This week’s cocktail is sponsored by Q Drinks.

I have been really impressed with the quality, carbonation and flavor profile of QDrinks’ Tonic, Grapefruit and Ginger beer mixers, along with the rest of their portfolio. They are made with real, carefully chosen ingredients, and designed to help you create a complete, balanced cocktail with just their mixers and your spirit of choice.

Thanks again to QDrinks for supporting A Bar Above!

The Rosemary Paloma

Recently we’ve been noticing a bit of a shift within the bar community. Folks are moving away from seven part cocktails with complex, homemade ingredients. Instead, we’re seeing some simpler drinks make their way onto cocktail menus. It’s a welcome change!

In light of this trend, we thought we’d feature one of our favorite simple, two-part cocktails… and one that doesn’t get nearly enough attention from “craft” cocktail folks.

Enter: The Paloma.

This cocktail is as delicious as it is simple: all you need is grapefruit soda and blanco tequila. We’ve fancied ours up a bit with a rosemary-salt rim, but this is completely optional and the drink really stands up beautifully on its own as well.

Often made with Fanta Grapefruit, I’ll usually make my Palomas with a touch of lime juice. It’s necessary to offset the syrupy sweetness of the Fanta. But in this cocktail I was very pleased to find the lime wasn’t necessary at all – the acidity of the Q Grapefruit was just right, and its carbonation and flavor profile finished the drink without any lime needed at all.

So … why the Rosemary?

If this cocktail’s so great with just the grapefruit soda and tequila, why add the rosemary-salt rim?

Adding a salt rim to a Paloma is not unheard of – it has a way of highlighting the grapefruit flavor really nicely. We added the rosemary as well because we found it helped play up the herbal qualities in the tequila. The combination of the two really seemed to add just a hint of spice to the drink.