The Steve Breeze?

And we are live again. It's Friday. Well, if I'm doing this stuff, it's definitely Friday, four o'clock, Pacific time has time to drink. This has been kind of a really long hard week. It's funny, with the pandemic and everything, I think most people are actually working longer, I know I am, I work longer hours. People that aren't used to working at home are trying to set up boundaries for how they work, and I think they end up just kind of not setting boundaries, and so for those of us that have had a homosexual forever kind of sucks, because it seems like we're on the clock all the time, so I'm super happy the week's done, I'm super happy it's Friday.

We got a super easy drink, but it's actually super tasty, and it's totally a summer drink. I remember drinking this You know, in my 20s it was kind of thing. to get Sea Breeze, right? What I didn't know was some history behind the Sea Breeze, and I, I so I dug some stuff up, and actually it's pretty interesting, because there's different stories on how the Sea Breeze came into being in its current and its current incarnation, which is super simple, right.

Sea Breeze is vodka, cranberry juice and and grapefruit juice, that's all it is, right? It's an easy drink to make. But now, what's the history behind it? So my favorite story is it's actually tied to a post cranberry panic that happened up here in the Pacific Northwest in November of 1959. There are a bunch of cranberries that were discovered to have traces of a herbicide called aminotriazole, and this herbicide

was causing cancer in rats, so naturally the U.S. secretary of health advised Americans at the time to stay away from cranberries because they could give you cancer, right? Because this herbicide, and so naturally the cranberry growers themselves on the cranberry farmers took a pretty big hit, right? I mean, when the U.S. secretary of health says don't eat cranberries because it could give you cancer, it tends to kind of stop those farmers from selling a whole lot of cranberries.

So at the time, now remember this is 1959 when this happened, so 1960, this little growers collective of cranberries formed in in the early 30s, and this little collective of growers was known as Ocean Spray. So 1960, you know, fast forward to 1960, they, the US Department of Health, says puts the kibosh on cranberry, says it could cause cancer. The collective is up in arms, like, oh my god, how are we going to sell cranberries?

So they started publishing these little recipe books that would encourage people to, you know, eat cranberries. Super interesting stuff, right. So this part I'm going to read, because I think it's kind of funny, so according to the archives at Ocean Spray in the 1960s, the company began suggesting a cranberry centric cocktail that included vodka and grapefruit, and here's, here's a quote, there's a recipe card in two cranberry kitchen newsletters that include cranberry juice and grapefruit, but not the Sea Breeze specifically, says Christine Air Frazil from Ocean Spray. From what I can recall, there were many versions of the Sea Breeze cocktail, but Ocean Spray was the one to add cranberry to it, and she's actually correcting that, and and so I think that the cranberry panic of 1959 probably did

create the modern Sea Breeze, and it's funny because most people think it was created in the 80s, because that's when it became super popular, right, but there's a bunch of alternate stories around there, and probably the, and it's funny, like drinks change over time. So many drinks change over time, you know, one drink starts is A certain type of drink ends up with something else, so this stuff's with a grain of salt but, there's all kinds of, like, bartenders historically have been really crappy at passing knowledge on.

Bartenders had a lot of gamesmanship, and so recipes for good drinks just never kind of got out, but this particular one, I think has some credence, and it dates back to the 1920s, in this old bartending book that this bartender found, which involves gin, right, not vodka, but gin. And and I think how it got switched from gin to vodka was, this bartending book was found in London in the 1920s, right, gin was super huge back in, so it makes a lot of sense that they would have used gin when it came over to the states somehow.

It got kind of mixed from gin to vodka in the Sea Breeze, and then a lot of other things changed, and the Sea Breeze evolved like every other drink, and to what we have now. So that's kind of the story of the Sea Breeze, I think it actually was kind of cool. I didn't realize there was this kind of, you know, cranberry panic in 1959, over a herbicide that was killing rats, but because of that we have a nice tasty drink now.

