My Round:

So it can be sickly sweet and laced with cheap booze. But the sun still shines on the tequila sunrise

When I heard that Dale de Groff was in town with a new recipe for tequila sunrises, I knew I had to shave and put on a clean shirt. This drink holds a special place in my affections: it was the first cocktail I ever tasted. The scene was a roadside bar in Armonk, New York, where I played drums (please don't laugh) in a rock'n'roll band during my high school years. Our band wasn't half bad, and we had a great time despite the derisory pay. I was well under-age for drinking, of course, but that didn't bother the management. Our lead singer's girlfriend liked to sit by the stage getting quietly merry drinking tequila sunrises, and once I'd sipped hers I knew I had to have one just for myself.

I have no idea what was in that drink, though the palate's memory places its sweetness level somewhere between infant's cough syrup and undiluted Ribena. That sweetness made it convenient to dismiss the drink as the alcoholic equivalent of easy-listening music. Kind of like wallowing in a collection of Abba singles: painless to swallow, comforting while it lasts, and you hate yourself afterwards. Many latter-day sunrisers probably feel the same way. Especially if they've used the cocktail to mask the taste of cheap, raw tequila so that they can drink enough of it to turn their brains into cottage cheese.

In fact, a true tequila sunrise isn't always particularly sweet. It is sweetened with grenadine, a syrup traditionally made of pomegranates and sugar, and if you go easy on the grenadine you won't end up with cough syrup. The other ingredients? Just tequila, orange juice and ice. Measurements? Typically around 40ml tequila, 100ml OJ, 10ml grenadine. Nearly fill a tall glass with ice. Mix in tequila and juice. Pour on grenadine and mix imperfectly, so there are streaks of the deep-red grenadine colour swirling about.

Pomegranates are a rarity now, by the way; something from a test tube is more commonly used. Which is all the more reason to listen to Dale de Groff. De Groff has appeared in these pages before as America's premier bartender. This time I went to the Player in Broadwick Street, London W1, to see what he had cooked up.

The recipe, it turned out, came from Bill Kelly's The Roving Bartender (1946). That made it the earliest for this drink that de Groff has found among his personal collection of 400 or 500 cocktail books. "It's very rare to find tequila recipes before the 1950s," he explained. "The first margarita recipe I've found is from 1959. Before then, tequila was really a boutique product popular with film people in southern California. As a matter of fact, the first person to import tequila into the USA was Bing Crosby; he brought in Herradura, though I'm not sure whether it was on a commercial basis or just for himself and his friends."

The recipe is easy to make at home, because Grenadine is replaced by crème de cassis. Measurements: 15ml tequila, which for de Groff means Sauza Reposado Hornitos; 8ml lemon juice; 10ml cassis; and sparkling water to the top. You just put everything in the cube-filled glass except the water, then add water till the glass is full. The only tricky bit: igniting the oil from a piece of orange peel while spraying it on to the surface. This, once the peel has been dropped in, is both a garnish and a final touch of mellow citrus flavour.

And note: de Groff now departs from the original by using ginger ale instead of sparkling water. This makes a sweeter, smoother drink, though the watered version (I later discovered at home) is also a fine thing. Both are a million miles from the sickly stuff I drank during my brief stint as a rock'n'roll hero. And a million miles in the right direction, as I probably don't need to add.