Blinker

Along with its close cousin, the Brown Derby, the Blinker is the classic cocktail most associated with grapefruit juice. While its Los Angeles contemporary was made with honey, the Blinker, recorded in Ireland-born New York bartender Patrick Gavin Duffy’s 1934 Official Mixer’s Manual, instead used grenadine to fatten up the tangy, sweet citrus. The original had quite a lot of the grapefruit juice, relatively speaking, but by the time it showed up in David Embury’s influential The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks in 1948, the spirit-to-citrus-to-sweetener ratio looked a bit more familiar. The author notes, “One of the few cocktails using grapefruit juice. Not particularly good but not bad.”

I’d have to disagree with Embury on that, as the Blinker in my mind is a welcome alternative to the omnipresent whiskey sour. With its rounder edge and touch of sweetness, the Blinker offers a nice change of pace from all the lemon and lime out there. This version comes to us from 1977’s Jones’ Complete Barguide, which is more or less in line with the Embury version but with a touch more grapefruit added back in the mix.

One should note that in 2009, the Blinker got another twist with its inclusion in Ted Haigh’s first edition of Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, where the author casually mentioned substituting raspberry syrup for the grenadine. The two syrups historically have found their ways into one another’s drinks in something of a cocktail ouroboros, so it makes a certain amount of sense. You can try the Haigh version with my raspberry syrup recipe, or give the original a spin with either my homemade grenadine recipe or a store-bought grenadine like Small Hand Foods.