A breezy highball of vodka lengthened with cranberry and grapefruit juice, tart and faintly bitter beneath an easy summer sweetness, built straight over ice and unmistakably pink. It drinks like a Cape Codder with a splash of grapefruit cutting through the cranberry, the vodka staying quiet in the background while the bitter citrus sharpens the finish and a squeeze of lime adds a last bright edge.
Garnish: Lime Wedge
Built · Highball · On the Rocks
build
Fill a highball glass with cubed ice.
add
Pour the vodka, cranberry juice, and grapefruit juice directly over the ice.
stir
Briefly stir to combine and chill.
garnish
Garnish with a lime wedge (the IBA official spec calls for orange zest and a cherry).
No bartender's name is attached to the Sea Breeze — it grew instead out of Ocean Spray's mid-twentieth-century drive to sell cranberry juice as a partner for spirits. That campaign yielded the Red Devil in 1945, and the Sea Breeze and the Bay Breeze arrived later as offshoots of the same cranberry family. With no documented creator, place or year behind it, the recipe settled into a generic highball, and the IBA now lists it among its official Contemporary Classics.