The Margarita just happens to be the most famous tequila cocktail. But beyond the top three (including the Bloody Maria and the Tequila Sunrise) are many others.

Th recipe below is for a fruity tequila cocktail created by Milagro Tequila. Called Carpe Dia, Sieze The Day, it uses lower glycemic agave nectar as the sweetener.

Unlike the orange and lime flavored Margarita for a blackberry, lime and sage flavors (sage is delicious in cocktails). The añejo (aged) tequila provides complex flavors, which vary by distiller but can include brown spices, dried fruits, olives, nuts and toffee, among others.

CARPE DIEM BLACKBERRY TEQUILA COCKTAIL RECIPE

Ingredients

Try this very refreshing cousin of the Margarita, with the flavors of aged tequila, blackberries, lime and sage. Photo courtesy Milagro Tequila.

Preparation

1. MUDDLE berries and sage in a shaker glass. Add the other ingredients and shake vigorously with ice.

2. STRAIN into a rocks glass filled with fresh ice.

3. GARNISH with a blackberry and a sprig of sage.

 
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We’ve received plenty of Margarita recipes this “Cinco de Mayo season.” But when is a Margarita not a Margarita?

A Margarita is more than a fruity tequila-based drink. It combines tequila with lime juice and Cointreau (or other orange liqueur) with a salted rim. Here’s the history of the Margarita and the original Margarita recipe.

Orange and lime are the flavors that ride on the backbone of the tequila. In the spirit of the recipe, you can add fruit purée to make a guava, mango, passionfruit, peach, strawberry, etc., Margarita.

But you can’t switch the orange liqueur for pomegranate liqueur (or other fruit liqueur) and call it a pomegranate Margarita. You’ve created a pomegranate and tequila drink that requires a different name.

This recipe adheres to the script. It’s from the book, Frontera Margaritas, Guacamoles and Snacks by Rick Bayless with Deann Groen Bayless.

Fresh, puréed pineapple makes this
Pineapple Margarita a special treat. Photo by
Paul Elledge | Frontera Margaritas, Guacamoles and Snacks.

Reposado tequila is aged to a pale yellow
color. Photo courtesy Hornitos Tequila.

PINEAPPLE MARGARITA RECIPE

Ingredients For 8 Cocktails

Preparation

1. COMBINE the tequila, lime juice, orange liqueur and pineapple purée in a pitcher. Cover and refrigerate until chilled, about 2 hours.

2. WET the rim of eight 6-ounce Martini glasses with a lime wedge. Then dip the rims into a plate of the guajillo salt to coat them lightly.

The pineapple purée can be made in advance.

3. FILL a cocktail shaker half full with ice and pour in a generous 1 cup of the Margarita mixture. Shake vigorously for 15 seconds, then strain into two of the prepared glasses. Repeat for the remaining Margaritas.

4. GARNISH each glass with a spear or two of cucumber and jicama, plain or dipped into the guajillo salt.

PINEAPPLE PUREÉ RECIPE

This can be made up to three days in advance. It makes about 3 cups of pineapple purée.

1. PEEL and core ½ medium pineapple. Cut it into roughly 1-inch cubes (you’ll have about 3½ cups) and place in a blender or food processor. Add ½ cup sugar and ½ cup water, cover and pulse until the pineapple is finely chopped. Then process until smooth and foamy, usually a full minute.

2. STRAIN into a sealable container and refrigerate until ready to use, up to 3 days.

GUAJILLO SALT RECIPE

1. MIX 1 part pure crushed or powdered guajillo chile to 2 parts coarse (kosher) salt.

2. ADD a little more chile if you’d like extra heat.
 
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Photo courtesy Jimador Tequila.

Today’s tip concerns thinking outside the box.

Have you ever had ice cream and hot sauce? If it sounds strange, try this cocktail from El Jimador Tequila.

Ratchet up the heat on Cinco de Mayo with a “hot” ice cream cocktail.

The recipe includes ice cream, coffee liqueur, tequila, mango nectar and a few dashes of hot sauce. It’s an unlikely combination of ingredients that will delight your guests.

It uses reposado tequila, which is aged for at least six months until it mellows and achieves a light yellow hue. Aging takes the edge off and makes the tequila more compatible with ice cream.