I used to get Sea Breezes and greyhounds mixed up all the time. Like, I remember, you know, you turn 21, you go to a bar, and there's your knowledge is very limited, usually you're drinking beer, or you're having straight shots of something because you have no clue what to drink. So for those of you that are young and just turned 21, I hope you get good knowledge and good lessons out of what I'm trying to compare to you guys, or impart to you guys. But I, I could never get them straight, like greyhound, Sea Breeze, I'm like, they both have grapefruit juice, they both have vodka.

The difference is super simple, a greyhound is really just vodka and grapefruit juice, a Sea Breeze is that plus cranberry juice, right, I mean, Ocean Spray dump the stuff in there to, you know, get people to drink cranberry juice during the great Pacific northwest cranberry purge or whatever. So it makes sense, right, but they're super simple, super easy to make. Now the twist on this is I'm not using vodka, and we're making our own, we're not actually going to use cranberry juice, instead of that we're making our own type of simple syrup, this is a, what I call homemade Pomegranate, and here it is right here, I just put in a little mason jar, and all this is is like I, you know, posted on Facebook.

All this is is equal parts of pomegranate juice and sugar. And it's funny, I'm not exactly sure how I came across this. I know that there was this little bottle of pom pom pomegranate juice, my kids drink it, my wife drinks it, was sitting in the freaking fridge forever, like half drank. It was driving me absolutely crazy because I'm anal retentive like that, and I wanted to get rid of it. And I came across a recipe that called for this homemade, what they call homemade grenadine, and the homemade grenadine was essentially a simple syrup made from pomegranate, right, juice and sugar, right, so it's just equal parts pomegranate juice and sugar.

So I made this stuff. It's actually pretty tasty, it kind of tastes a little bit like grape juice actually. But it's super easy, equal parts pomegranate juice and sugar, let it, you know, you don't want a roiling boil, but you know, put it on high heat, stir it until the sugar totally dissolves into the pomegranate, take it off, let it cool. Put it in a jar, whatever, gonna put it in. One thing to do whenever I make my own syrups is I put in a little bit of vodka, probably about a teaspoon of vodka and something like this.

Because it does two things, you'll notice, like, there's no like crusted sugar around the rim or anything like that, like it's not there. And on the inside, same thing, the vodka helps with that, it actually keeps it from the sugar from granulating again. It also helps it stay a little longer in the fridge, so if you're making your own simple syrups, which I highly suggest you do, add a little bit of vodka, it doesn't change the flavor, the taste of the syrup you're making. And it will keep the sugar granulation from happening, so do that.

So this is a little bit different, I don't know if we call this a Steve Breeze or whatever, but I call this my old school made new Sea Breeze, right. So we're gonna make this with gin, not vodka. I think gin is a better fit for a Sea Breeze, I think the botanicals in the gin work a lot better with the homemade grenadine that we're using, and actually it works really well with the grapefruit juice we're using, and oddly enough we're using Ocean Spray grapefruit juice, who knew notions break and glamour takeover, I guess, of the Steve drink show, so we're going to use gin, we're going to use this homemade Pomegranate, we're going to use that awesome ruby red grapefruit juice, and we've got a lemon here for garnish.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring you down a little bit here so you can kind of see what I'm doing, glass, there we go, so we're gonna, we're going to, this isn't a shake, and here we're going to mix this one up, so we're going to start with a big ass ice cube, Vegas ice cube, and remember all of our drinks have at least two ounces of booze, right. So let's go ahead and add our gin, two ounces, we've got a a nice pour, two ounces there, the gin that I use, is Hadley and Sons, and you can tell I put all two ounces, whether the bourbon, gins, tequilas, whatever, because I like to aerate them a little bit.

