Sipping season
Refreshing cocktails to carry us through a summer like no other
If you had asked me in early March what makes for a great summer drink, I might have listed such qualities as brightness, lightness, low ABV. Bubbles and herbal notes, perhaps. I would have named my favorite summer classics: the gin and tonic, crisp and fizzing; a daiquiri as balanced as Philippe Petit; tart margaritas made earthy with mezcal and spicy with chile peppers; the herbal, tea-toned Pimm’s Cup beloved by the Brits. I would have mentioned white spirits such as gin and vodka and light rum, and summer fruit, strawberries and pineapple and especially watermelon, whose cool, crisp flesh is difficult to sacrifice to drinks but absolutely delicious in them.
Four months later, I’m thinking about the question differently, in ways that are far more philosophical than compositional. Right now, talking to people about their favorite summer drinks feels like asking Roy Scheider about his favorite beach vacation. I mean, come on:
Read the room.
So I ask instead: Can a summer drink even exist right now? I mean, for thinking people? What is a beach book, a summer song, a summer drink when the usual circumstances of their consumption are so utterly lost to us?
Summers, I make drinks when my husband decides to invite a mess of folks over for barbecues. I make big batches of herbal, lightly boozy lemonade when my family has a big get-together in the backyard or at the beach, or when my workplace does a company picnic. In any season, I make drinks largely in hopes that they’ll delight not only me but other people.
And right now ... other people?! Are you crazy?
I find myself longing to sit beside a large body of water somewhere, but I’m unwilling to commit to a week at the shore without knowing I won’t find it clogged with tipsy anti-maskers, slathering one another with coconut oil and coronavirus.
Only recently have we even started figuring out ways to see the friends I’d usually delight in making drinks for. On Memorial Day, we projected theatrically to one another across our backyard, the grass taped off to keep each couple safely within our own hyperlocal biome.
Even our yard, a green and welcome refuge from work and news stress, cannot drown out the sounds of our failings: The tinny little jingle of the ice cream truck has recently started jingling again, and hearing it made me feel both nostalgic for childhood and a little more summer-normal — until I realized that one of its most frequent tunes is the old minstrel song “Camptown Races.” Now, especially with the virus still booming, watching our neighborhood’s multihued children come running for Popsicles just feels too loaded.
Heck, even as I began testing drinks for this column, I hesitated as I remembered that the Stiggins’ Fancy pineapple rum I enjoy is part of the Plantation Rum brand.
Watching people around the country march for racial justice has provided moments of hope in an other
wise distressing season. But even those signs of change don’t exactly inspire the kind of lighthearted summer tippling that this season typically prompts. Still, the heat is upon us, feral and thirst-inducing, and so I return to the compositional characteristics of a great summer drink: brightness, lightness, freshness.
The drinks that accompany this column are all bright fruit tweaks on refreshing summer classics: a bright, grassy daiquiri; a strawberry and cucumber long drink made complex with Pimm’s liqueur; and a spicy margarita that leans on watermelon, the fruit that, for me, defines summer.
This year, this is how I’ll drink on my summer vacation: Quietly, thoughtfully, hopefully with some modest degree of enjoyment, while we work and hope for our country to get better.