The Pickle Margarita Is the Drink of Summer 2025

There’s a great bar in my neighborhood called Pine Box Rock Shop, cleverly named after the building’s former life as a coffin factory. I’ve been there for shows, trivia nights, elections and even a dog holiday party thrown by my favorite neighborhood pet store. And through the years, the bar’s Pickle Back Margarita has been my favorite libation.

Before you scrunch up your nose, just think about it. Do you like pickles? Do you like Margaritas? If the answer to both questions is yes, then you will definitely like this drink — whether or not you can currently fathom them being paired together. And you heard it here first: The Pickle Margarita is going to be the drink of summer 2025.

I recently had a small dinner gathering at my house and was looking for a welcome cocktail to make. As I was combing through cocktail books and saved recipes, I stumbled upon this Pickle Brine Margarita from NYT Cooking. Lo and behold, it’s a recipe adapted from one Pine Box Rock Shop that I must have saved last summer but hadn’t thought about until now. I told my husband I was going to make this Marg, and he reacted how some of you may have: with a wrinkled nose and very skeptical “Really?”

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My two guests arrived, and I told them I could either make them a regular Margarita or a Pickle Margarita. They enthusiastically replied “pickle!” in unison; my husband even decided to try one, thanks to this new wave of peer pressure. I mixed them up exactly according to that NYT recipe (five stars from 199 reviews seemed like a solid reason not to change anything), and we congregated in the backyard to take first sips. From the moment we tasted it to the last drop, it was a perfect summer drink in every way. It’s lightly sweet and quite tart — perfectly in balance like any Margarita should be — but the added pickle brine adds a savory punch, much like a salt rim. Everyone agreed it was one of the best and most satisfying cocktails they’ve had in a while.

This recipe calls for granulated sugar instead of simple syrup, which I admit I was skeptical about at first. But it mixed into the cocktail perfectly when I shook it with ice. The NYT Cooking recipe also calls for an optional salt rim, but I opted to throw a couple pinches of salt into the shaker with the rest of the ingredients instead. It was a divine addition.

While we’re not quite feeling the full-force of summer weather in New York yet, this drink has been on regular rotation in my household. And as soon as you try it, I guarantee you’ll agree: it’s the summer of the Pickle Margarita.