Lemon Drop

The Lemon Drop is a vodka sour built from vodka, triple sec, fresh lemon juice and a little sugar, shaken hard with ice and strained up into a stemmed cocktail glass with a sugared rim. It is bright, sweet-and-sour and unabashedly lemony — the sugar crust on the rim playing against the tart citrus inside, so each sip lands sweet then sharp. A San Francisco invention of the 1970s named for the old lemon-drop sweet, it is the martini-style descendant of the lemon-drop shot, and one of the most popular citrus cocktails of the 1990s.