Moscow Mule
- Medium
- spicy
- citrus
A spicy and citrus, medium-strength cocktail, built in the glass, served in a copper mug.
Serve in: copper mug glass
Ingredients
- 2 ozvodka
- 4 ozginger beer
- 0.5 ozFresh lime juice
- 1lime wedgeoptional
- 1fresh mintoptional
- Ice cubesoptional
How to Make a Moscow Mule
Instructions
- Fill a copper mug or similarly sized glass with ice.
- Pour in the vodka and lime juice.
- Fill the glass with ginger beer and gently swirl it with a spoon once to mix.
Garnish
Decorate with a lime wedge and mint.
Tips & substitutions
- Ginger beer, not ginger ale, and a spicy one; the drink is mostly mixer, so its quality determines the result more than the vodka does. Add the lime juice yourself rather than relying on a squeezed wedge, since a Mule without enough acid tastes flabby and sweet.
- No vodka? Try gin.
- No ginger beer? Try ginger ale.
- No limes? Try lemons.
The glass
Serve this one in a copper mug. These small copper mugs are used to serve vodka based Moscow Mule cocktails. The cold metal keeps the cocktail fresh and cool.
Did you know
The Moscow Mule is a marketing story that turned into a classic. In 1941 in Los Angeles, John G. Martin, who had bought the struggling Smirnoff brand for Heublein and was having trouble persuading Americans to drink vodka, fell in with Jack Morgan of the Cock 'n' Bull restaurant, who had a surplus of house-made ginger beer nobody wanted. The two problems solved each other. A third figure, usually described as someone with a stock of copper mugs, is often added to the story, though the details vary between tellings and the mug's exact provenance is not firmly documented.
What is documented is the campaign that followed. Martin travelled between bars with a Polaroid camera, photographing bartenders holding the branded copper mug, leaving one print behind and taking another to show the next bar as proof that everyone was already serving it. The mug was the whole point: distinctive, memorable, and impossible to serve without advertising the drink. The Moscow Mule is widely credited with launching vodka as a mainstream American spirit, an achievement out of all proportion to its three ingredients.
The name has nothing to do with Russia beyond the vodka association, and it was enough of a liability during the Cold War that some bars quietly renamed it. The Mule survived anyway, and its structure, spirit plus lime plus ginger beer, proved endlessly portable: the Dark 'n Stormy with rum, the Mexican Mule with tequila, the Kentucky Mule with bourbon, the Gin-Gin Mule with gin and mint.
The copper mug is not pure theatre, either. Copper conducts heat quickly, so the vessel itself goes ice-cold in your hand and the drink stays colder longer than it would in glass. Do check that any mug you buy is lined on the inside, since acidic drinks in contact with unlined copper are best avoided.
