Kamikaze
Vodka, triple sec and lime in equal parts, shaken hard — a sharp, no-frills bar staple.
- Difficulty
- easy
- Prep time
- 4 min
- Strength
- 23% ABV
- Glassware
- Coupe glass or rocks glass
- Base
- vodka
- Serves
- 1
Method
- Add vodka, triple sec and lime juice to a shaker with ice.
- Shake hard for 10–15 seconds until very cold.
- Strain into a chilled coupe glass, or into a rocks glass over fresh ice.
- Garnish with a lime wheel.
Equipment
Don't have everything? Here's what works instead.
Cocktail shaker
Household swap: A clean jar with a tight-fitting lid.
Jigger
Household swap: A tablespoon measure (1 tbsp ≈ 15ml).
Missing an ingredient?
Each swap below says what it changes and how to correct for it, so you can decide whether you are making this drink or a neighbouring one.
Instead of Triple Sec
Best substitute: Orange Curaçao
This is the modifier in this drink.
Flavour impact: Orange curaçao is slightly richer and less sharply orange than triple sec.
What changes
Expect more bitterness. Still a good drink, and a slightly different one.
- Bitterness ↑
- Bitterness builds across a drink rather than announcing itself, so this will read as a longer, drier finish.
- Character
- Both are orange, and you lose sweet, clean and citrusy, and you gain bittersweet, aromatic and rich. Numbers can't see this: two ingredients can be identically sour and still smell nothing alike.
To correct for it
- Pour slightly less, or lengthen the drink a little, and let the sweetness catch up.
High confidenceStandard interchangeable orange liqueurs.Shifts the drink
Make it better
- Fresh lime juice makes a real difference here — bottled juice tastes noticeably flatter against just two other ingredients.
- Keep the parts genuinely equal; it's a simple drink and the balance is the whole point.
- Shake hard for a proper chill — this drink is meant to be served ice-cold.
Rescue this drink
- Too sour
- Add a touch more triple sec, keeping the vodka and lime in equal proportion to each other.
- Too sweet
- Add a splash more lime juice to sharpen it back up.
- Tastes watery
- Shake for less time, and use solid, well-frozen ice.
- Feels one-note
- A dash of cranberry juice turns it into a Cosmopolitan-adjacent drink with more depth, if that's welcome.
- Tastes thin, with no weight to itgeneral guidance
- A short shaken drink with nothing rich in it depends on sugar and dilution for body. Try a slightly richer syrup — two parts sugar to one of water rather than equal parts — which adds weight without adding much more sweetness. Egg white or aquafaba does the same job more dramatically, and turns it into a sour.
- Shaken too longgeneral guidance
- Ten to fifteen seconds is a full shake. Beyond that the ice fractures and keeps diluting while you are still working, so the drink arrives cold, thin and slightly foamy when it should be sharp. Shake hard and briefly rather than gently and long — the two are not interchangeable.
- Too stronggeneral guidance
- Stir or shake for a little longer to add dilution, or add a splash of chilled water. This is a spirit-forward drink by design, so some strength is expected.
- Served too warmgeneral guidance
- Chill the glass, ice and every ingredient ahead of time — a warm pour is the fastest way to lose a cold drink's balance. For one serving, there's no real fix beyond rebuilding it properly chilled; for a batch, keep everything refrigerated until the moment of serving and add ice last.
- Under-diluted (tastes harsh or too concentrated)general guidance
- For one serving, stir in a few drops of chilled water to open it up. For a batch, extend the shake time slightly on the next round.
- No cocktail shakergeneral guidance
- A clean jar with a tight-fitting lid.
Make ahead & storage
Batch the base, finish at serving
Batch the 2 stable components days ahead and add fresh lime juice when you pour.
Add about 27% water to the batch to replace what the ice would otherwise contribute, or it will pour noticeably harsher than a fresh one.
- Fresh lime juice:
- Fresh citrus loses its aroma within hours and turns dull. Squeeze it on the day.
What it tastes like
The taste, and what drives it
off-dry, very sharp, very light — a sour-structured drink served over ice.
