Much like the Triple Crown races, tennis's U.S. Open has an official cocktail, the Honey Deuce. (Not to be confused with the Honey Fitz, which I wrote about in "Festive Drinks.")
The drink was commissioned by Grey Goose, the official vodka supplier of the Open, from mixologist Nick Mautone. The brief was for something refreshing and tasty, sure, but above all something that would be easily batchable in bulk, given the size of the Open crowds. And it couldn't hurt if it was eye-catching, one of those instantly appealing drinks that, when you see one go by, makes you desire one of those. As Mautone told Vogue a couple years ago:
Mautone constantly mulled it all over that summer, turning his Hamptons house into a test kitchen of sorts. One failed version included rosemary syrup, another muddled lemons. But one afternoon, during a trip to a Shinnecock farmers market, a carton of mini spherical honeydew melons caught his eye. “I thought. . . those look exactly like iridescent tennis balls.”
Even after hitting on the honeydew idea, Mautone took it through several iterations to ensure its simplicity and high-volume batchability, as he told Forbes:
"I made several variations that did not make the cut; many proved too hard for the venue to produce in large format," he says. This careful consideration ensured that the cocktail could be made at scale, easily prepared and served to the large crowds at the U.S. Open, always while delivering a quality, refreshing product.
I'm not generally a vodka fan, but it has its place, and there's nothing wrong with something crisp...especially if you're imbibing while sitting in the Flushing sun in August. If you pick one up at the Open, it'll run you a cool $23, but you do get to keep the souvenir cup. This is a buck more than last year's Open, and the cocktail cost $12 when it made its debut in 2007. As Sportico pointed out a couple years ago, the drink's price has historically risen faster than inflation:
Between 2012 and 2022, the drink’s cost went up 57% (from $14 to $22), while the Consumer Price Index rose 29%. The biggest hike came between 2017 and 2019, when the price went from $16 to $18, a 12.5% raise, while the CPI went up only 4%. CPI measures the average price change over time in a fixed market basket of goods and services, including food and drinks, but not expensive cocktails.
They even went on to graph the rise!
The price wasn't much of an obstacle, however; last year there were 957,387 fans in attendance at the Open. And, they sold 450,000 Honey Deuce cocktails, netting a cool (refreshing?) $9.9 million. (As CNBC points out, that's well over the combined $7.2 million prizes awarded to the winners of the men's and women's tournaments.)
And people go nuts for everything Honey Deuce - not many cocktails have their own merch, but this ones does. Per Newsday:
Mary Ryan, senior director of merchandise and licensing for the USTA, said that Honey Deuce items are available on the USTA’s website and that there will be more on-site as this week unfolds.“They throw them out of the warehouse in the morning and then we sell through them, so we’re continually pulling them out of the warehouse,” she said. ”I don’t know how much more inventory I have to support it through the tournament.“I’d love to hold back a bit just so we can have some for finals weekend. We want to make sure those folks also see what happened earlier.”After the early run on shirts and hats wiped out supplies, it was far easier to find someone drinking a Honey Deuce than wearing a Honey Deuce. . .(A USTA spokesman said the shirt and hat were the two biggest-selling merchandise items during Fan Week.)
I couldn't even find a working link to the shirt for sale on the USTA's site, but they are still selling a $40 trucker hat...and even a melon-baller and garnish-pick set for $24. Cocktail Courier will even deliver you a canned Honey Deuce set in NYC or Chicago.
Grey Goose has gone all-in, understandably, on the drink. Here's a Honey Deuce Locator to tell you where you can get one in New York, besides the U.S. Open. And they've not only published the recipe, but also variations such as a Frozen Honey Deuce and a pitcher-sized scaled-up version serving 9.
Honey Deuce
- 1 1/4 oz. vodka (Grey Goose of course suggests that you use their brand. It's a good one.)
- 3 oz. lemonade (Fresh made is always better, but store-bought will work just fine.)
- 1/2 oz. raspberry liqueur (I'd use Chambord.)
- 3 honeydew melon balls
Fill a highball glass with ice and build the drink in the glass. Garnish with the melon balls.
UPDATES:
- Serena Williams has done the Deuce and extols it, though hers was made with tequila instead of vodka, which is...rather a big change;
- CNN's Kate Bolduan says it sounds good but argues that "the melon baller is the most useless kitchen gadget ever created";
- Amanda Schuster is not a fan;
- Nor is Gabriella Ferrignine of Salon:
My other friend didn’t mince words. “It tastes like basic fruit juice. I can hardly taste the vodka. I think it’s mid,” she said with a straight face. As the realization of the Honey Duece’s undeniably average taste sunk in, I too sank lower in my seat. The cocktail wasn’t bad by any means, but the amount of hype it’s received led me to believe that it would have been a strong level up from some of the better well-drinks I’d been poured in college.
A refreshing bite of a melon ball — which my friends and I all agreed was the drink’s highlight in taste and aesthetic — did little to redeem the Honey Deuce. It only got worse when I inadvertently knocked my remaining balls clean off the top of my drink, leaving them to sit sadly in the aisle until an attendant swept them away at some point over the next three hours in [sic] change.