16 Mar Croatia Week: On the Balcony Cocktail Recipe

Posted at 07:00h in Blog, Cocktail Recipes, Cocktail Recipes: R&J Original by Roberts & June

Croatia Week: On the Balcony

We recently tended bar for a Harvard Kennedy School of Government alumni event held at the Croatian embassy. It was sort of a reunion of participants in Ronald Heifetz’s crazily popular class on Adaptive Leadership. We designed custom cocktails for the event, using Croatian liquor for the ingredients and Adaptive Leadership catchphrases for the names. Today, we give you On the Balcony.

On the Balcony is based on the Last Word, one of a handful of cocktails that we find especially fun and easy to riff off of. For on the balcony, we substituted in grapefruit juice, and we also broke one of the cardinal Last Word rules by doubling the quantity of juice; with 3/4 oz, it didn’t quite have enough of the sour flavor we were looking for.

We also, of course, used the Croatian Maraska maraschino liqueur, rather than our more usual Italian Luxardo. As we mentioned yesterday, maraschino got its start in Croatia, with some of the more famous makers moving from there to Italy during WWII. In the 80 years of separate existence, the Italian and Croatian styles seem to have differentiated a bit. The Maraska is sweeter and fruitier–more of a discernibly cherry flavor. We would imagine many of you might prefer it over Luxardo, though we personally are fans of Luxardo’s peculiar sour bittersweetness. Even we think that the Maraska worked better for this particular recipe, though.