A bright, sugar-rimmed vodka sour that drinks like a lemon candy melted over ice — tart lemon and orange-liqueur sweetness balanced over a clean vodka base. Think of a Cosmopolitan with the cranberry taken out and the lemon pushed to the front: the sugared rim meets the lip first, then the cold, shaken citrus cuts through it, with triple sec doing the sweetening and an optional splash of simple syrup there to round it off.
Garnish: Sugar Rim, Lemon Peel
Shaken · Cocktail glass · Up
rinse
Run a cut lemon around the rim of a chilled cocktail glass and dip into superfine sugar to coat.
add
Combine vodka, triple sec, and fresh lemon juice in a shaker over ice (add simple syrup only for a sweeter variation).
shake
Shake well until thoroughly chilled.
strain
Strain into the sugar-rimmed chilled cocktail glass, served straight up.
garnish
Express a lemon twist over the surface and drop it in.
Norman Jay Hobday created the drink in the 1970s at Henry Africa's, the bar he ran in San Francisco's Russian Hill neighbourhood, and took its name from the lemon drop candy it recalls. It first found a wide following in the 1990s as a shooter, then graduated to the stemmed cocktail glass it is usually served in today. The IBA lists it as the Lemon Drop Martini, specifying vodka, triple sec and fresh lemon with no added syrup, though many modern recipes sweeten it further.