New Cocktail: Scarlet Joy Martini (A Drink For Pretentious Tossers)

Oh, didn’t you know about this one? Well, I suppose you wouldn’t. It’s very new, and of course very in at all the most exclusive places. Still, I suppose I could see my way to letting you in on the secret of how to make one. Is it clear that we invented this drink just outside of Portland in 2005? Is it also clear to you that they still serve it to this day and it is quickly becoming known as a Portland Martini? Yeah, the hipsters never got the joke. This is not actually a martini, it contains exactly nothing that would make a martini. That was what Cecilia demanded when we invented it. We also decided on the formula, two things they’ve heard of, one thing that’s obscure*.

Cecilia was a beautiful girl, and an incredibly talented photographer. Something of a hipster herself, she always had distain for the hipsters we had to deal with. In fact, she said she was an Uber-Hipster because she was a hipster before it was cool and her distain for the others meant she was in the 1% of hipsterdom. You can see why the relationship only lasted two months, can’t you?


4 ounce Absolut Vodka
4 ounce Pavan Liqueur Or some other Orange Liqueur. (But if you’re not going to go for the really obscure stuff, why bother?)
½ ounce Raspberry Syrup
4 ounces Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice


You want to just swirl the raspberry syrup around the ice, so put that in the shaker with a handful of ice. Rattle it around for a while and then strain off the excess, if any.
After that it done, put the juice and hooch into the shaker and shake the dickens out of it. You’re doing this because it would be an insult to a good martini to shake it.

Now here is where Cecilia started breaking my heart. See, she insisted on a martini glass because otherwise, she argued, how would people know it’s supposed to be a martini. She argued that the hipsters would call bourbon, sugar, and bitters a martini if you served it in a martini glass. I on the other hand, argued that all you had to do was tell them it was a martini. I later proved this by giving a hipster an old fashioned in an old fashioned glass and convinced him it was a martini by no greater magic than asking him if the martini tasted right to him. He said it was a pretty good martini, but the bartender had used a cheap scotch, despite the fact that it was the traditional bourbon.

So I say, go whole hog. The point is that there is nothing here that you would actually find in a martini. As such, go with a short highball glass. You’ll note I went with a rather cheap glass. Because going with a nice one would give the impression that you cared. Which, like, you totally don’t. As if. Anyway! Garnish with a maraschino cherry and wonder to yourself, perhaps aloud in a sarcastic tone, why you put up with these people.


Note: This recipe makes two drinks, because whoever orders one invariably wants to force one on someone else as well.


*I wouldn’t have had the pomegranate juice if it weren’t for the formula. I would have gone for alum or something like that. If you replace the vodka with gin, and the orange liqueur with vermouth, you can make a respectable sweet martini out of this. The pomegranate juice needs to be cut in half, or swirled with the ice, but otherwise it’s not bad.