Super Bowl LX: 2026
The Taima & The It’s Gonna Be Maye
The Taima (Seattle Seahawks)
3/4 oz Midori
3/4 oz Woodinville bourbon (or really any bourbon will do—I chose Woodinville for the local WA connection!)
3/4 oz triple sec (Hiram Walker brand highly recommended in acknowledgement of Kenneth Walker’s postseason contributions, but really, triple sec is triple sec)
3/4 oz lemon juice
Shake all ingredients together over ice and strain into a cocktail glass.
My original jumping-off point for this cocktail was the Last Word, which apparently has a strong association with Seattle because it was revived there. It turned out that the only thing I ended up taking from the Last Word was the fact that it’s equal proportions of four ingredient, but I changed every single one of them up. Midori is really the perfect shade of green for the Seahawks, so I immediately swapped the chartreuse for that. I was interested in using Woodinville whiskey since it’s from Washington, just outside of Seattle. I wasn’t sure how they’d do together, but it was a more successful combination than I imagined, so that replaced gin as the primary hard spirit. I felt like both maraschino and lime might not be a great combo with the melon liqueur, which led me to try subbing in triple sec and lemon juice respectively (also there’s a Hiram Walker brand, which is a fun nod to Kenneth Walker), and shockingly it all just really worked. In fact, this was the first time that I hit a Super Bowl cocktail on my very first stab of mixing some potential ingredients together!
The It’s Gonna Be Maye (New England Patriots)
1 oz mezcal
1 oz blanco tequila (preferably Sauza)
1/2 oz Domain de Canton or other ginger liqueur
3-4 dashes cranberry bitters
Splash of cranberry ginger ale
Stir together mezcal, tequila, ginger liqueur, and bitters over ice. Top with a splash of cranberry ginger ale to taste—less if you like your drink on the booze-forward side, more if you prefer it a bit lighter and sweeter.
I was interested in using cranberry because it feels very New England (and is also red), but cranberry juice felt both heavy and also frankly kind of boring, so I was seeking an alternative—and then a bottle of cranberry ginger ale caught my eye at the grocery store! I had also been leaning towards tequila since Justin Timberlake has (or once had?) his own “Sauza 910” tequila, and the ginger ale inspired me to lean further into the ginger side with the Domain de Canton, but I still felt like it was missing something. I tried bitters, and even realized I had cranberry bitters on my shelf, but that wasn’t quite enough. My partner and taste tester suggested mezcal instead of tequila, but that overpowered all of the other elements—until I hit on the idea of splitting the difference and doing a combination of tequila and mezcal, and that was the sweet spot!