Off-dry
Dry → Sweet
Sweetened enough to take the edge off without reading as a sweet drink.
What drives it: Triple sec — carries the most sugar into the glass.
Very sharp
Soft → Sharp
Bracingly sour — the first sip is meant to wake you up.
What drives it: Fresh lime juice — supplies the acidity.
Very light
Light → Rich
Almost weightless in the mouth — closer to a long soft drink than to a sipper.
What drives it: Vodka — adds most of the weight.
Very bold
Delicate → Bold
Very bold — concentrated, and served small for that reason.
What drives it: Vodka — is the most concentrated thing in the glass.
What you smell first
- Citrus peelLeads
From Triple sec, Fresh lime juice, Lime wheel
Every aroma here comes from the liquid itself; nothing is layered on top.
How it was worked out
Each reading comes from the recipe's own recorded taste scores combined with what each ingredient contributes, weighted by how much of it is in the glass. Almost everything in this drink has detailed ingredient data behind it.
How balance actually works →If it isn't right
What goes wrong with this drink, and why
Only the faults this particular recipe is actually prone to — each with the likely cause, the adjustment, and what the adjustment costs you.
It's too sweet
- Likely cause
- Triple sec is carrying the sugar here, and it is the easiest thing in the drink to over-pour — syrup clings to a jigger and a "splash" is rarely the same twice.
- What to change
- Cut triple sec by about a third and rebuild. If it is already made, a squeeze of citrus is faster than starting again.
- What that does
- The drink will read sharper as well as less sweet, because the acid stops being balanced. That is usually the intention, but it is a bigger change than it sounds.
It's too sour
- Likely cause
- Fresh lime juice varies more than any other ingredient in the drink. Limes differ by weeks of ripeness, and a sharp one can be half again as acidic as a mild one at the same measure.
- What to change
- Add sweetener a few millilitres at a time rather than diluting — you are correcting a ratio, not a concentration.
- What that does
- Sourness recedes and the drink gains a little weight. Overshoot and you will be reading the too-sweet entry above instead.
It's too strong
- Likely cause
- Vodka dominates by design here — this is a drink built to be sipped, and it is under-diluted more often than it is over-poured.
- What to change
- Shaking for longer, or add a measured 5–10ml of water. Both are the same correction; one is just more honest about it.
- What that does
- Alcohol heat drops and the aromatics open up — a slightly diluted spirit-forward drink usually smells better, not worse.
It's watery
- Likely cause
- Shaking adds water while it chills, and the two cannot be separated. Wet ice from a freezer door, or small cubes, will over-dilute before the drink is properly cold.
- What to change
- Use bigger, drier, colder ice and stop sooner. Chilling the glass first buys you time you would otherwise spend diluting.
- What that does
- More flavour concentration at the same temperature. Under-dilute instead and the drink will taste harsh — this is a target, not a direction.
It doesn't smell of anything
- Likely cause
- This drink's aroma comes from citrus peel, carried in the liquid. Serving it too cold suppresses that: volatile compounds do not leave a very cold drink.
- What to change
- Let it sit for a minute before drinking, and use a glass that narrows towards the rim to concentrate what does escape.
- What that does
- More of the aroma escapes and the drink reads as more intense. The cost is temperature: a drink left to warm also dilutes faster, so this is a trade against how long it stays right.
It tastes one-dimensional
- Likely cause
- With 3 components there is nowhere for complexity to hide — a sour-structured drink is exposed by design, so a dull one is usually a dull ingredient rather than a missing step.
- What to change
- Change the quality of what is there before adding anything new: fresh citrus rather than bottled, a better base bottle, a dash of bitters. Bitters add layers at a scale nothing else matches.
- What that does
- More going on at the same strength and sweetness. Adding a whole extra ingredient instead usually produces a muddier drink rather than a deeper one.
