Summer’s over here so I wanted to relay a success on the mixology front. My cocktail posts get the fewest reads but, nevertheless, I have a duty to share this information with the world.
This is a simple recipe:
Juice of One Lemon
Equal Parts Creme de Cacao (white, preferably)
Pour over rocks in highball glass and top with soda water
To my great surprise, this is quite a pleasant drink. In each sip, the more pungent lemon hits first, then you taste the chocolate as an afternote, and the two tastes merge quite well.
That being said, this is definitely a “weird” drink with a lot going on outside the recipe. The most important is to make sure that you don’t use a “weak” lemon with little sourness. Just taste the inside of the rind after you juice it to make sure it’s as sour as expected.
The other is that creme de cacao formulations vary quite a bit. I use the DeKuyper’s White Creme de Cacao, which is 48 proof and pretty balanced between chocolate taste and sweetness. I prefer and encourage in others a taste for less sweet lemonade, but if you want something closer to the typical store-bought sweetness you might want to add a little simple syrup. 48 proof also means that each glass is about a quarter to half of a standard drink, something like a low-alcohol beer at most. You might want to test this recipe out with whatever specific brand of creme de cacao you’re using to make sure it tastes right before producing it en masse — I think the drink, while simple, requires a pretty narrow range of sweet:sour:chocolate to be palatable.