Virgin Sea Breeze

Sweetness and body, mostly. Pineapple juice is sweeter and carries enough pulp to coat the mouth, so the drink goes round and loses the bitter finish grapefruit leaves behind. Pour it hard and you get a head of foam as well. That version has a name of its own: Bay Breeze.

Either works and they look quite different. Cranberry is denser, so poured first it stays low and you drink down through a gradient of pink. A quick stir gives one even color and a steadier flavor. Bars usually leave it unstirred and let the drinker decide.

Not really. Bottled grapefruit soda carries a lot of sugar and only a hint of the real fruit's bitterness, so you lose the dryness that makes this worth drinking. If it is all you have, halve the cranberry and add a squeeze of fresh lime.

Twenty milliliters of orange juice. It rounds off the grapefruit's bitter edge and the sweetness arrives as fruit rather than syrup. Failing that, use a cranberry juice blended with apple, which most supermarkets sell, or lengthen the whole thing with soda water and accept a thinner drink.

A classic Virgin Sea Breeze calls for 90 ml (3 oz) Cranberry juice, 60 ml (2 oz) Grapefruit juice. That single-serve spec scales cleanly — the recipe above converts it to oz and multiplies it for 2–4 drinks.

Nothing — the Virgin Sea Breeze is completely alcohol-free, which makes it a great mocktail for drivers, kids and anyone skipping alcohol.

A Virgin Sea Breeze is stirred, not shaken. It contains no citrus juice, so stirring keeps it crystal clear and silky instead of cloudy and aerated.