Taste profile
- Sweetness
- 2/5
- Sourness
- 4/5
- Bitterness
- 0/5
- Strength
- 4/5
- Fruitiness
- 1/5
- Freshness
- 3/5
- Creaminess
- 0/5
- Smokiness
- 0/5
Nutrition & alcohol
Estimate onlyBased on equal 30ml pours of vodka and triple sec.- Calories
- 148 kcal
- Sugar
- 8 g
- Carbohydrates
- 9 g
- Alcohol units (UK)
- 2.1
- US standard drinks
- 1.17
- ABV
- 23%
- Serving size
- 90 ml
Show calculation assumptions
Source: Calculated from standard measures
Calorie breakdown: ~114 kcal from alcohol, ~34 kcal from sugar and mixers.
Likely range: 111–185 kcal, reflecting the confidence level above — not a lab-measured figure.
Assumes vodka at 40% ABV and triple sec at 30% ABV.
These figures are estimates, not laboratory measurements — individual tolerance to alcohol varies. See our responsible drinking guidance.
Variations
Blue Kamikaze
Swap the triple sec for blue curaçao for a vivid blue colour with a similar orange-citrus flavour.
Kamikaze Shooter
Serve in a chilled shot glass rather than a coupe for a quick, single-sip version.
What kind of drink this is
The structure behind the recipe
A shaken build: a sour-structured vodka-based drink, served over ice — light and lively in the mouth.
Sour-structured
Something sour and something sweet held in balance over a base — the structure behind the whole sour family and everything descended from it.
Base
Vodka
Modifier
Triple sec
Sour element
Fresh lime juice
Drinks built this way are collected as the Sour family.
Technique
shaken
Ice is thrown against the liquid and against itself, chipping fragments off and driving air through the mix. Chilling, dilution and aeration all happen at once and cannot be separated.
A lighter, briefly frothy body and a cloudy appearance that settles as it stands. The aeration blunts alcoholic heat, which is why a shaken drink tastes softer than a stirred one of the same strength.
What it ruins: Clarity, and any carbonation. A shaken spirits-only drink arrives cloudy with ice shards floating in it, and shaking anything fizzy is the one rule with no exceptions.
Everything about shaking →How the technique works →Dilution
During mixing, then strained
Water from ice typically makes up around 30% of the finished drink for a shaken build (commonly 25–35%). Dilution is an ingredient here, not a side effect.
Why dilution is an ingredient →Served
Over ice
Coupe glass or rocks glass · 90ml
Served on ice, so it keeps chilling in the glass. A larger, colder, slower drink than the same spirits served straight up.
Texture and aroma
Shaking whips air through the drink, giving a lighter, briefly frothy body that settles as it stands.
No dedicated aromatic component — what you smell is the spirit itself, which is a deliberate choice in a drink this spare.
Where to go from here
Each of these is here because of something specific about this drink, not as a standard set of links.
Drinking this with food: seafood, oysters and anything raw
On its recorded taste scores this drink meets the test for seafood, oysters and anything raw — the page explains the principle behind it rather than simply asserting the pairing.
Making good drinks at home
A good drink to learn on. The beginner path covers the four things that actually make a home cocktail disappointing.
Where this fits in a home bar
Vodka is bottle 2 in the order that unlocks the most drinks — buying it opens up 8 recipes beyond the ones before it.
Where it comes from
Origin and family
Origin of the Kamikaze
American in origin, popularised in the 1970s bar scene; the name references the equal-parts, sharp-edged simplicity of the drink rather than any specific historical event.
Family
Sour2 parts spirit · 1 part citrus · 1 part sweetener — shaken, strained, served up or over ice.
On drinks history
Cocktail origin stories are frequently repeated and rarely evidenced. Our history section separates what is documented from what is folklore rather than picking whichever version reads best.
History and culture →Try this next
Cosmopolitan
You may like this because it's part of the same sour family as the Kamikaze.
Margarita
You may like this because it shares a sour-forward profile with the Kamikaze, but uses tequila instead of vodka.
- White Lady
White Lady
You may like this because it shares a sour-forward profile with the Kamikaze, but uses gin instead of vodka.
Use up your ingredients
Bought a bottle just for this? Here's what else it's good for.
Related tools
Scale this for a party
Work out bottles, mixers, ice and total alcohol units for any number of guests.
Recipe confidence
A widely standardized equal-parts ratio across modern bartending references.