The Sidecar cocktail has one of my favorite things for cocktails: the prepared rim. I admit it, I like drinks with coated rims. I don’t care whether it’s salt, chile powder, or, in this case, sugar: I like the idea of preparing yet another aspect of the cocktail.

After all, we spend a lot of time procuring the different ingredients and juicing our citrus and making our syrups, but we usually don’t think about the glass itself. Coating the rim suggests that the glass can be an ingredient unto itself, and I like that.

For the Sidecar, you rub an orange slice around the rim and then dip it into a plate of sugar. Easy breezy. Then you chill it. For me, that’s the hard part because my freezer is always chock full. I have to make room for things that are important, though, right?

The Sidecar is one of those drinks, too, that has to be shaken well in order to get the bits of ice in the drink. I like that part of it. Sure, I guess you could serve it over ice in order to keep it cold, but any real cocktail shouldn’t be around that long anyway.

The Sidecar Cocktail Recipe

So you combine in a shaker the following ingredients:

• 1.5 oz. cognac (Remy Martin)
• 0.75 oz. Cointreau
• 0.75 oz. fresh lemon juice

and you shake it well. Go for forty shakes. Yes, I’m serious. The ice melts the right amount and the drink gets cold enough to hold it through sipping.

Then you garnish the Sidecar with a flamed orange peel, which is awesome to do for a party because no one has ever seen it before. Believe it or not, it does actually change the flavor. If you’re wondering what a flamed orange peel is, keep reading this blog, and I will eventually get to it.

I like the Sidecar. Let me rephrase that: I really like the Sidecar. I love it that the only sugar in the drink is the sugar on the rim. Sure, it’s considered a sour, but there’s no actual sugar in the drink except from the liquors themselves. The drink is sweet, though, because we took the time to prepare the glass itself.

What’s so great about the Sidecar is that it is a stout drink with 2.25 oz. liquor in it, as compared to the standard 1.5 oz. in a regular drink. But it’s still refreshing. I can imagine sitting outside on a hot day with the entire family and enjoying several of these in pretty quick succession. They go down so smooth that they’re easy to drink, but they’re so stout that they would make any day enjoyable.

I like it that the Sidecar works in mixed company, too. A lot of classic cocktails are enjoyed primarily by men, but the Sidecar is sweet enough to please a woman yet stout enough to hold a man’s interest.

No, I’m not being misogynist; just honest.