There is no mixing for me, I like Cointreau just as it is, I don’t even drink Cointreau on ice, instead keeping my bottle of Cointreau in the refrigerator. It is better to drink from a crystal whiskey tumbler, but these days I just sip from a crystal shot glass. My whiskey tumblers were all broken by people staying in my house in the trail of destruction that they usually leave behind.

So what I learned is when researching this post, Cointreau is a form of Triple Sec, so I need to ask, what is Triple Sec? Firstly, there is a liqueur named Triple Sec, it is an orange flavoured liqueur containing 20% – 40% alcohol by volume. Triple Sec is typically consumed in Margarita, Long Island Iced Tea, Sidecar, White Car, Mai Tai, and Cosmopolitan cocktails and is a form of orange liqueur that is perfect for blending in cocktails. Apparently, the term Triple Sec was removed from the bottle between the world wars to differentiate the liqueur.

So I needed to learn a little about Cointreau, they source sweet and bitter oranges. The bitter oranges are peeled and paired into single ribbons whilst the sweet oranges are quartered. The peels are sun dried for three to five days to achieve a moisture content of 11% to meet the balance of sweet and bitter orange flavour. From there, pure water, sugar and neutral alcohol are the only other ingredients in the natural liqueur that is my favourite liqueur.