The One Drink and the No-Drink
Opening Night: Concord Grape, Bay Leaf, and Black Lime Fizz
Concord grape is the most instantly recognizable flavor in an American refrigerator, and that is the liability. Bay leaf, black lime and tonic are here to argue with it.
The parts that change whether this works tonight.
- Yield
- 1 drink
- Time
- Prep 15 minutes
- Equipment
- saucepan, shaker, jigger, fine strainer
- The method
- 8 ingredients · 5 steps
From this recipe’s own recipe card. Nothing here is a guess.
Serve alongside
Salted almonds and a hard sheep's cheese, or plain crackers. Concord grape is aggressively grapey and black lime is sour and slightly funky — keep the plate to salt or the whole thing becomes a juice box with ambitions.
Tools
Small saucepan, shaker, jigger, fine strainer, bar spoon. A microplane for the black lime, which is the only tool here without a substitute; a knife will give you shards instead of dust and the shards do not dissolve.
Ingredients · swaps in parentheses
Unsweetened Concord grape juice, lemon, fresh bay leaves, sugar, dried black lime, salt, soda water, dry tonic water, coriander seed (optional).
Magic
Build it upside down. Put the soda and tonic in the cold glass first, then pour the shaken purple base slowly down the back of a bar spoon so it sinks under the bubbles. You get a glass that is nearly black at the bottom and pale at the top, holding that division for a good two minutes before it drifts together on its own. Nobody has to be told to look at it. The first sip is also drier than a stirred version, because the tonic is still concentrated where your mouth meets it. Not feeling brave? Top and stir once, and accept one very good color instead of two.
Gotcha
Black lime is not a pinch ingredient in the way salt is a pinch ingredient. A few grains too many and the drink turns dusty and sourly bitter, and there is no ingredient in the glass that can pull it back. Grate less than you think, taste, then grate more.
Concord grape is the most instantly recognizable flavor in an American refrigerator, which is precisely the liability. Pour it into a glass with bubbles and most people’s palates arrive at a conclusion before the first sip, and the conclusion is a lunchbox. Everything else in this build exists to interrupt that.
Bay leaf runs a cool herbal line under the fruit. Dried black lime brings fermented citrus and a faint smoke. Lemon supplies direct acid, tonic supplies quinine bitterness, and salt sharpens the grape without being detectable as salt. The drink comes out almost black-purple and opens bright and bitter, which is not what the color led you to expect.
The staging is pure Room for Drama: one saturated color, one severe garnish, no fruit skewers.
Bay-leaf syrup
Simmer 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 cup water, and 3 fresh bay leaves for 3 minutes. Off the heat, steep 20 minutes, strain and chill. Refrigerate one week.
Fresh bay is worth hunting for here; the dried leaves in the spice drawer have lost most of the cool eucalyptus note and kept the tannin, which is the wrong half. The finished syrup should smell green and slightly menthol, not medicinal. If it has gone bitter, the steep ran long.
Drink details
Prep time: 15 minutes
Makes: 1 drink
Glassware: narrow highball or tall flute
Equipment: saucepan, shaker, jigger, fine strainer
Ingredients
- 2 ounces unsweetened Concord grape juice
- 3/4 ounce fresh lemon juice
- 1/2 ounce bay-leaf syrup
- 1 small pinch finely grated dried black lime
- 1 pinch salt
- 2 ounces chilled soda water
- 1 ounce chilled dry tonic water
- 1 fresh bay leaf or narrow lemon peel
The pour, drawn to scale
- unsweetened Concord grape juice2 ounces32%
- fresh lemon juice3/4 ounce12%
- bay-leaf syrup1/2 ounce8%
- chilled soda water2 ounces32%
- chilled dry tonic water1 ounce16%
Building it
- Shake. Grape juice, lemon, syrup, black lime and salt with ice, 8 seconds only.
- Strain. Fine-strain into the chilled glass.
- Top. Soda, then tonic.
- Stir. Once, from the bottom.
- Garnish. One bay leaf or lemon peel, standing vertically at the rim.
Eight seconds
A short shake is doing two jobs: chilling the base and dispersing the grated black lime so it does not settle into a gritty layer. It is not there to dilute. Three ounces of carbonated liquid are coming afterward and they will handle the length.
Glass and ice
Narrow and clear. A wide glass wastes the color, which in a drink this dark is most of the visual argument, and it also drops carbonation faster. No ice in the glass at all is my preference here, with the glass and every liquid chilled hard beforehand; ice dilutes a zero-proof drink toward the flat, watery register that gives the whole category a bad name. If your kitchen runs warm, one large cube, and drink it promptly.
Why unsweetened juice matters more than usual
Sweetened Concord juice will overrun the bay leaf entirely. The bay is a quiet aromatic and it is competing with a flavor bred for immediate recognition. If unsweetened is genuinely unavailable, cut the syrup to a third of an ounce and add a little more lemon, and understand you are managing the drink rather than making it.
Batching
For six drinks, combine 12 ounces grape juice, 4 1/2 ounces lemon, 3 ounces bay syrup, the black lime and the salt. Refrigerate four hours. Pour 3 1/4 ounces into each glass and top with soda and tonic.
Batch the base, chill the bottles of soda and tonic in the same refrigerator, and the drink becomes a thirty-second pour. The bay syrup itself keeps a week, so it can be made on a Sunday for a Friday, and it is also very good over ice cream, which is how the leftover half cup usually ends its life at my house.
If half the table is drinking
This takes 1 1/2 ounces of a London dry gin or a blanco tequila without any other change, though I would cut the syrup slightly since the spirit adds its own perceived sweetness. Build the batch zero-proof and let people add the spirit per glass. It keeps everyone drinking the same thing, which is the actual goal, and it means nobody has to announce what they are having.
When it goes wrong
Tastes like grape candy. Unsweetened juice, more lemon, drier tonic.
Black lime is running the drink. A few grains next time, and dilute the current glass with soda.
Flat. Both carbonated ingredients cold, both added at the last moment.
The final scene
What makes this hold up past the first look is that the color and the flavor are telling different stories. The glass promises something lush and childish. The drink is dry, bitter, herbal and salted, and by the second sip you have stopped thinking about grape juice entirely.
Part of Drinks & Zero-Proof.
Where this goes next
