Making Classic Cocktails at Home #25: Grasshopper

The twenty-fifth entry in the series where my wife Sabrina and I journey through the wide wonderful world of classic cocktails by crafting and drinking recipes together at our home bar. Today let’s relish in this overly indulgent, overly green, mint chocolate marvel, the Grasshopper!

---

Recipe:

• 1 oz De Kuyper Green Crème de Menthe Liqueur
• 1 oz Giffard Crème de Cacao Liqueur
• 1 oz Heavy cream
• Garnish: Mint leaf (or grated chocolate or grated nutmeg)

Add ingredients to a shaker with ice and shake vigorously. The more the better to get it good and frothy. Strain into a chilled coupe and add garnish.

---

Intro:

Believe it or not, when I decided to start down this path of making and learning about “classic” cocktails, the silly ole’ Grasshopper was one that I was really excited about. 

I clearly remember my first introduction to the Grasshopper. I was a young kid back in early 80s Boulder, Colorado, at a neighborhood backyard party with my parents. My mom was holding a plastic cup with some weird brilliant neon green liquid in it. As an 80s kid growing up with You Can’t Do That On Television’s green slime, Ghostbusters‘ green slime, and whatever was inside of a Stretch Armstrong but was surely green slime, I cared deeply about bright green stuff.

I asked my mom what was the amazing elixir she had in hand. She said it was a Grasshopper, a name that made the drink even more intriguing to a dirty knee’d tot like me. Since it was the 80’s, and everything was allowed in the 80’s, she asked me if I wanted a sip. Oh hell yeah, I did. I took a swig and was pounded by a blast of cold, creamy, sweet artificial mint flavoring and alcohol. It was awesome. It tasted like… well, it tasted like the 80s. 

And then I never saw a Grasshopper out in the wild again.  

I never saw another one, but I carried with me that fateful memory of my singular sip through the years, hoisting the Grasshopper up in my personal rankings of “important” cocktails. I didn’t know anything about it, except that it was minty and it was green. Awesomely green. 

In fact, up until very recently, I always assumed that Grasshopper ingredients had been a critical part of every adult’s liquor collection back in the 90s too, because I recall seeing that iconic tall, faceted, angular bottle of brilliant green booze in every liquor cabinet that we snooped around in as teenagers. 

Of course, it also recently dawned on me that the bottle that I remember would have actually been a Midori Melon Liqueur bottle, not a Crème de Menthe. My bad. 

So, perhaps the Grasshopper wasn’t as ubiquitous among the 90s suburban parental demographic as I’d thought. But it was certainly popular with the parents in the 80s, cause I saw that shit firsthand! 

Also,  I guess I need to add a Midori Sour to my ever growing (and loosely defined) list of “classics” to explore.

Booze Basics

A traditional Grasshopper recipe consists of equal parts Crème de Menthe, Crème de Cacao, and heavy cream, making for a thick creamy dessert drink that looks, tastes, and feels almost exactly like melted mint chocolate ice cream.

For the past few decades, a Grasshopper has not really been treated as a serious cocktail. You didn’t drink it to meditate on its delicate mint notes or ponder its nuanced cacao flavors. Nah, this one was all about just being bright green and indulgent. I decided to stay true to this with the recipe I used, forgoing a high end Crème de Menthe for something much more, eh, budget-friendly and also very green and very minty: De Kuyper Green Crème De Menthe. 

I throw no shade on De Kuyper when I say that their liqueurs are far more likely to be found on the shelves of a college dive bar than in a craft bar, and that’s perfectly fine. It’s totally awesome in fact. Balance is necessary. If everything were high end, then nothing would be high end, right?

The De Kuyper Green Crème de Menthe looks just a mint-flavored mouthwash and tastes like a mint-flavored mouthwash, with a slightly thicker, stickier mouthfeel than mouthwash. It’s not a subtle liqueur, and it doesn’t care. Neither do I. I wanted an old school Grasshopper like they would have drank in the 70s and 80s when the word subtlety was practically a banned word. Also, it’s like $12 a bottle. 

This particular Crème de Menthe’s contribution to the Grasshopper is what you’d expect. It makes it green as hell and minty.  Respect.

My choice for Crème de Cacao is what is going to uplift the drink a little bit. Giffard is a higher quality brand that offers more lush, natural cacao, vanilla and bittersweet chocolate than a lower caliber bottle will. A budget Crème de Cacao tastes too much like candy, from what I’m told. 

So anyway, I went with a more backyard party-friendly Crème de Menthe and then cranked down the intensity of the mint with a more layered Crème de Cacao. In fact, while the mint is the most pronounced flavor of the Grasshopper, or maybe because the mint is the most pronounced flavor, we really want to lean more into the quality of the cacao flavor and try to push the mint to the back a bit, or else we’re simply drinking mint candy. 