This “hot ice cream shake” recipe will fill a large Martini glass. Have it for dessert with your choice of garnishes: chocolate shavings or a chocolate rim.

Ingredients Per Cocktail

Preparation

1. PREPARE optional chocolate rim: Shave chocolate OR grind chocolate wafer cookies or chocolate shavings into a coarse powder OR use cocoa mix (with sugar). Place ground chocolate in a shallow bowl. If you’ve opted for chocolate shavings, reserve to sprinkle on the finished cocktail.

2. DIP the rim of a Martini glass in a bowl of water 1/4 inch deep. Place the rim in the chocolate powder and twist to coat.

3. PLACE all ingredients in a blender; blend until smooth and creamy.

4. POUR into glass and garnish with chocolate shavings.

 
FIND MORE OF OUR FAVORITE COCKTAIL RECIPES & ICE CREAM RECIPES.

Thinking ahead to Cinco de Mayo? Bring something hot to the party—a bottle of Stoli Hot vodka, with jalapeño flavor and a hint of chipotle smoke. You can also make your own (recipe below).

Introduced last year as a new flavor, Stoli Hot is a reformulated version of the 1962 flavor, Pepper (Pertsovka). Another 1962 flavor, Honey and Herb (Okhotnichya), is now called Stoli Sticki. They were the brand’s first flavored vodkas, and the freshening up of the concepts was a 50th anniversary celebration.

Stoli Hot mixes well with lime juice, mango nectar, orange juice and pineapple juice. We loved it in a frozen mango Margarita, the flavors echoing our favorite flavor of paleta (Mexican ice pop), mango chili lime.

The distiller has developed Stoli Hot cocktail recipes, including, among others:

Some like it hot. They should enjoy drinking shots of Stoli Hot. Photo courtesy Stolichnaya Vodka.

 
There are plenty of ways to have a hot time on Cinco de Mayo!

MAKE YOUR OWN INFUSED JALAPEÑO VODKA

You can infuse your own vodka with jalapeños, and can also play around with a touch of chipotle or liquid smoke flavor. Home-infused vodka will have a different flavor from Stolichnaya’s, since commercial vodkas are flavored with extracts instead of infused with fresh fruit.

Just because you’ll be infusing jalapeños doesn’t mean you can buy the cheapest vodka on the shelf: The impurities will still be apparent. Of course, you don’t have to infuse the most expensive vodka, either, unless you want to.

Ingredients

 
Preparation

1. REMOVE stems from jalapeños and cut into quarters lengthwise. Add to vodka bottle.

2. STEEP in a cool, dark place for one week; then taste. If you’d like a hotter flavor, continue steeping and check weekly.

3. REMOVE the jalapeños. You can keep them in the bottle for a picturesque touch, and they will continue to add flavor for a few months until their flavors are thoroughly incorporated.

TIP: It’s not easy to remove the fruit from the bottle. Instead, keep an empty vodka bottle around for making infused vodka. Transfer the vodka you’re infusing into that bottle and add the fruit. Then, when your infusion is complete, decant the flavored vodka into the original bottle.
 
FIND MORE OF OUR FAVORITE SPIRITS & COCKTAIL RECIPES.

The proliferation of flavor-infused vodkas provides a ready-made “cocktail” that you can enjoy straight (and straight 80 proof!). But you can also create more complex-flavored drinks with them; every distiller has a website full of tempting recipes.

The next time you’re at the liquor store, take a look at what’s available in the infused vodka category, and consider experimenting with your favorite flavor.

If you like all things (a) fizzy, (b) with vodka, and (c) with grapefruit, Belvedere Vodka has created this very simple and refreshing Pink Grapefruit Fizz.

 
GRAPEFRUIT FIZZ COCKTAIL

Ingredients For 1 Drink

 
Preparation

1. BUILD drink over cubed ice in a highball glass.

2. GARNISH with a wedge of grapefruit.

A transition between winter and summer: a grapefruit fizz. Enjoy it while you can still find pink or red grapefruit for garnish.

Rum, tequila and vodka distillers are launching more and more infused or flavored options. What‘s the difference?

