Refreshing Gin, Whiskey, Tequila & Rum Recipes

Kentucky Buck

Created by bartender Erick Castro at Rickhouse in San Francisco, the Kentucky Buck is a bourbon, ginger and strawberry cocktail that’s great with a ginger beer, but even better with fresh ginger syrup and sparkling water. If it sounds like a Moscow Mule with bourbon and strawberries it’s because that’s exactly what it is, but the mule was passé by that point in San Francisco, so Castro reached deeper into history for the name. A “Buck” is a style of cocktail that dates back to the 1890s—long before the Mule or the Dark ‘n Stormy—and was composed of just a spirit (usually whiskey) and ginger beer, so named because the ginger and alcohol together would give quite a kick (the Moscow Mule is named similarly, for the kick).

Muddle the strawberry in the bottom of a cocktail shaker. Add bourbon, lemon, ginger syrup, and bitters, and shake for six to eight seconds. Strain over fresh ice in a tall glass and top with soda water. Garnish with a half strawberry or a lemon wheel or a mint sprig or all three.

El Diablo

ith a name like “El Diablo” (“the Devil” in Spanish) you might not expect a fruity and charming tequila sipper, but since “Trader” Vic Bergeron invented it in 1946, the El Diablo has been enchanting drinkers with its tart berries and gentle spice. It’s a simple tequila version of a Moscow Mule, essentially, with a bit of the fruit liqueur creme de cassis making it juicy and the oaky richness of the aged tequila making it plush. Find out why a tiki guy was one of the first Americans to mess with tequila cocktails here.

Combine all ingredients over ice in a tall glass. Stir briefly to combine and garnish with a couple blackberries on a pick, or a lime wedge, or both.

Mai Tai

“Across the entire classic cocktail universe,” we claim, “no drink has suffered more indignity—had more liquid crimes done in its name—than the Mai Tai.” Like the Daiquiri, you might think you know what the Mai Tai is about, but if you’re picturing a deathly sweet, over-juiced concoction, you’re picturing the wrong one. The original 1944 Mai Tai is just rum, lime, orange liqueur and almond—tart and bracing, and among the strongest of the classic cocktails. Find out what Mai Tai means (and how it became the sugar-embalmed zombie version of itself) here or make one for yourself with the recipe below.

Add all ingredients together in a tin with crushed ice. Shake briefly, about five seconds and empty contents into a tropical-looking 14 oz.-ish glass. Pack with more crushed ice and garnish with a juiced lime husk and a sprig of mint, so it looks like a palm tree on a small green island.

Clover Club

“You could spend weeks drinking nothing but different tasty gin sour variations,” we write, “but personally, I don’t know if you could do better than the Clover Club.” Throughout its 120 year history the Clover Club—a gin sour, tarted up with fresh raspberries and smoothed out with an egg white—has been celebrated, then dismissed, then forgotten, and now, finally, is back on top. Find out what it has to do with Oscar Wilde here, or just do what William Butler Yeats did upon discovering it and make three of them all for yourself by the recipe below:

Add all ingredients to a shaker tin. “Dry” shake ingredients without ice for five seconds to whip the egg. Add ice, seal tins and shake hard for 10 to 12 seconds. Strain into coupe or martini glass, express a lemon peel over the top of the foam for aroma and discard and garnish with one to three raspberries, on a pick.

Whiskey Sour

“Is there a more agreeable drink than a well-made whiskey sour?” we asked a few summers back and we’re still not sure there is. Whiskey, with its broad shoulders and oaky fullness, can be almost completely disarmed by tarting it up with fresh lemon juice and balancing with simple syrup, as bartenders have been doing since roughly forever. We say “almost” because often (though not always) you need a little extra push by way of an egg white. Check out two Whiskey Sour recipes in which you don’t need an egg white here, or just make yourself the classic version below.

Add all ingredients to a shaker tin. “Dry” shake ingredients without ice for five seconds to whip the egg. Add ice, seal tins, and shake hard for 10 to 12 seconds. Strain into coupe or Martini glass—it’ll come out white at first, and the color will emerge over the course of a minute under a paper-smooth head of foam. Express a lemon peel over the top of the foam for aroma and discard and decorate the foam with a few drops or dashes of Angostura Bitters.

Queen’s Park Swizzle

The Queen’s Park Swizzle is like the alter ego of the Mojito, its dark twin. “If the Mojito is like a lovely evening with your spouse,” we write, “the Queen’s Park Swizzle is like a beautiful stranger leading you by the hand down a dark hallway towards the sounds of a party you can’t yet see.” They share a build—rum, lime, simple syrup, and mint—but the Queen’s Park trades the Mojito’s easy brightness of light rum for the indulgent vanilla notes of an aged rum, and adds a spicy shock of Angostura Bitters on top, all supercharged by the chilling power of crushed ice. Make the recipe below and find out why it has been called “the most delightful form of anesthesia given out today.”

Add mint leaves to a tall glass. Add simple syrup and gently muddle mint into the syrup. Add crushed ice two-thirds or so full and agitate (either swizzle back and forth with a swizzle stick or a bar spoon, or else just stir) until the glass begins to frost. Add crushed ice to fill and decorate the top with two to three d

Single Village Fix

Smoke and tropical fruit are best friends and the Single Village Fix shows that relationship is thriving. This drink, created by bartender Thad Vogler, takes the “fix”—an old-timey name for a simple sour with a fruit component—and deploys mezcal as the base spirit to fantastic effect. The pineapple syrup harnesses the vibrant smoke and character of the mezcal, embracing and even amplifying its charms, and the lime cuts through any the sweetness and makes the whole thing refreshing. 

Add ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice and shake good and hard for eight to 10 seconds. Fine strain into a coupe or cocktail glass, and garnish with a lime wheel, a piece of dried pineapple on a pick, or nothing at all.

Mojito

And, of course, the Mojito, the drink that’s like a beachy Cuban summer in a glass. It’s light, bright, effervescent and fresh. There was a time when the Mojito was the bane of bartenders back in the early aughts when the drink was popular but the craft cocktail movement hadn’t really found its sea legs yet. So that usually meant this drink felt like a chore to make during an era of Jack and cokes and vodka-sodas. But once we introduced fresh ingredients and proper technique across the world of cocktails, it was time to reclaim the Mojito’s honor.

Add all ingredients to cocktail shaker and shake. In a tall glass, gently muddle an additional three to five mint leaves. Shake the cocktail and strain into the glass over fresh ice. Top with 1 to 2 oz. soda water. Garnish with two mint crowns (the top of the plant) twisted together to form a bushy mint explosion on top.

Hemingway Daiquiri

Daiquiri variation in 1939. Lead barman Constantino Ribalaigua had created the excellent Daiquiri #3, with grapefruit and maraschino liqueur. Hemingway—both a diabetic and a savage alcoholic—didn’t like sugar in his drinks, so he threw out most of the sweetness and, just for fun, doubled the rum. This puts us in a bind, we write: “Hemingway’s version is, simply put, unacceptable,” both too tart and too strong, and “no one even considers making it his way.” Check out the three ways modern bartenders adapt this recipe here, or just make our favorite, below.

Combine ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice, shake well for 10 seconds, and strain into a stemmed glass. Garnish with a Maraschino cherry.

Paloma

“Some things are so modest and unassuming,” we say of the Paloma, “the best way to understand their size is by measuring the shadow they cast.” We’re tempted to think of the Margarita as the star of the tequila show, but look above the title on the marquee, and you might be surprised, at least in Mexico, to find the Paloma—a simple drink of tequila, lime juice, grapefruit soda, and a pinch of salt. Palomas are sweet and tart and bright and preternaturally refreshing, a worthy match for the pitiless heat of the Mexican summer, and deployed in great numbers whenever a little reprieve is in order. The classic version is below, or you can find out about the freshly squeezed variation here.

Add ice to a tall glass. Add tequila and lime and top with grapefruit soda. Mix the ingredients around with a straw (or, as they do at La Capilla de Don Javier in the town of Tequila, with a large knife), sprinkle a pinch of salt on top, and garnish with a lime wedge or, honestly, nothing at all.

French 75

The French 75 pulls off a neat little two-step. The cocktail—gin and lemon juice, electrified with champagne—is equally at home in enthusiastic toasts on New Years Eve as it is deployed into eager hands on a normal Sunday brunch. Wherever you see it, you find it attending celebrations of the sweeter things in life. Not bad for a drink named after a World War I field cannon. Find out more about the three main variations here, or just make our favorite, below.

Shake first three ingredients over ice. Strain into a chilled flute, and top with about 3 oz. of chilled Champagne.

Brown Derby

If you only ever drink one cocktail that may or may not have been created inside a building shaped like a bowler hat, let it be a Brown Derby. Of course, the origins of the drink weren’t in Hollywood after all, but let’s not allow that to distract us. The drink we’ve come to know as the Brown Derby is a combination of whiskey, grapefruit, and honey. However, the addition of a little bit of lemon juice gets the balance of this lesser-known drink right and turns it from pedestrian to outstanding.

Brown Derby

Add all ingredients, including grapefruit peel, to a cocktail shaker with ice and shake good and hard for eight to 10 seconds. Strain off the ice into a rocks glass over fresh ice or up in a coupe (your choice), and garnish with a grapefruit peel.

Classic Margarita

There is no better or more convincing a liquid cheerleader for tequila than a well-made Margarita. Those who’ve had one already agree. Those who haven’t—those for whom all they know is some $13 bottle of tequila mixed with day-glo “Margarita Mix,” with respect, you’ve not had a Margarita, you’ve had citric acid and sodium benzoate and high-fructose corn syrup cosplaying as a Margarita. A proper Margarita is exuberance in a glass, “the spirit of unfussy joie de vie,” we write,  “that acknowledges the potential for fun in any situation.” The classic version is below, or learn how to make the extremely popular Tommy’s Margarita.

For both: Add ingredients to shaking tin, or blender, with lots of ice. Shake, or blend, until ice cold. Pour into a glass, garnish with a bright slice of lime, and indulge.

Piña Colada

The Piña Colada is a vacation in itself, “the cocktail equivalent,” we say, “of the guy at the bar wearing a Hawaiian shirt who keeps trying to strike up conversations with everyone, and whom you end up liking despite yourself.” It is as much as anything responsible for the sugary reputation of rum drinks, but with a lighter hand on the coconut and a little added lime juice, it can be transcendent. Honestly, even bad ones are pretty good, and good ones are phenomenal. Find out which of the three competing origin stores has the most truth to it here, or just make one, below.

If using pebble ice: Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with a handful of pebble ice and “whip” to mix everything together. Dump contents into a festive glass and pack in as much more ice as will fit.

If using a blender: Add liquid ingredients and about 6 to 8 oz. ice to a blender and blend on high for about 10 seconds. Empty into a festive glass.

In both cases, garnish with pineapple leaves, an orange slice and a little colorful umbrella, if you’ve got it.

El Guapo

he El Guapo is an advertisement for innovation. Most of the time, you have a crazy new idea and try it and it’s terrible. Sometimes, though, it ends up like this: Take the same hot sauce you’d use on your burrito and put a bunch of it into the shaker tin with your Margarita, and the result, perhaps surprisingly, is among the most delicious and celebrated spicy cocktails of the last 20 years. This cocktail, created in 2008 by Sam Ross at NYC’s Little Branch, also throws in some salt and pepper, because why not? Make his original, below, or try out an even more refreshing variation of El Guapo.

Add lime pieces to shaker tin and muddle to get as much juice out as possible. At the rest of the ingredients, shake hard for five to six seconds and dump the whole thing, ice and all, into a large rocks glass. Taste for balance and add more lime juice as necessary. Garnish with a sprinkle of salt and a good crack of black pepper.

Pornstar Martini

Every year, the U.K.-based Difford’s Guide publishes a list of what they call the World’s Top 100 Cocktails. It’s not an opinion piece, or an editorial endorsement—when they say “top” they mean by popularity, the list is ranked by web traffic, and is therefore objective and purely democratic. And what was No. 1 for 2022? The eternal Margarita, or the hip Negroni, or the trendy Carajillo? Nope. It’s the Pornstar Martini, crowned in the top spot for an incredible eighth year in a row. Now, the name may sound salacious, but it’s actually an outstanding drink. Invented by bartender Douglas Ankrah at Townhouse in London, it’s made from vodka, vanilla, and passion fruit. In the video above O’Bryan takes this 20-year-old recipe and updates it with more modern techniques so the Pornstar Martini is even easier for home bartenders to make.

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice and shake hard for eight to 10 seconds. Strain into a martini glass, and garnish with a lime wheel, a lime peel, or, if you’re feeling rich, a half passion fruit bobbing in the top of the drink. Serve alongside a sidecar of Champagne or other sparkling wine, if you wish.

Mint Julep

Don’t be fooled by the Mint Julep. Its campaign materials may have you convinced it’s just a harmless little minty refresher, but in reality it’s nearly a double-pour of bourbon, tempered only by mint and a touch of sugar. Nonetheless, some 120,000 Mint Juleps are consumed across two sunny days at Churchill Downs during the Kentucky Derby, proving that some cocktails can become refreshing daytime summer sippers just by sheer force of will, and a little crushed ice. Find out the best bourbon to use for your Mint Julep here, or if the race is about to start, quickly fix one up according to the recipe below.

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–2.5 oz. bourbon
–0.5 oz.-0.75 oz simple syrup (to taste)
–10-12 mint leaves

In a metal cup, gently muddle the mint into the simple syrup. Add bourbon, and fill 2/3 with crushed ice. Stir to chill, until a frost forms on the outside. Then pack the rest of the cup with ice. Take two mint crowns, lightly bruise them with your fingers, and stick them against the inside close to the straw. Enjoy.

Kamikaze

Yet another disco-era cocktail that just needed a few tweaks to make it a refreshing classic, the Kamikaze is worthy of your attention in the here and now. As O’Bryan wrote when he chronicled the plight of the Kamikaze that, “Put the smallest effort toward its development—recruit fresh lime juice and a high quality triple sec—and the Kamikaze can be a great drink: clean, bright and refreshing. It’s a vodka gimlet made a little juicier with orange liqueur, lean and tart, avoiding the lingering presence of tropical fruit or the piquant sweetness of berries. Its clarity reads effortlessly as refinement. The fact that it was conceived without thought and for decades was produced and consumed without thought is immaterial. It really is quite good, and worthy of (unironic) attention.”

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice, and shake hard for 10 to 12 seconds. Strain up into a cocktail glass, and garnish with a lime wedge or wheel.

Napoleon

Born in a beach California enclave of Montecito, the Napoleon comes by its refreshing summer vibes honestly, even if it is made with a seemingly unsummery spirit. Sam Penton at the Manor Bar at the Rosewood Miramar took a high-proof bourbon and the basic structure of a whiskey sour and added some fruitiness and herbaceousness to make this a well-rounded cocktail. The addition of strawberries, vermouth, and Campari are welcome modifiers to the old classic, and their sharpest edges are sanded off with the presence of an egg white to keep it as mellow as you want a summer drink to be.

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker without ice. Seal the shaker, hold tight, and give it a “dry” shake without ice for three to five seconds. Then add ice, seal again, and shake for eight to 10 seconds. Fine strain into a coupe or cocktail glass, and garnish with a couple drops of Angostura bitters or a raspberry, on a pick.

Daiquiri

There are two Daiquiris, and for our purposes, we can divide them into the right kind and the wrong kind—and if you believe Daiquiris to be blended concoctions of sour mix spiked with rum so cheap they don’t sell it in liquor stores, I regret to inform you that you’ve only had the wrong kind. “One is the neon slushy you’d get in Cancun that’s so sweet you involuntarily lick the air after you taste it,” we’ve warned you of previously, “and the other is one of the greatest simple cocktails of all time.” A proper Daiquiri is simply rum, lime, and sugar—find out why it’s a great litmus test of a bartender’s skill, or just make one, below.

Add ingredients to shaker tin, add ice and shake hard for 10 to 12 seconds. Strain off ice into a stemmed coupe glass. Garnish with a thin lime wheel or honestly nothing at all and enjoy while reflecting that the best things are often the simplest.

Fort Tilden Cooler

Bartender Andrew Rice of N.Y.C.’s Attaboy took the template of a Tom Collins—gin, lemon juice, sugar, and soda, itself foundationally refreshing and the original summer banger—and twisted it in two delicious ways. The first was replacing half the gin with fino sherry, the delicate, slightly nutty fortified wine from Spain, which has the dual benefits of lowering the proof and adding a subtle complexity. To complement this, Rice also spiced the whole thing with a dash of absinthe, whose botanical intensity compensates for the sherry’s relative lack of weight. What all of this means together is that the Fort Tilden Cooler is an ice cold and viscerally refreshing charmer, a low-ABV drink that doesn’t taste low-ABV so much as it just tastes crushable. 

Add all liquids except for the soda water to a cocktail shaker with ice. Seal and shake hard for eight to 10 seconds. Strain over fresh ice into a collins glass, top with soda, and garnish with a grapefruit peel.

Bronx

The Bronx is a maligned cocktail. The original recipe does indeed make a pretty bad drink and a survey of available recipes, when people give it the time of day at all, shows that everyone is basically seeing how much they can tweak it and still call it a Bronx. The classic Bronx is a full pour of gin, and about half that much of sweet vermouth, dry vermouth, and orange juice. But I believe there’s greatness in there that just needs to be coaxed out, which I think happens with the recipe below. Make it right and the Bronx is bright and refreshing, juicy and exuberant, a little liquid sunshine with just enough herbal complexity to make it grown up. It’s the perfect cocktail for the type of weather for which biting into a fresh orange just seems like a great idea, and good enough, at absolute minimum, to recommend without insulting it in the same breath.

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker and shake on ice for eight to 10 seconds. Strain into a cocktail glass or coupe, and garnish with an orange peel.

Eastside Rickey

Sometimes all you want is a vodka soda and that’s great. But there are times when you get stuck in a rut, and that can be true of vodka drinkers who don’t wish to move outside of that comfort zone. But there’s a sure-fire gin cocktail that can shake off the hesitancy over trying a new drink and it’s the Eastside Rickey. The gin, lime, cucumber, and mint cocktail is about as refreshing of an ingredient combination you can find—add to that some soda water for effervescence, and you may never want to go back to your vodka soda again.

Eastside Rickey

Muddle cucumber and mint in the bottom of a shaker tin. Add liquid ingredients and ice, seal and shake hard. Strain into a tall glass over fresh ice and top with soda water, and garnish with a mint crown stuck through the middle of a cucumber coin.

Amaretto Sour

We hear you thinking. “The Amaretto Sour? I thought this was about whiskey drinks?” Well, the Amaretto Sour is a whiskey drink, or at least, it should be. It’s been 10 years since a bartender named Jeffrey Morgenthaler wrote on his blog that he had derived “the best Amaretto Sour in the world,” and it was the shake heard round the world. Morgenthaler’s version—Amaretto and lemon, punched up with a pour of high-proof bourbon, and smoothed out with an egg white—utterly transforms the drink. “It’s difficult to overstate how many favors the addition of high-proof bourbon does for the Amaretto Sour,” we write, “it’s not a revision so much as it is born again.”

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker and shake without ice for five to seven seconds to whip the egg white. Add ice and shake hard for eight to 10 seconds. Strain either over fresh ice in a large rocks glass or up in a coupe. Garnish with a lemon peel and, if you like, a cherry.

El Lupolo

This cocktail is what would happen if you just started listing everything that goes best with tequila, and combined the top three or four in one drink just to see if life really is that easy. For starters, lime, obviously. Then grapefruit as well, a legendary combination that appears several times on this very list. And then there’s hops by way of an IPA, a duo so perfect they don’t even really need the others (but it’s nice to have friends). Add Campari to punch up the IPA’s juicy bitterness, and you’ll have a beer cocktail you won’t want to put down. Find the recipe below, and full background and instructions here.

Add all ingredients except for beer into a shaker tin and shake on ice for six to eight seconds. Strain into a tall glass and top with about 3 oz. IPA. Garnish with a grapefruit peel.