How to Make a Lemon Drop Martini

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is JD Stubenberg, I'm one of the bar managers here at Jimmy Maks Jazz Club in Portland, Oregon, and today we're going to talk about one of the classic cocktails, a Lemon Drop. Now depending on what part of the country you're in, a Lemon Drop has different meanings. If you're coming from the East coast, a Lemon Drop is typically going to be a shot of Citron Vodka with a lemon wedge that's been doused in sugar. On the West coast and other parts of the country, you'll find Lemon Drop being served as a cocktail or as a quote-unquote, Martini, this basically means it's served up. So what we're going to do is talk about the essentials of a Lemon Drop and then I'll show you how it's actually made, and you'll see the finished product. We're going to start out with our mixing glass and then we're also going to with a couple of cubes of sugar, just a sweetening agent. Kind of want to just get things going because your basic fundamental thing here is going to be straight up, old fashioned lemon juice. And lemon juice is tart and needs some help. So take your two cubes of sugar, cover this with lemon juice. And here at Jimmy Maks, we use something extra special, that's got a little bit of orange juice in it as well. The OJ is a great kicker that helps bring up the natural sweetness of the juices and that'll make the drink a whole lot better. Not a lot of places do that but I kind of like it myself. We're going to take a muddler, muddle the sugar cubes up so we get that sugar broken up, so it'll dissolve well when we go to our shaking. Plenty of ice please, all times, keep that going there. Now we're going to leave that for just a second, and we're going too prepare our glass receptacle. Many times you're serving up drinks, you want to pre-chill a glass. You can have it either coming out of a refrigerator, you can use ice and water in order to get the glass chilled. However in the case of glass where like this, we're going to be rimming it with sugar, that's a messy thing, it doesn't work very well. If you're coming out of refrigerator, you're o.k., but using the ice and water technique I really bad because you'll end up having a sloppy mess. So let's not worry about chilling this glass, we're just going to rim it with sugar. Start off with a lemon wedge, in this case we're using lemon as a primary flavoring agent here. You want to use lemon wedge to keep the flavors consistent. If you're making a Margarita for example, lime juice will be your primary flavoring agent. So you'll use a lime to rim the glass to get that same flavor. So get a lemon, we're now going to rim the glass, so it gets it good and sticky. Douse that in a little bit of sugar, shake up the excess sugar and you have a nice rimmed glass ready for your cocktail. Now we've got our base with lemon juice and a little bit of OJ in there as well and a little bit of sugar. Now we're going to add to that, two things. First of all, a citron flavored Vodka. You can use Absolut Citron, you can use Smirnoff Citrus, there's a lot of different citrus Vodkas out there. But this is key, using a regular Vodka doesn't cut the mustard. You really want to buck this up with something that's already got lemon flavor infused into it. So I've got two ounces of citrus Vodka, about one ounce of Triple Sec, another sweetening agent. Get your shaker, good firm seal, again we've got a break the sugar, so you need to shake this vigorously. There we go, and strain up. You'll notice because there's a little bit of orange in there , that changes the hue just slightly on the color of the drink. So it makes it look just a little bit richer and also makes the taste richer. Garnish it with a lemon wedge as well and you have a perfect Lemon Drop, enjoy."