Mexico's actual favorite tequila drink. Tart, salty-sweet.
Bench-tested by the Will It Slush? team · Last revised July 19, 2026
Ingredients
Scale the batch — amounts update live in your units.
- Blanco Tequila235 ml
- Fresh Grapefruit Juice355 ml
- Fresh Lime Juice60 ml
- 2:1 Simple Syrup90 ml
- Water235 ml
- Sugar (to taste)12.7 g
Method
- 1.Combine in Slushi, run 60 min.
- 2.Salt rim, pour, top with tiny splash of soda.
- 3.Grapefruit wedge.
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Notes from our testing
Squirt and Fresca are sweeter than fresh grapefruit; pick one and rebalance around it.
There are two palomas and they need different builds. The grapefruit soda version — Squirt, Jarritos, Fresca — comes in with 10 to 12 Brix already in the mixer, so it needs no added sugar at all. The fresh grapefruit version sits near 8 Brix and needs about an ounce of syrup per batch to reach the window.
Our default is the fresh build: 4 oz blanco tequila, 8 oz fresh pink grapefruit, 1 oz lime, syrup to 12 Brix, water to fill. About 10% ABV. Fresh grapefruit has a bitterness that survives freezing better than soda does, and cold flattens flavour enough that you want the extra structure.
If you use the diet grapefruit soda — Fresca, Squirt Zero — you are back to zero sugar and the batch will freeze hard. That is the same trap covered in our sugar-free guide: swap in allulose to rebuild the Brix without the calories, because aspartame contributes nothing to freezing point.
Salt the rim, not the mix. A paloma wants that saline edge, but salt in the chamber depresses the freezing point on its own and leaves you with a permanently wet slush.