Some things don’t mean what you think they do. Unless regulations limit them, manufacturers choose words that are less accurate or explanatory but better for marketing; consumers and the media change the meaning of words via ignorance, and the usage proliferates. (The most egregious example is the use of the word decadent. It doesn’t mean delicious or anything positive, but the vast number of people who pick up the erroneous meaning couldn’t care less.)

In the old days—which may be as old as 10 years ago—infused olive oil, honey, etc. meant that the flavor being infused (steeped or soaked)—herbs, citrus, etc.—was crushed or placed into the vat with the main ingredient, and the flavors melded. That was the expensive, old-school way of doing things.

A less expensive way is to simply add an extract—the way you can use lemon extract in a recipe instead of infusing slices of lemon or adding fresh lemon juice.

With spirits, all bets are off: “Infused” has no meaning to those who govern the industry. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), the department of the U.S. Treasury that is responsible for controlling the labeling standards of spirits (and collecting taxes on every bottle sold), neither defines the term nor holds distillers accountable for how they label the products. For example, a bottle can declare that it is “infused with the flavor of Seville oranges” when the contents have never been anywhere near a piece of fruit. No seller wants to declare a product “infused with the flavor of Seville oranges via orange extract.”

The current trend among whiskey distillers is to add honey flavor, as in the case of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Honey, Jim Beam Red Stag, Wild Turkey American Honey and Bushmills Irish Honey. We don’t know where the honey flavor comes from in those bottlings, but Dewar’s new Highlander Honey Scotch incorporates real honey from their own hives. It restores our faith.

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This Gatsby-inspired cocktail is delicious. Photo
courtesy Moët & Chandon.

If you have a bottle of Chartreuse that languishes on the shelf, we’ve got a recipe that’s so charming and delicious, it’s reason enough to call friends over for a cocktail hour.

The recipe was created as part of The Plaza Hotel’s spring celebration of the new Baz Luhrman film, “The Great Gatsby,” based on the F. Scott Fizgerald novel. The Plaza Hotel is featured in a the novel and the film.*

The sixth film version of The Great Gatsby stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Carey Mulligan. It opens in theaters on May 10, 2013.

But there’s no reason to wait until then to enjoy the cocktail. Start mixing!

A NEW CHAMPAGNE COCKTAIL: THE MOËT IMPERIAL GATSBY

It couldn’t be easier to make this simple-yet-elegant cocktail. The recipe was crafted for the occasion by mixologist Jim Meehan.

Ingredients Per Drink

 
*On an oppressively hot afternoon, Jay Gatsby, Tom and Daisy Buchanan and Nick Carraway decide to drive into the city and take a suite at the Plaza Hotel.

Preparation

1. SOAK the sugar cube in the Chartreuse.

2. POUR Champagne into a flute or wine glass and add the sugar cube.

2. GARNISH with a spiral lime twist.
 

If you can get to the Plaza Hotel, there’s much more to enjoy after the cocktail.

Jay Gatsby would feel right at home in the Plaza Hotel’s Rose Bar. Photo courtesy Plaza Hotel.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age novel, was originally published by Charles Scribner’s Sons on April 10, 1925. Eighty-eight years later, this April 22nd, The Plaza Hotel will unveil a display of props used in the production of the film, along with some of the costumes worn by the cast.

If you’re in the chips, inquire about the Fitzgerald Suite, inspired by the new film. The 900-square-foot suite on the 18th floor is a dramatic art deco space where Gatsby and his crew could have spent that hot, indolent and fateful afternoon.

If you’re headed to The Rose Club or The Champagne Bar for a drink, a live jazz band plays on Wednesdays and Thursdays.
 
WHAT IS CHARTREUSE?

Chartreuse, pronounced shahr-TROOZ, is a pale green or yellow liqueur made from brandy and aromatic herbs (green Chartreuse is aged with 130 different herbal extracts!). We prefer the original green Chartreuse, which has more complexity. Yellow chartreuse is a later recipe, lower in proof and a sweeter mix of herbs.

The liqueur, first made by the Carthusian Monks in the 1740s, is named after the Grande Chartreuse monastery, located in the Chartreuse Mountains in southeastern France (in the general region of Grenoble). The liqueur, in turn, gave its name to the startling greenish-yellow color.

One of the most elegant bosses we’ve ever had, an old school gent, drank Bourbon and Ginger Beer* as his cocktail of choice.

