These cocktail recipe cards prepare you for that hot summer party

Today is a rainy, chilly, dare I say crappy April day. I’m not thinking about summer.

No, instead I’m worried that my basement might flood (again) and that my new tax prep firm will tell me that I owe Uncle Sam thousands of dollars because I screwed up my estimated tax payments last year (please, gawd, no).

But amid these gray skies, I got a chance to look forward to summer by perusing Summer Sips: Fun and Refreshing Cocktail and Drink Recipes, which I received from Adams Media for review. (The set dropped today, April 2, 2024, for about $17).

First off: Summer Sips is not a book; it’s a deck of 75 beautifully designed cards each of which features a full-color photograph of a cocktail on one side and its recipe on the flip. The set also includes a short booklet called “Bartender’s Guide,” which explains cocktail and bar terminology (glassware, bar tools, and so on) — pretty basic stuff that most aficionados will already know but useful to casual readers.

Divider tabs categorize recipes by alcohol type

The deck is categorized by the base alcohol—whiskey, vodka, rum, gin, tequila, wine, and beer—and each category of cards is separated by a tab, like an actual file box, which is useful.

Another cool touch is that each card features an icon above the recipe name representing the recommended glassware for that cocktail.

But one thing missing is the alcohol category name on the card itself. Yes, you could figure out where a card goes by either an obvious cocktail name (e.g. Gin Rickey, but many cocktail names aren’t obvious) or whatever spirit tops the ingredient list… but I would have preferred each card to have an easy-to-read category label so that I can quickly file cards where they belong.

Also, while I enjoyed discovering new-to-me recipes (like the two I made, see below), some are a bit obvious—do we really need a recipe card for a gin and tonic? C’mon, bro.

Anyway, recipe books are certainly fun (I own several) but a recipe on a card is convenient for plopping on the bar to be able to read and follow with your hands free to, um, do the cocktail thing, duh. (This is why old-school professional bartender’s books are spiral-bound.) Plus at that summer party you plan to host you can pass the cards around to your guests and let them pick their poison.

So on to the fun part.

I picked two recipes for my wife and I to try: The Boulevardier, a variation of a negroni, and the Algonquin, a pineapple juice-based refresher. We are whiskey drinkers, and both of these are rye-based (I used Redemption Rye).

Here are the recipes (reprinted with permission).

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Boulevardier

1¼ ounces rye or bourbon

1 ounce Campari

1 ounce sweet vermouth

1 orange zest

1. Fill a mixing glass with ice. Add whiskey, Campari, and vermouth.

2. Stir mixture with a bar spoon until very cold, then strain into a rocks glass filled with ice.

3. Garnish with orange zest.

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I think I effed up. I interpreted “Garnish with orange zest” to literally mean scrape the skin of an orange with a zester (such as a Mircoplane) to sprinkle little flakes of zest on top of the drink. But after consulting the aforementioned “Bartender’s Guide,” I think I was supposed to use a “zester/channel knife” to slice off a long peel. Oh well.

So was this good? Well, I enjoy an occasional negroni and I prefer whiskey to gin… so, yes. Yes it was. My wife, Erin, is decidedly not a gin drinker AND she very much dislikes bitter booze so she passed on this one.

But she really did enjoy this next one.

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Algonquin

1½ ounces rye

1 ounce dry vermouth

1 ounce pineapple juice

1 small pineapple wedge

1. Fill a cocktail shaker with ice. Add whiskey, vermouth, and pineapple juice.

2. Shake and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a pineapple wedge.

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“In the summer, as a whiskey drinker, I sometimes think I have to switch to something else because there’s not always a refreshing [whiskey] drink or I’ll just have whiskey on the rocks,” Erin said. “But this is refreshing and would be great at a summer party.”

Are you seeing the theme here?

Bottom line: If you’re a pretty sophisticated spirits drinker who already has a bunch of recipe books or pro bartender who could have written this deck, well, it’s not for you.

These colorful cards are for folks who want to up their home cocktail game and want to have fun doing it.

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Click here to buy: Summer Sips: Fun and Refreshing Cocktail and Drink Recipes, Adams Media/Simon & Schuster, 2024, $16.99

Note: Links to Amazon are affiliate links. If you click and buy the cards or something else, SITMW gets a small commission at no cost to you.

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