One Appletini, Please

Cry 'Havoc!' and let slip the schnapps of war.

When I was a kid, I craved Trolli Apple-O’s: sugar-stippled inner tubes both the color and leather-y texture of a ninja turtle. When I was in college, I craved appletinis.

The appletini is intentionally artificial and unintentionally hilarious—the booze equivalent of Bicentennial Man. It tastes like someone trained an AI to make a cocktail by showing it a picture of a green apple. It looks like someone put a komodo dragon in a Vitamix. It’s green in the way Mountain Dew is green—as an identity, as a principle, as a threat. 

I’m using the word “appletini” as synecdoche, I suppose. What I’m really talking about is DeKuyper’s Sour Apple Pucker. The two are hard to separate. The tangy, green apple schnapps hit the market in 1996; less than a year later, a West Hollywood bartender shook it up with some vodka and triple sec and the appletini was born. You can find a couple other green apple liqueurs if you know where to look, but they’re few and hard to find. DeKuyper’s has had a 25-year chokehold on Granny Smith. 

I should state off the bat that I don’t think Sour Apple Pucker is incredible—I’m not going to defend it with the same fervor I’d extend to mayonnaise-based pasta salads or Malört. But I do think it’s incredibly effective. Just the smell of a bottle being opened across the room is enough to make me salivate. I mean this biologically, not euphemistically. Apple Pucker, much like the prelude to a puke, is literally mouthwatering.

Am I the only one that feels this atavistic pull to the round, juicy promise of Green Apple™? Why have we resurrected so many kitschy artifacts of ‘90s drinking culture—espresso martinis, Sex and the City—but left the appletini on the bottom shelf? 

The Rise and Fall of the Appletini

1997. A bartender named Adam at Lola’s West Hollywood shakes up the first “Adam’s Apple Martini” using Apple Pucker and Ketel One. It’s an instant hit—so popular, in fact, that the county sheriff stops by to complain about a surge of drunk driving among women in the neighborhood. 

2000. The New York Times publishes “The Greening of the Martini,” in which writer Rick Marin proclaims the apple martini “officially in season.” 

2003. The sitcom Scrubs airs an episode in which main character J.D. orders an appletini (“easy on the ‘tini”). J.D.’s love of appletinis becomes a recurring gag on the show, tinged with that special brand of Diet Homophobia peculiar to the early ‘aughts. 

2005. Sarah Jessica Parker launches the perfume “Lovely.” The ad copy describes it as having notes of “lush lavender and crisp apple martini.”

2008. Tales of the Cocktail, a yearly cocktail conference/festival in New Orleans, announces the death of the appletini. Festivalgoers honor its dubious contribution to the cocktail canon by marching through the city with a casket while a funeral band plays.¹ 

2013. Lola’s West Hollywood closes for good, though the appletini remains popular until last call. Owner Loren Dusworth tells The Los Angeles Times “we sell ludicrous amounts of apple martinis…I think it makes people happy.” 

The craft cocktail revolution has made artificial ingredients gauche, and I’m not surprised DeKuyper’s fell out of favor with bartenders. I am surprised that a small-batch “artisanal” Granny Smith liqueur hasn’t supplanted it.² I texted just about every bartender in my address book while I was researching this post, and most of them said they hadn’t made an appletini in years. 

Plenty of them had made apple cocktails—walk into any cocktail bar in September, and you’ll probably see something on the menu with Calvados (a mahogany-colored apple brandy) or apple cider. But most of those drinks lean into caramel notes or warming spices. They’re their own genre. They have little to do with a big glass of green. 

I had pretty much settled on making my own fresh green apple schnapps at this point, but part of me wondered if I was missing the point. Maybe the artificiality of the appletini—the turn-off for modern drinkers—was also key to its pre-Willennium appeal. 

I asked Amanda DeJarnett, one of Kansas City’s best bartenders, for advice. One of the reason’s Amanda’s so good at what she does is that she’s allergic to snobbery: she operates at that perfect intersection of craft and curiosity that lets her take fun seriously (this is, incidentally, the Haterade ethos).

“The original spirit and appeal of the Appletini was fun, sassy, vodka-something-not-too-sweet, happy hour, women finally having access to their own bank accounts, pretty colors. It was a symbol of ‘class and sass’ in its heyday,” Amanda says. “But the beauty in the modern versions of these neo-classic cocktails is the opportunity to change the context; to make them more relevant without losing optimistic roots and thematic value.”

The challenge? “Poison-green apple schnapps is absolutely not delicious.”

I had my marching orders. I bought five pounds of Granny Smith apples and an enormous jug of Costco vodka. I was ready to workshop the schnapps. 

Motherpucker

I started my home schnapps experiment by slicing a small mountain of Granny Smith apples (leaving the peels intact), stuffing them in a quart jar, and filling it with vodka. I let it steep for about a month, shaking the jar every day or so and topping it off with vodka as needed to make sure the apples stayed submerged. 

