The Miami Spritz Is the Best Mocktail Recipe You Haven’t Made Yet

Miami Spritz mocktail patio

Everyone is loving the mocktail right now. Maybe it’s because everyone has spent a year drinking and eating too much and we just want to enjoy the ritual of a cocktail without the hangover. Enter the Miami Spritz. This tangy, fruity (but not sweet) mocktail is what we want to be drinking all the time. And it’s one of the simplest drinks you can make, meaning you’ll be enjoying it on the patio before you know it. And the fact it’s non-alcoholic means you can drink hundreds and hundreds of them and feel fine. OK, maybe not hundreds. Hundreds of anything would be bad for you. But you can drink three or four, easy and feel fantastic.

OK, so, since we’re like you, we hate having to scroll through endless paragraphs about someone’s life story to get to the recipe. For that reason, we’re going to put the recipe up top, and then give the backstory after.

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The Miami Spritz Recipe

To make things easy, the Miami spritz has only four ingredients. And one of those ingredients is ice. So technically it has three ingredients, but who’s counting. (Clearly we are. Sorry about that.) Anyway, here’s how to make a Miami Spritz:

Miami Spritz Ingredients:

2 ounces of unsweetened cranberry juice
6 ounces of sparkling water or club soda
A lime wedge
Ice

The Preparation:

First Step: Fill a pint glass halfway full of ice. Whether it’s half full or half empty depends on how you look at life.

Second Step: Add 2 ounces of unsweetened cranberry juice. Make sure you get the kind with no added sugar. This isn’t one of those sweet drinks your aunt sips by the lake.

Third Step: Add 6 ounces of sparkling water or club soda. You can use a fancy club soda like Fever Tree or some cheaper version of sparkling water you found at the gas station. We don’t judge.

Fourth Step: Cut a lime into quarters and squeeze one of those quarters into the drink.

Fifth Step: Drop the squeezed lime quarter into the drink (this adds a nice little aroma to the whole experience.)

Sixth Step: Stir it all together and that’s it. Take it outside, sit down and forget about all the annoying things in your life. Or try to (you may need two Miami Spritz’s for that Herculean task.)

Miami Spritz mocktail recipe
The Miami Spritz in action.

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What Makes This Mocktail So Great?

The result is a perfect pairing of refreshing and tangy and completely delicious. It’s like a defibrillator for your tastebuds. The combination of the tang of the cranberry and pop of the lime are brought down perfectly with the sparkling water. It won’t make you pucker, but it will make you remember the word pucker.

As we mentioned earlier, there’s been an explosive amount of interest in mocktails over the last few years. And it seems that this is a by-product of the cocktail craze that started about 15 years ago. Don’t get us wrong, people still love their cocktails. Go to any big city and you’ll find plenty of bars charging $24 for a lavender essence-infused martini with olive foam. And you’ll also find people lined up at the bar excited to pay for it. But as consumers have gotten more particular about their cocktails, they wanted to bring that interest to their non-alcoholic beverages as well.

Also Read: Here are our 3 Favorite Seedlip cocktail recipes

If you’re going to spend all that time and effort on a cocktail, why not up your mocktail game as well?

And we’re here for it. We spent a lot of the pandemic learning how to make cocktails at home. We made everything from Manhattans to martinis, sidecars to margaritas. But as anyone who’s not in their early twenties can attest, alcoholic drinks can take their toll after a while. And the mocktail offers the fun ritual of making a well-crafted and delicious drink without the pain and suffering the next day. Or the extra pounds those classic cocktails always seem to add. Hence the Miami Spritz.

Now, of course, alcohol is fun. And mocktails do miss that important component that helps sand off the edges after a long day of work. But you’d be surprised how relaxing a mocktail can be if you’ve never had one. This isn’t like having a non-alcoholic beer like an O’Doul’s. Half the fun of well-made and delicious cocktails are the whole experience. The mixing. The shaking. Even the squeezing of the lime adds an element that’s almost meditative. Enjoy it.

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