In those long-ago days, before the runaway popularity of the white-goods-based† Bloody Mary, Martini and Margarita, most people were either Scotch or Bourbon drinkers. They drank their spirit of choice with soda, with water or on the rocks; those who didn’t really like the flavor of the spirit added the sugar and lemon of sour mix.

Back then, Bourbon and Ginger Beer was stylish and different. And delicious.

So we were happy to receive this cocktail suggestion from Maker’s Mark Bourbon. For baseball season, they’ve renamed the classic Bourbon & Ginger Beer and ported it to a Pilsner glass, called the Ballpark Diamond. Those ice cubes look like big, rough diamonds, don’t they?

And it couldn’t be easier to serve to your friends and refill during the game:

BOURBON & GINGER BEER RECIPE

Ingredients Per Cocktail

A Bourbon & Ginger Beer is an appropriate cocktail to sip while watching the old ball game. Photo courtesy Makers Mark.

1. ADD ice cubes to a tall Pilsner (beer) glass.

2. Pour in 1-1/2 parts of Maker’s Mark and fill to the top with ginger beer. Stir lightly and serve.

You can also mix multiple drinks in the pitcher and keep the pitcher in the fridge or in an ice bucket. But don’t add the ice cubes to the drink until you’re ready to serve.
 

FIND MORE OF OUR FAVORITE COCKTAIL RECIPES.

*Ginger was brewed in England in the mid-18th century as an alcoholic drink. Today it is invariably a soft drink. Think of it as a stronger version of ginger ale.

†In the liquor industry, “brown goods” are the brown spirits, including bourbon, rum and whiskey. White goods are the clear spirits, such as gin, tequila, vodka.

There may still be time for you to pitch this idea to your favorite watering hole:

Customers get a free drink on April Fool’s Day if the bartender likes a joke they tell.

We just learned that two New York City restaurants, Courgette and Mari Vanna, are giving a complimentary drink to ANY joke told to their server: It doesn’t even have to be a good joke.

We think every April Fool’s Day should be a free drink opportunity…with more demanding standards.

Tell the joke, get a laugh, get a drink. Photo courtesy BeerLime.com.

Spread the word at your favorite hangouts. And if there’s not enough time to do it this year, start contemplating now for 4.1.14.

A priest, a rabbi and your mama walk into a bar…

Ready to drink, VitaFrute lower calorie
cocktails reduce the sugar calories in
cocktails. Photo courtesy VeeV Spirits.

Typical mixed drinks can pack on the calories. The standard 1.5 ounce serving of 80-proof alcohol has 96 calories, which seems reasonable. But start to add mixers:

 
But there are calorie-saving solutions:

 
LOOK FOR REDUCED CALORIE READY-MADE COCKTAILS

One easy way to control a sweet cocktail while controlling the calories is the new line of VitaFrute cocktails from VeeV Spirits, in Margarita, Organic Lemonade and Organic Cosmopolitan. The base spirit is VeeV, the world’s first spirit made from the superfruit açaí.

The suggested retail price of VitaFrute is $13.99 to $14.99 per bottle. Learn more about VeeV spirit and VitaFrute cocktails at VeeVLife.com.

Here are more tips to cut back on the calories in cocktails:

HOW TO REDUCE THE CALORIES IN MIXED DRINKS

VeeV, the açaí-based mother spirit of VitaFrute cocktails.

 
Finally, our favorite calorie-saving cocktail strategy:

 
If you’ve got additional tips, use the Contact Us link to send them in!

What can you say about an “unknown” vodka that ranks as high for quality as top brands, at one-third of the price?

You say: Forget the prestige labels and buy that vodka!

Wódka, the Polish word for vodka, is a well-priced vodka that tastes anything but generic (and we drink our vodka straight). Crisp and clean, with flavors of rye and hints of minerality, Wodka won a gold medal and 90 points from the industry authorities at the Beverage Tasting Institute.

Triple-distilled and on a par with most super-premium vodka brands, Wodka vodka is just $8.99 for a 750ml bottle. There’s no need to pay more for prestige brands: In these economic times, make price-value Wodka the new prestige.

BEVERAGE TASTING INSTITUTE RANKINGS

Pick your bottle! Photo courtesy Wodka vodka.

Learn more about Wodka vodka at WeLoveWodka.com.