Easy Lemon Drop Martini Cocktail

How to make a perfect lemon drop martini cocktail with a homemade lemon sugar rim. This is one of our absolute favorite cocktails to make at home. 

Watch the Recipe

How to Make the Best Lemon Drop Martini

The key to the best lemon drop martini is balancing sour and sweet. Here are four things to keep in mind when making lemon drop martinis at home:

1. Use Freshly Squeezed Lemon Juice. The juice from a bottle just won’t cut it here. For one cocktail, you will need 1 ounce of lemon juice or the juice from half a large lemon.
2. Use quality vodka. Since this is a martini, there’s quite a bit of vodka called for. You don’t need to go straight to the top shelf, but choose a smooth vodka. A few of our favorites are Kettle One, Stolichnaya (Stoli), and Tito’s.
3. Everything should be really cold. A lukewarm martini is no fun, so be sure to shake the heck out of it — if you want to go the extra mile, chill the martini glasses, too.
4. Add a lemon sugar rim. You’ve probably noticed rim sugar sold at the store. They are a great idea, but honestly, much easier to make at home yourself.

To make our lemon drops extra special, we add a simple lemon sugar rim to our glasses. You could certainly stick with plain sugar, but since you’ve already bought the lemons for the fresh lemon juice, you might as well whip up this zesty sugar, right?

To make it, rub the zest of one lemon into granulated sugar. Easy!

One more thing — you’ll need simple syrup for this. You can buy simple syrup at the store for convenience, but it’s really easy to make at home.

Here’s our step-by-step instructions for how to make simple syrup. We made it in our recipe video, too — it only takes a few minutes.

Recipe updated, originally posted July 2010. Since posting this in 2010, we have tweaked the recipe to be more clear and added a quick recipe video. – Adam and Joanne