I guess it's kind of like wine, I don't think alcohol, like the spirits like this, they really don't need to decant. But I do it anyway, I just kind of like the look, but this Hadley and Sons gin that I use, like I have this stuff around all the time, I'm actually jonesing a little bit. I buy this stuff by the half gallon, by the way, it's a it's a rated gin, it's like 90 points gin. It's super good, it's it's inexpensive, it's like 25, 26 a half gallon. I buy it by the half gallon because I like that much and it makes great mixing and you can actually just drink it neat or on the rocks too, but The gin is Hadley and Sun's gin.

so we've got two ounces of gin in there. Okay, we're gonna put just a little bit, here's the hard part, we're going to put just a quarter of an ounce of this homemade grenadine in there, just a little bit. Okay, there's a quarter of an ounce of homemade grenadine, and this stuff is so sweet that you don't need a lot. Okay, then what we're going to do is we're going to put about two or three ounces of pink grapefruit juice in there, you could also just kind of fill it up to the top if you want.

I'll use three ounces here, I'm probably drinking a little bit more tonight, so I don't want it totally hammered yet. So there's our grapefruit juice, okay, bar spoon, we're going to stir that up. Okay, and then we've got lemon here, we're going to put a nice lemon garnish on that, a little lemon wedge on there.

Okay, here's my lemon, we're gonna rim the glass, okay, so super easy, this is Steve Breeze, it's two ounces of gin, a quarter of an Ounce of that homemade pomegranate, simple syrup, three ounces of pink grapefruit juice and lemon for garnish. Okay, now that's all made, let's taste it. That's super tasty, the one thing about if I tried this against like just a Normal sea breeze with vodka and cranberry juice, and I like this a lot better for two reasons. One, I like gin better.

I think the gin mixes those botanicals in the gin, even though this Hadley and Sun is a pretty clean gin, it's more, it almost tastes like a dry gin than a more like American botanical gin, but it's absolutely an American gin. Typically the, the London gins are a lot drier, they don't have the botanical taste. They taste like pine trees, they've got that, that super hard juniper berry taste, but American gins are a lot more varied in flavor. Hadley and Sons is an amazing gin, it kind of straddles that.

It's a nice clean gin. It's got just enough botanicals where you know, it's a good gin, it's not overwhelming, it mixes really well. But I put this side by side with a regular sea breeze. I like this a lot better, like I said, I think the gin works a lot better. It's actually not as sweet, it's not quite as tart as using cranberry juice. I don't really like tart stuff that much unless I'm trying to counterbalance something super sweet. That's super tasty. So I like it from, from that aspect.

I also like it that I'm only using a little bit of this homemade pomegranate stuff, so it's not quite as sugary as cranberry juice. And you can kind of play with the grapefruit juice as much as you want to kind of get the flavor you want. The other reason why I like this, and we've talked about this before, there's one, like Gin, I don't like vodka, is vodka really doesn't have a lot of taste or flavor, right. I mean, it's a very, very neutral, very neutral alcohol.

Gin, on the other hand, depending on the gin you get has all kinds of flavor and all kinds of taste, and the cool thing about this is depending on the gin you pick, it will change the flavor of this. And so if you get a really good botanical gin you get kind of a refreshing, like a more refreshing A botanical taste, obviously out of it, it's hard to explain until you try. If you go like with a London dry or just a regular dry gin, you'll get more kind of fruity flavor from the pomegranate and the grapefruit juice, so you can kind of go either way, and it changes the changes the taste in the complexity of the drink. That's why I like using gin more than vodka.

Other than vodka is a drink for 18 year olds, I mean, come on, let's be serious between you and me. Come on, vodkas, there's, I, I always keep walk around. It's a neutral spirit, it's a great kind of neutral spirit for mixing. But it doesn't have a lot of flavor, right, but you can't make a Vesper Martini, God bless that drink, without vodka. So I'm all about vodka too, but in this drink, gin, gin's my choice. So for the seb or the Steve Breeze, I guess, two ounces of gin, just a quarter of an ounce of that homemade pomegranate juice, about three ounces, I probably wouldn't go any more than two and a half, three ounces of grapefruit juice, I just think you're losing the flavor, but you know, to each his own, and a lemon wedge,

and that, my friends, is Steve Breeze. So super easy to make, you just have to put a little bit of prep for that homemade pomegranate or, sorry, I call it homemade pomegranate juice, it's not, it's like homemade grenadine, this is pomegranate simple syrup. That's the only prep you have to do, and that prep, literally, like you make the stuff in five minutes and then you just let it cool. One thing about simple syrups, if you're making them, I always find that I kind of it torques me off because I want to make a drink and I look in the fridge and I'm out of whatever syrup I want, I've got stuff to make it, but I haven't made it.

