A pucker-then-sweet shooter: vodka shaken hard with fresh lemon juice and a touch of simple syrup until it is ice-cold, so the sour lands first and the sugar catches up a beat later. The sugared rim lays a candied edge against the bright citrus as it goes down, and a bite of lemon chasing it snaps the whole thing shut.
Garnish: Sugar Rim, Lemon Wedge
Shaken · Shot Glass · Up
rinse
Moisten the rim of a shot glass with lemon and coat it in sugar.
add
Add the vodka, lemon juice, and simple syrup to a shaker with ice.
shake
Shake well until cold.
strain
Strain into the sugar-rimmed shot glass.
garnish
Serve with a lemon wedge to suck after the shot.
The shooter has no inventor of its own; it is a pared-down form of the Lemon Drop, a cocktail Norman Jay Hobday created during the 1970s at Henry Africa's, the San Francisco fern bar he founded and ran, and named for the lemon candy it imitates. Through the early and middle 1990s the drink traded its stemmed cocktail glass for a shot glass, and that smaller pour spread from bar to bar with no single bartender's name attached. The full-size parent carries on separately as the Lemon Drop Martini on the IBA's official list, where triple sec takes the place of simple syrup.