The Cape Codder, more commonly called the Cape Cod, is one of the most ordered cocktails in America and one of the few whose origin is a marketing campaign. Most cocktails stumble into existence through bartenders experimenting with what they have. The Cape Cod was designed by a committee, launched as an advertisement, and worked so well that it became part of the American drink vocabulary.
The drink as advertisement
In 1945, the Ocean Spray cranberry cooperative was looking for ways to sell more cranberry juice outside the Thanksgiving season. Cranberries are native to New England and are farmed heavily in Massachusetts, particularly on Cape Cod. Ocean Spray had been a grower cooperative since 1930, and the company was trying to make cranberry juice a year-round product.
Their marketing team, in what would today be called a brand partnership, proposed a cocktail. Vodka was cheap, neutral, and available. Cranberry juice was tart and distinctive. Together they produced a simple, refreshing, summer-appropriate drink that did not require any specialized bar knowledge to make. Ocean Spray began promoting the cocktail in trade advertisements in the late 1940s, calling it the Cape Codder after the region where the cranberries were grown.
The drink spread slowly through the 1950s and then quickly through the 1960s as vodka moved into the American mainstream. By the 1970s, the Cape Cod was a fixture on cocktail menus in coastal bars up and down the Eastern Seaboard and had migrated inland to national restaurant chains. By the 1980s, it was one of the most ordered drinks in American bars, usually called a “vodka cranberry” by guests who had no idea that Ocean Spray had named it.
A drink designed to be easy
The genius of the Cape Cod, from a commercial standpoint, is that it is forgiving. It requires two ingredients, neither of which need to be particularly high quality for the drink to work. Bartenders can make it fast during a busy shift. Guests who do not know what they want can order it and not be surprised. It is a gateway cocktail, and an entire generation of American drinkers learned on it.
This also means the Cape Cod has a reputation, fairly or not, as a beginner’s drink. It is true that the cocktail is simple. It is also true that a well-made Cape Cod, with clean vodka and real cranberry juice, is a small and useful drink. Simplicity is not a defect.
What the drink actually is
The Cape Cod is a highball: a spirit topped with a non-alcoholic mixer over ice. The highball category includes the Gin and Tonic, the Whiskey and Soda, the Vodka Tonic, the Mojito, and many others. Highballs are the workhorses of drinking, designed to be tall, refreshing, relatively low in alcohol per volume, and drinkable over time.
The highball formula is not a sour and not a spirit-forward drink. It is a different category entirely, defined by the mixer doing most of the volume. The ratio is usually between 1:3 and 1:4 spirit to mixer. This means the quality of the mixer matters as much as the quality of the spirit.
Making one well
The vodka has to be clean. In a drink with only two ingredients, the vodka’s qualities come through clearly. Silverton Vodka’s creamy finish holds up well to cranberry juice’s tartness without muddying the drink. Cheap vodka in a Cape Cod tastes like cheap vodka in a Cape Cod.
The cranberry juice has to be actual cranberry juice and not cranberry juice cocktail. Most grocery store cranberry products are labeled “juice cocktail” or “juice drink” and are cut with high-fructose corn syrup, apple juice, and water, usually to between 15 and 25 percent cranberry juice. A drink made with juice cocktail tastes sweet and flat. A drink made with 100 percent cranberry juice tastes tart, complex, and alive. The difference is immediate.
Unsweetened cranberry juice is aggressive on its own. Most cocktail recipes call for the sweeter juice cocktail for a reason. The middle path is to use 100 percent cranberry juice and adjust sweetness with simple syrup or a splash of orange liqueur, which both gives you control and adds a second flavor dimension.
A squeeze of fresh lime finishes the drink. This is not optional. Lime is what takes the Cape Cod from sweet cranberry water to an actual cocktail.
Variations worth knowing
The Sea Breeze adds grapefruit juice to the Cape Cod. It is brighter and more bitter and is better in summer.
The Bay Breeze adds pineapple juice and is sweeter and more tropical.
The Madras adds orange juice and is the most commonly ordered variation.
The Cape Cod with Üla adds half an ounce of Üla Orange Liqueur, which gives the drink bitter-orange depth and pushes it closer to a Cosmopolitan without committing to one. This is what we usually make at home.
The recipe
2 oz Silverton Vodka Cranberry juice, to top Lime wedge
Build in a highball glass over ice. Top with cranberry juice. Squeeze a lime wedge over the top and drop it in.
The version worth making
A Cape Cod made with any vodka and any red drink in a glass is still a Cape Cod, and most of them are forgettable. A Cape Cod made with clean vodka, real unsweetened cranberry juice, a touch of simple syrup or orange liqueur to balance, and fresh lime is a drink that holds up against almost any highball on a hot afternoon. The Ocean Spray marketing team got one thing exactly right: a simple drink, made well, sells itself.
The Cape Cod is also the drink that has turned more afternoons into situations than anyone is willing to document. It goes down easy, which is the problem. Drink it at the pace you would drink iced tea and you will spend the evening trying to remember where you parked.
I associate this drink with a cousin of mine on the East Coast who made them by the pitcher during summers when the family got together. She used fresh lime and good vodka and never called it anything but a vodka cranberry. She was right about the drink long before the rest of us caught up.
Sources
- Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc., trade advertising and company history, for the 1945 campaign origin.
- David Wondrich, Imbibe! (Perigee, 2007), on post-Prohibition vodka in American bars.
- Dale DeGroff, The Craft of the Cocktail (Clarkson Potter, 2002), on highball technique.
- Difford’s Guide entry on the Cape Cod.
About the author
Adam Messick is the founder of Abiqua Spirit Distillery in Silverton, Oregon, with ten years in the craft spirits industry. With help from family and friends, he handles the day-to-day work of blending, bottling, and labeling every release of Silverton Vodka, Gallon House Gin, and Üla Orange Liqueur. Silverton Vodka received the American Distilling Institute’s Gold Medal in 2019. Silverton Vodka, Gallon House Gin, and Üla Orange Liqueur have each won Silver at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition.
Abiqua Spirit Distillery is a small-batch spirits company producing finely crafted potato vodka, gin, and orange liqueur from Silverton, Oregon. Contact: info@abiquaspiritdistillery.com or (503) 837-9869.