And there's actually a pretty easy trick you can do. You make it right there, but you don't want to put hot syrup in a drink and just put it in in like a bowl of ice, take the pan and put the pan in a bowl of ice to cool the pan down. It'll cool the liquid down within five or ten minutes, you've got your syrup all ready to go for a drink. So it's kind of just in time drinking, I don't know, it works out for me though. So, Steve breeze, hope you like it. I like it a lot. Next week, I'm not sure what we're gonna do, there's a couple ways we could go.

My buddy Clark Butler, who is here every week, this week he couldn't make it because he's oddly enough on his way to the Washington coast, and I hope that he actually visits the cranberry bogs and looks at the ocean, spray dudes right, because perfect for him, but he sent me a drink called Enzoni, which I'd never heard of before. And it reminds me of, kind of a gin version of the Kevin, actually that we made, or the drink with no name, I still call it the Kevin because I can't think of anything better, but the drink with no name that we made a long time ago.

It's, it's really good, it's gin and Campari, and it sounds disgusting and nasty, but it somehow works really well. So we may drink, we may make that next week. We may do something else, there's a whole bunch of stuff I got on tap. This is either week 15 or 16. Like we've been doing this for a long time, I think this is week 15. And at some point I'm going to run out of drinks, I still have. I still have, there's probably at least a good dozen drinks that I want to make with you guys.

One that I want to make with you guys is super cool because it uses like a blender or food processor. It's a Southern Peach Manhattan. And this thing is freaking loaded to the gills with booze, but it tastes like. I mean, it's, it's, it's almost, it's hard to explain. It's, it's a sweet drink, but it gets its sweetness from peaches, and it is loaded to the gills with booze, and it is a fancy, fine drink, and so I mean, you know, we did Manhattans early on, this is, I mean, it tastes like a Manhattan, but dude, it's different.

And I think I want to show you guys how to make that because I think we've never made a blender drink yet, so, you know, we'll puree some stuff live and we'll see how nasty that gets, but we may do that. That's super yummy, there's a whole bunch of other drinks that that I, I, I want to do too. And I have on tap for you guys. You know, as always, send me any ideas, oh, Matt Christensen kind of challenged me, if you guys take a look at the post on Facebook, to make an Everclear drink.

That'll be a tough one, I do not like Everclear, I'm not sure anyone likes Everclear. It's 180 proof, they actually do sell in the state of Washington now. And I am going to accept that challenge and I am going to make an Everclear drink that is drinkable. Might take me some time to figure out, but remember, like with every good drink you've got a spirit, you've got a sugar, and you've got something to cut that which is usually a citrus, right. So I'm going to go back to the basics, I'm going to start with those things and I'm going to make an Everclear drink at some point.

I probably won't be drinking as fast as a gin drink, though. So, I hope you like the Steve Breeze. Again, super simple, two parts gin or two ounces of gin, a quarter of an ounce of this homemade grenadine, which is just it's pomegranate simple syrup, it's pomegranate juice and sugar, and then two to three ounces of grapefruit juice. Lime for a garnish, like I down these like crazy, but sip them, they're good and they're great summer drinks, they're amazing summer drinks, you can make these by the pitcher and they're perfect, hope you guys have fun this week.

And this weekend, take care of yourselves and your family and we will post the next set of ingredients for drinks on like Tuesday, Wednesday or something next week, so you guys have enough time to go out and buy whatever you want if you want to follow along. Otherwise, take care everybody and I will see you next week. Cheers.