The thing that looks like an apple butthole is there to tamp down the slices. #design

At the end of the month, the vodka had a bright green apple fragrance but a wan champagne color. I blended the shit out of it, apple slices and all, and then double-strained the liquid through a wire mesh strainer and cheesecloth to remove as much sediment as possible. (If you don’t have a juicer or a good blender—I didn’t until a month ago—you can borrow Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s method and throw the mash into a salad spinner.)

At this point, I had about 600 ml of cloudy green apple vodka. A more committed craftsperson would have tried to clarify the apple juice, but I am a committed crapsperson. Plus, this was a beta test; all I really needed to know for my first go was whether it tasted good. To get a less syrup-y sweet-tart profile, I blended in about 100 ml of simple syrup to which I had added two teaspoons of citric acid. 

For a first effort, I felt pretty pleased. A sip from the bottle made me salivate in the exact same way that DeKuyper’s does—it had a similarly tart, roundly juicy apple aroma. The homemade liqueur was less sugary (I don’t want to say less SWEET), less artificial tasting, and a lot less….green. 

Urine sample from a person who drinks only appletinis.

The color was admittedly a problem, one I tried to rectify with useless hippie food coloring made from vegetable glycerin and turmeric and algae. Results were…mixed (photo at the end of this post). But on the whole, I was pleased. I had made a passable fresh green apple liqueur. It was, at the very least, possible. So why weren’t more people doing this? 

I asked Amanda to speculate on this very important question, and she brought me back to reality.

“There is simply no demand. Unlike the very popular Espresso Martini, there are no deprived Appletini masses that would incite producers to join the gold rush.”

If you will it, Dude, it is no dream.

Last fall, Chris Crowley, a writer for New York Magazine and Grub Street, started tweeting about appletinis. Initially, he seemed to be poking gentle fun at all of the espresso martini articles floating around.

Chris Crowley @chrisecrowley

pitching a big trend piece called "Everyone Is Drinking Appletinis Now" (no one is) in order to usher in the second coming of the Appletini

He didn’t stop. By my count, he has tweeted about appletinis 30 times in the last six months. I know a Fellow Traveler when I see one, so I called him up to talk strategy. 

Crowley tells me his tweets were inspired more by the appletini’s comic possibilities than a genuine affection for the drink. He can’t remember ever drinking DeKuyper’s Sour Apple Pucker; he didn’t even try his first appletini until October, when he made a batch for a party to commit to the joke (he used a $5 bottle of Llord’s Sour Apple Schnapps, which feels a little like buying Hunt’s Ketchup).

“It may have just been a gag,” he says. “But I had at least like 10 people come to me and ask me about them and want them.”

Trends are manufactured, he reminds me. And in our irony-poisoned demographic, the appletini has much to offer—a silly name, a silly color, a deliberately uncool, try-soft vibe. 

“It’s a little more carefree. And you can say that really quite literally about the quality of the apple ingredient that goes into it, which is probably…careless? Zero care?”

Demand is demand. The alcohol economy doesn’t care if it’s earnest. And while bartenders might roll their eyes at the poison green fruitini, it’s less annoying than pulling 12 espresso shots during a rush. Appletinis are cheap, they’re easy to make, and they require almost no prep work (unless you want to get fancy and garnish with an apple slice). 

Plus, there’s a Chartreuse shortage right now; we may as well hop tracks to a liqueur in the same hallucinogenic color palette. Sure, Chartreuse and Sour Apple Pucker have some slight differences—one of them is made by Carthusian monks and the other is made by the corporation that brought you Buttershots. But if we goose demand, who’s to say we can’t convince a particularly goofy order of nuns to craft us some artisanal apfelwein?

To get there, we’re going to have to invest in appletini futures. We’re going to have to convince would-be schnappstrepreneurs that there’s enough demand to support competition.

Here’s my pitch: the next time you’re out and see that pulsing bottle of Yoshi-green liqueur, order an appletini and plop a photo of it onto whatever social media platform has the most suckers (it’s Instagram). Bonus points if you add a caption like “Had to see what all the fuss was about.” 

This isn’t a schtick—it’s a strategy. We deserve better, bolder green apple drinks. We’re going to have to drink a lot of bad ones first.

DeKuyper’s on the left, Motherpucker on the right. Do not speak to me about the art or the fish jerky lurking on the bookshelf.

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1. I haven’t seen this reported in any of the “history of the appletini”-type articles, and I would like credit for the deep dive into Robert Simonson’s groty-ass Wordpress. His blog gives me confidence that I, too, might someday become respectable and Of Use.

2. A couple bartenders suggested I check out apple liqueurs by Stirrings or Leopold Bros, but I can’t find a bottle of either anywhere in KC (nor have I seen any drinks on local cocktail menus that use them). If you have a lead, let me know!