around 1970, and it owes its fame to the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger and the band reportedly drank them on the 1972 American tour, and the recipe rode that association straight into the decade's bloodstream. There was an older Tequila Sunrise, a Prohibition-era thing in Phoenix involving crème de cassis and soda, but nobody outside cocktail historians mourns it. The orange-and-grenadine version is the one that conquered the world, and conquered it hard. By the eighties it was everywhere, which is precisely how it became uncool. Ubiquity plus bad ingredients equals contempt, and a generation of bartenders made with frozen juice concentrate and grenadine that had never met a pomegranate did the drink no favors. The backlash was earned. The redemption is also earned. Good blanco tequila has gotten cheap and excellent, fresh juice is no longer exotic, and a drink built on three honest ingredients has nowhere to be embarrassed. Drink it without irony. The sunset in the glass was always real; we just stopped using real grenadine to paint it.