The Clear Sky is what happens when a bar with nothing to prove decides a summer sour needs four base spirits instead of one. Summer Goff built it for Death & Co in Denver in 2022: blanco tequila and white rum for the frame, a quarter-ounce of tomato eau-de-vie and a half-ounce of fino sherry for everything the frame can't do on its own. Watermelon syrup and lime make it read, at first sip, like the most straightforward drink on the menu. Then the finish arrives - dry, saline, faintly savoury - and you realise the last ingredient on the list is a dash of MSG solution, and that it is doing more work than anything else in the glass.
Drinks bright and fruity up front, with a savory, saline finish.
Death & CoOrigin
The Clear Sky is Summer Goff's, made for Death & Co's Denver bar in 2022 and published in the group's own recipe archive. We're documenting their spec, not claiming it. What's notable is how little of the drink is load-bearing in the usual sense: no single ingredient exceeds three-quarters of an ounce, and the two components doing the most to define the finish - a tomato eau-de-vie and a dash of MSG in water - together account for about a quarter-ounce of liquid.
Laurent Cazottes' 72 Tomates is the ingredient most likely to stop a home bartender cold. It's a French eau-de-vie distilled from tomatoes - the number refers to how many go into a bottle - and it tastes green, faintly vegetal, and nothing like a Bloody Mary. It is also expensive and genuinely hard to find, which is the honest caveat on this recipe: the Clear Sky is a bar drink first, and a home drink only if you're willing to chase a bottle.
The Spec
Structurally this is an ordinary sour - two ounces of base against three-quarters of an ounce of citrus and three-quarters of sweetener - and it is worth seeing that skeleton clearly before worrying about what fills it. The unusual part isn't the ratio. It's that the two ounces of base are split four ways, which is the decision everything else in the drink follows from.
Why Split the Base Four Ways
Blanco tequila alone would dominate a watermelon sour; it is vegetal and assertive and would turn this into a watermelon margarita, which already exists. Cutting it with white rum softens the agave without adding much character of its own. The tomato eau-de-vie then pushes the whole thing green and savoury, and the fino sherry - the lowest-proof thing in the drink at around 15% - adds dry, briny, nutty length that no spirit at 40% can supply without also adding heat. Each of the four is doing a job the other three can't.
The fino is the point. It takes up a quarter of the base by volume but contributes only about a tenth of its alcohol, so it buys dry, saline length at almost no cost in heat — the trick a single 40% base spirit cannot pull off. Strengths are label figures; the split is arithmetic, not a lab measurement.
Watermelon, Uncooked
The sweetener is a house-made watermelon syrup built at 3:1 - three parts strained juice to one part sugar, by weight - and stirred together cold. That ratio is much leaner than the 2:1 rich syrups most bars keep on the rail, and the cold process matters more than the ratio does: watermelon's aroma lives in volatile compounds that cook off on the stove, so a simmered watermelon syrup tastes like candy rather than fruit. It keeps about a week, which is the price of not cooking it.
The Dash That Does the Work
The last line of the spec is one dash of MSG solution - monosodium glutamate dissolved in warm water at roughly 1:5. It functions the way a saline dash does, but further along the palate: glutamate reads as depth and duration rather than as a flavour of its own, and a bright acidic sour is exactly the kind of drink that hits hard and then disappears. It's also the ingredient people flinch at, and shouldn't. MSG is classified as generally recognised as safe by the FDA, and double-blind trials have failed to reproduce the symptom cluster once pinned on it. There is more glutamate in the fino sherry already in the glass than in the dash.
Bottom Line
A drink that reads as simple and isn't. Two of its seven ingredients are hard to source and one of them is a seasoning most people keep in the spice drawer rather than on the back bar, which makes the Clear Sky a poor candidate for a Tuesday. It is, however, a very good argument for the idea that a sour's finish is a thing you can design deliberately rather than just accept - and that argument costs a dash.