Sunrise Shot

Tequila, OJ, and grenadine in a shot — the 1972 Trident Sausalito Sunrise (Rolling Stones' tour drink), the Eagles' 1973 Desperado completing its cultural reach.

The Sunrise Shot is a party shooter inspired by the Tequila Sunrise — a cocktail that exists in two distinct documented versions separated by decades. The original Tequila Sunrise was created in Phoenix, Arizona in the early 1930s at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel, where bartender Gene Sulit combined tequila, fresh lime juice, grenadine, and crème de cassis to produce a gradient drink of entirely different character from the later version. The modern Tequila Sunrise — tequila, orange juice, and grenadine layered to produce the sunrise gradient effect — was created by Bobby Lazoff and Billy Rice at the Trident restaurant in Sausalito, California in 1972 for the Rolling Stones, who were touring North America at the time and adopted the drink as their unofficial tour cocktail. The 1972 version's combination of orange juice and grenadine in tall glass over ice, with the grenadine sinking through the orange juice to create the color gradient, became one of the most visually recognized cocktail presentations of the 1970s and was further embedded in American popular culture by the Eagles' 1973 song Tequila Sunrise from the Desperado album. The Sunrise Shot compresses this layered visual and tropical flavor into a single-serve shooter.