This 3-Ingredient Sea Breeze Cocktail Is the Ideal Summer Drink

The sea breeze is a refreshing, tart cocktail with a vibrant red hue, perfect for a warm summer day. It’s a breeze to prepare, only requiring a few affordable ingredients and no fancy tools. Just pour some vodka and two kinds of juice over ice, stir, and enjoy. 

Today, the sea breeze is known as a drink made with vodka, cranberry juice, and grapefruit juice, served with a lime garnish and plenty of ice. It’s in the same category as the bay breeze and Cape Codder—both of which are summery cocktails containing vodka and cranberry juice.

Before today’s sea breeze, however, there was the sea breeze cooler, a drink from the 1920s made with gin, apricot brandy, and grenadine. In 1930, the sea breeze cooler appeared in The Savoy Cocktail Book, which featured recipes from the luxurious Savoy Hotel in London. Although the sea breeze cooler is a different drink entirely, it’s similarly refreshing and tart, and likely contributed to the development of the modern sea breeze. 

It was only in the 1960s that the sea breeze became the drink we know it as today, likely due to marketing efforts by Ocean Spray—the agricultural cooperative of cranberry growers. To promote the use of cranberries in the kitchen, Ocean Spray began releasing recipe booklets offering ideas for how to enjoy cranberries in food and drinks. Within these booklets were cranberry cocktail ideas, including the reinvented sea breeze, made with vodka, cranberry juice, and grapefruit juice.

The sea breeze saw its heyday in the 1980s, an era when colorful, fruity cocktails reigned supreme and vodka was particularly popular. But there’s no reason why you shouldn’t make one today, whether you’re nostalgic for the ‘80s or just want a delicious, simple cocktail. 

In terms of ingredients, the sea breeze is commonly made with bottled cranberry juice cocktail, which is sweetened to cut through the puckering tartness of cranberries. Depending on your palate, pure cranberry juice may be too tart for this drink. As for the grapefruit element, freshly squeezed grapefruit juice is a nice touch and easy to accomplish at home, by hand or with any old juicer. The vodka is masked by the flavorful juices, so you don’t need anything top-shelf. While the lime garnish is typical, other citrus garnishes, like grapefruit, lemon, and orange, would also be nice.

Keep reading to learn how to make a sea breeze at home, and know that the recipe below is easily scalable for a party. Just multiply the recipe by however many drinks you’d like to make, add everything to a pitcher, and pour over ice.