Cassis Orange: The Two-Ingredient Drink With a Different Name Everywhere

Order a drink in a Japanese izakaya and you have almost certainly seen this one. カシスオレンジ, kashisu orenji, near the top of the menu, somewhere between the highballs and the sours. It sells enormously well over there, and it is two ingredients long.

Outside Japan it barely has a name. Which is why people end up searching for it in the literal form — cassis, orange — and finding very little. So let us give it a proper write-up.

The build

Cassis Orange — crème de cassis, orange juice.

Our proportions: 1 oz crème de cassis, 4 oz orange juice, over ice in a highball glass. Pour the cassis first. Then the juice, slowly, down the side.

Leave it a moment before stirring. The liqueur is dense with sugar and sinks, so you get a magenta base bleeding up into orange before anyone touches it.

Then stir once. The gradient is for looking at, not for tasting — unstirred, the first third of the glass is syrup and the last third is juice.

Getting the ratio right

This is the whole drink, so it is worth being fussy.

Crème de cassis carries a great deal of sugar by law. The Dijon standard sets a minimum of 400 grams per liter, and most bottles land near it. At 1:2 against orange juice, which is where a lot of recipes put it, the result is genuinely unpleasant: thick, jammy, closer to a dessert sauce than a drink.

The izakaya pour is much lighter. Somewhere between 1:4 and 1:5 is where the blackcurrant reads as a flavor rather than a sweetener, and where the orange has enough acid to cut through. We settled on 1:4 after making it both ways more times than strictly necessary.

Fresh juice matters here more than in most drinks, for an unusual reason. Cassis is already carrying all the sugar this glass can hold. What you need from the juice is acid — and cartoned juice, blended and stabilized toward sweetness, brings noticeably less of it.

Why it works at all

Blackcurrant and orange sit unusually close together on the palate. That is why the pairing feels obvious the moment you taste it, and why it turns up well beyond cocktails — in cordials, in tea blends, in confectionery.

The other half of the answer is strength. Crème de cassis is bottled around 15–20% ABV. A 1 oz pour in a 5 oz glass puts the finished drink near 4%, which is roughly a beer.

That is the real reason it does so well on izakaya menus. You can order one at the start of a long meal without committing to anything.

The rest of the family

Cassis hides in plain sight. Open the bottle and there is a surprisingly complete set of two- and three-ingredient drinks waiting behind it.

The famous ones are the wine builds:

A Kir is the same idea as a Cassis Orange with wine standing in for juice. The ratio problem is identical — a heavy hand turns a crisp aperitif into something syrupy. The traditional Burgundian pour is about 1:9, considerably lighter than most people expect.

Then the spirit builds, which are where the bottle earns its keep.

Gin Cassis is two ingredients and the best argument for owning cassis at all. Juniper against blackcurrant comes out sharp and slightly savory — nothing like the sweetness the bottle threatens. Lengthen it into a Gin Cassis Fizz with lemon, sugar and soda for summer.

Vermouth Cassis — dry vermouth, cassis, soda — is a genuinely low-alcohol aperitif, and the drink we make most from this bottle. There is a taller version if you want it to last.

Brandy Cassis adds lemon juice and turns the whole thing into a sour, which suits the darker fruit of the liqueur well. Ballet Russe does the same with vodka and lime.

Two more worth knowing if you like an aperitif: Dubonnet Cassis and Byrrh Cassis, both fortified-wine builds in the same register as the vermouth one.

And a few that go further afield — Autumn Moon with sake and lime, Blackberry Tequila, Bordij with cognac and red wine, and Pineapple Rum Cassis. If you want to see the full set your shelf supports, our builder will work backward from the bottle.

Cassis is not Chambord

These get substituted for each other constantly and they are not the same thing.

Crème de cassis is blackcurrant, made in and around Dijon, heavy with sugar and low in alcohol. Chambord is black raspberry with vanilla and honey in it — a rounder profile entirely.

Swap one for the other in a Kir and the drink survives. Swap it in a Cassis Orange and you get something noticeably sweeter and less sharp, because the blackcurrant’s tartness was doing structural work the raspberry does not do.

If Chambord is what you have, our Chambord cocktails is the better page for it.

Keeping it

This is the part that catches people out. Crème de cassis behaves less like a liqueur than its shelf position suggests.

At 15–20% ABV with a very high fruit content, it oxidizes. An opened bottle in a warm cupboard darkens from bright purple-red toward brown within about six months. It loses its fresh-fruit character and keeps all of its sugar.

Which is exactly the failure mode behind the cough-syrup reputation this drink has in some quarters. The recipe is rarely the problem. The bottle usually is.

Ours lives in the refrigerator, which roughly doubles that window. Buy the smallest bottle you can find unless you make Kir regularly. Our notes on which bottles need cold storage are in the refrigeration guide, and the liqueur shelf-life piece covers where cassis sits against its neighbors.

A brown bottle is not dangerous. It is just no longer worth putting in a glass with good orange juice.

Last modified on September 6, 2026