And of course, both liqueurs get rounded out and softened by the addition of the heavy cream anyway, rendering my over-thinking above kind of moot. The cream is also going to contribute that thick, pillowy creamy mouthfeel and transform the drink into the melted ice cream awesome that stuck with me since my inaugural sip 45 years ago.  

If you want to create a more modernized higher end version of a Grasshopper, you can certainly do so with a higher end Crème de Menthe.  In Cocktail Codex, the Death & Co. folks use Tempus Fugit White Crème de Menthe, and include mint leaves as part of the recipe, presumably as a classier alternative to the bright green coloring of the “traditional” drink.

Crème a Little Crème of Me

We’ve talked a lot about the Crèmes already, but while we’re at it, what exactly is a Crème?

Well, it’s just a high sugar liqueur with a rich syrupy, creamy texture. But it does not actually contain cream. It’s produced like any other liqueur, with fruits/herbs/whatever added to a neutral spirit, sweetened, and diluted to the preferred strength. It’s just creamier. 

Along with menthe and cacao, you’ll also find Crème de Cassis (black currents), Crème de Violette (violet flowers), Crème de Fraise (strawberry) and plenty others. 

Crème de Menthe can be traced back to 19th century France and is credited to Emile Giffard, a pharmacist who developed the mint liqueur to use as a digestif since mint was popular as a digestion aid back in the day. There is both a white (clear) and green version of Crème de Menthe. 

Crème de Cacao (pronounced “ka kow”) appears to have started back in 18th-19th century Europe, back when cacao was a luxury ingredient only available to the upper crust. There’s a white (clear) version as well as a brown version. The Giffard bottle in my recipe above is a white one. 

Probably worth noting that cacao refers to the cacao bean or plant or nibs, whereas cocoa is what it’s called after it’s been roasted or processed, like into cocoa powder. 

Origin Story

The common story is that the Grasshopper started at the Tujague, “the second oldest restaurant in New Orleans, the birthplace of brunch and home to the oldest stand-up bar in America”, by bartender Philip Guichet back in 1918 or 1919. 

Over the next couple decades, the Grasshopper likely wasn’t a top player in the cocktail scene, but would fit in just fine with that era’s drinking culture where it was common to substitute one’s dessert with a sweet, refined after-dinner drink (liqueur, cream drink, flip, cordial…).

The Grasshopper starts to hit its stride as we move into the 50s, in those post-war days when folks were entertaining at home, mixing drinks in their kitchen, and moving away from the more extravagant cocktails to simpler recipes that you can build quickly with just a couple bottles and get back out to the guests before they start to sober up. 

The 70s and 80s, however, are where the Grasshopper often gets pinholed. Not that the drink itself changed at that time, but the culture and the fashion absolutely did, and in a way where a sweet bright green dessert drink would fit in perfectly. Hell, it is practically the ideal color match for the refrigerators of that time period. 

The styles of the 70s (shag carpet, disco balls, etc) and the 80s (action movies, MTV, Spuds Mackenzie, etc) are often looked back upon with a wry judgmental giggle (not by me, though, I love it all), and the drinking trends of that era leaned deeper into fun over sophistication. Those traits, for better or worse, thus became attached to the Grasshopper, too.  

As the Cocktail Revolution took hold in the early 2000s and we started moving back to tried-and-true classics (Old Fashioneds, Manhattans, Negronis), the Grasshopper was often overlooked as one of those corny drinks from the recent past, despite it actually being nearly a century old by then.

It regained some recognition in some establishments once they acquired quality, craft liqueurs with natural flavorings and colorings, eventually leading to a version of the Grasshopper as a high end dessert drink rather than just the cocktail equivalent of the one ice cream flavor you never picked at Baskin Robbins. 

Recipe Rationale:

De Kuyper Green Crème de Menthe Liqueur:  We’ve already covered this in far more detail than needed, but as a quick recap, I went with the budget stuff here as I was more interested in capturing that awesome green color and “neo-mint” flavor, knowing I’d be balancing it out with a higher end Crème of Cacao and soaking it up with heavy cream anyway. 

Giffard Crème de Cacao Liqueur: I chose to put more focus on quality with this portion of the recipe. I’ll use this bottle in other cocktails, whereas I don’t expect many other opportunities to use a green Crème de Menthe, so it was worth getting something a bit nicer. 

Heavy Cream:  Some will say that you can substitute for lighter cream or half n half, but live a little, man. Embrace the high calories in this drink. It’s not like you’re gonna be pounding Grasshoppers on the regular. But if you do, hell yeah. 

Garnish: I chose to go with mint since I’ve been growing fresh mint at home. And I was thinking it might introduce a touch of “real mint” aroma. But it didn’t. Gonna blame that on user error, though. Other garnish options that sound awesome are shaved chocolate or shaved nutmeg.

Verdict:

---

---