Faux Paloma

Over the holidays, we were gifted a bottle of butterfly pea… well, not syrup – there’s no sugar. The company calls it a serum, which kinda bums me out, but let’s use that nomenclature. There were three recipes on the serum label that didn’t include alcohol, and nothing that we were seeing on the interwebs was practical for us and our bar cart. The closest was a purple sort-of Paloma, which sounded tasty, but we didn’t have grapefruit juice. We did have grapefruit seltzer, so I made this:

Okay, some notes for the type of person who continues to read content after the recipe. I used a repasado tequila, because that’s all I usually have on hand, but plata is perfectly fine. The grapefruit seltzer is just that. It’s not a hard seltzer. The butterfly pea serum makes it a very nice color, but doesn’t do much for the flavor, except add a very slight astringent note, which I suppose is because it’s essentially a tea.

Right now, it’s a very rainy and windy January evening, and I can’t say this iced drink was the made for the night, but it was tasty – mildly sweet and no harsh edges. Since the agave syrup is the only sweetener, it’s easy to adjust the sweetness depending on your taste. Using 6 oz. of seltzer makes it easy to make two cocktails from a single 12 oz. can. And we just happened to have grapefruit seltzer. We’re practical here at DnU HQ, if nothing else. Any other citrus-based seltzer would probably work just as well.