Best Summer Cocktail Ever - All Natural Fresh From the Farm - Prairie Vodka with Fresh Fruit

It's summer and the Farmers Market is abundant with fresh fruits ripe for cocktail making. Here is a step by step guide on how to do it yourself.

For this drink we chose the wonderfully delicious Prairie Vodka that is "made 100% organic by farmers who own the land, the distillery, and the quiet respect of all around them" in Minnesota, a place we happen to love.

With this we muddled and stirred fresh mint, watermelon, strawberry and lemon juice with a touch of bitters.

Making cocktails is a combination science and art. There are some essential tools that make it all possible. Here is my hand squeezer for lemon, limes and other citrus and two trusty muddlers, a classic wood and a fancy plastic version.

I use the muddlers to smash the fresh mint to bring out the flavor, they have many uses and there is more here: Muddling Around with Cocktails

You can make cocktails right in the glass or in a shaker. Technique is about the same.

Great cocktails require three basic ingredients. Your booze, your fruit/juice, and what I call your accents.

In this case we chose Vodka for our booze, a very nice one indeed from the rich prairies of Minnesota. That state and especially the city of Minneapolis is becoming quite the food and booze source with a lot of really great craft beers and abundant farm lands. Food and Wine just named Minneapolis their favorite food city for 2012.

For our fruit we chose fresh watermelon and strawberies from local farms.

Our accents, which are what make cocktails really intersting were fresh mint from our own garden, lemon and blood orange bitters.

We start by dropping in about 6 or 7 mint leaves per drink in the glass or shaker, squeeze over that enough lemon to cover and then muddle away. You should smell the aroma of the mint wafting out.

We then added several chunks of watermelon and three strawberries and mashed them down in the glass with our muddler to a very juicy pulp.  This could be hard in a cocktail shaker. A blender could work but I like the pulp that hand muddler leaves.

I then stirred in an ounce and a half of vodka and some ice. You could add a little seltzer here too. A few drops of bitters to taste, stir gently and viola, a perfect fresh fruit cocktail.   

 Prairie Vodka

Comments

[vodka cocktails drinks]

The flavor was different and provocative, though without knowing the profile of the commercial brand and the vodka flavor being so open to interpretation we could not fully endorse the cocktail.