The other day, while watching “Hercules in New York,” I — no, I’ll admit it, I wasn’t. I just wanted to start with a “Hercules in New York” reference. If you haven’t seen it, it’s one of Arnold’s best worst performances ever — just ignore that whole Arnold Strong thing. Anyway, thinking about that got me thinking about Greek got me thinking about ouzo. Which is a roundabout way of saying…nope, no ouzo cocktail! However, we do have an Ouzon soda cocktail! Introducing the Lemon Ouzon Spritz.

Booyacasha! As the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles like to say. If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for us. Well, me at least. But let’s say us.

This is, as you might infer, a lemony cocktail with an Ouzon base.

What’s Ouzon? A damn tasty soda. If you haven’t tried it, you’re not alone in that we hadn’t tried it until our friends over at Ouzon sent us some. Now that we have tried it, I can promise you that we were lesser for not having it. Alice now wants to make sure we can hunt some down so we’re always stocked.

With that as our starting place (just think ouzo in soda form), we needed some flavors that we figured would work with it, which led us to vodka, that most neutral of spirits.

As we had our base booze, we just needed some complimentary flavors, which is where the lemon comes in to the party. We always like to accentuate what our base component is — in this case, it’s the Ouzon and its star anise notes.

Bingo bango, lemon, vodka, Ouzon and we were set. Typically, we’d look for a little sweetener to go with a drink like this, but the cane sugar in the Ouzon worked in its place.

Yes, it’s simple in its construction, but tasty in its execution.

Do yourself a favor, go hunt down the components so you can make a Lemon Ouzon Spritz for yourself!

 

July 17th, 2015 | by morgan