The right rim can take a good cocktail to a whole new level. And, like most things in bartending, rims tend to work better if you use quality ingredients and make them yourself. Recently we were putting together a nice simple ‘spiked tea’ type drink and decided it could use a lemon-sugar rim. Instead of running out and buying a flat round can of what, essentially, is ground up lemon drops, we pulled out our mini food processor, some white sugar, and three fresh lemons.
We started by zesting the lemons (avoiding as much white pith as possible), rough chopping the zest, and placing it and one cup of sugar in the processor:
Pulse for 3-5 minutes until the zest is well pulverized. You want to pulse to avoid heating the mixture to the melting point of sugar. Next we put the pulverized sugar/zest mix in a mixing bowl and combined it with one additional cup of sugar:
Last we spread the mix on a baking sheet and let it dry at room temperature for about an hour:
That’s it! A very tasty lemon sugar rim. It worked out on our cocktail perfectly:
