If there’s one thing that a bougie American tennis audience loves, it’s a kitschy themed cocktail. The U.S. Open has an “official drink,” and it’s not Gatorade—it’s the Honey Deuce. If you can’t make it over to see a match, or you simply want to save having to speak the awkward name in public, you can easily make this cocktail at home.
For a bit of background, the U.S. Open is one of the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments and it takes place in Queens, NY. Tens of thousands of fans head over to watch the matches, and selling at The Open, for $23 each, is this fruity cocktail. It’s expected to rake in about $10 million over the course of the nearly two week-long tennis event.
The “official” drink is made with Grey Goose vodka, lemonade, and raspberry liqueur. In order to properly make it a play on words, you must add honey dew melon masquerading as tennis balls as a garnish. Otherwise, it’s just a raspberry-tinged, spiked lemonade, and only tennis-haters drink that. (As you can see, I don’t have a melon baller but I did use honeydew melon chunks, so you can decide how I feel about tennis.)
How to make the Honey Deuce (or fake it)
The recipe and method are dead simple. Grey Goose doesn’t even ask that you make the lemonade yourself, it just indicates that it should be “fresh.” So I believe that a freshly opened bottle of Simply Lemonade will work if you don’t have lemons and sugar around.
To the same point, you can make this cocktail with the exact ingredients listed on Grey Goose’s website, or do what I did—work with what you can get. The biggest issue I had with this recipe was finding raspberry liqueur. Oddly, raspberry is not popular in the small liquor stores near me, but cherry is, so that’s what I went with. If you can’t find raspberry liqueur, but you must have the Honey Deuce flavor experience, you can either make your own and have it in two weeks, or you can heat raspberry jam with a bit of water in a pot, then pour the hot liquid through a sieve and use that.
There is very little not to like about a fruity lemonade, especially in summer. I enjoyed every sip of my cherry “honey deuce” (the melon snack is a huge bonus). It’s bright, not aggressively alcoholic tasting, and not too sweet. When the day comes that I run into a bottle of raspberry liqueur, I’ll go ahead and try it again. If nothing else, this cocktail is a great excuse to buy the last of summer’s honeydew before late September whisks it away.
Honey Deuce(ish) Recipe
Ingredients:
3 ounces lemonade
1 ¼ ounce vodka
½ ounce raspberry (or cherry) liqueur
Honey dew melon hunks for garnish
1. Fill a highball glass with ice and pour the vodka and lemonade into it.
2. Add the fruity liqueur and stir. Drop in a couple chunks of honeydew melon or skewer a few melon balls as a garnish.
