The 9 Best Thanksgiving Cocktails to Mix at Your Turkey Day Feast

In Italian culture, eating and drinking are seen largely as two arms of one culinary experience, meant to be enjoyed concurrently. Before a meal, there is an aperitivo, bitter herbs infused into a little alcohol help stimulate the appetite. With dinner comes wine, of course, and after the meal, there are digestivos, even more bitter herbs in even more alcohol, to help with digestion. Campari, the sharply bitter, candy-red Italian liqueur, is often thought of as the original aperitivo, and the Americano—Campari, sweet vermouth, and soda water—is its platonic ideal. So as you get ready to dive into your feast, enjoy a drink that’ll get that appetite going.

Combine Campari and sweet vermouth in a tall glass over rocks. Top with soda water, stir to combine and garnish with an orange peel.

The Hot Mulled Apple Cider cocktail is the most labor-intensive on this list, but even in this august company, it might be the tastiest. It’s also pure fall: Apples are at their very best right now, and we insist that juicing them, mulling the juice with spices and spiking it with Irish whiskey “warms you from the inside in a way you otherwise can only get by watching videos of soldiers coming home to their dogs.” It seems like everyone on the internet has a Mulled Apple Cider recipe and a lot of them get the main points wrong, so check out the instructions here, and then do yourself a favor and make it.

Designed for an 8 oz. mug—scale up as needed

Pour whiskey and cider into a pre-heated mug, leaving a little less than one inch of room from the rim. Gently pour half-whipped unsweetened cream so it layers on top. Garnish with a pinch of ground cinnamon.

Invented at Chicago’s acclaimed cocktail bar the Violet Hour, the Autumn Negroni takes the classic cocktail and layers it with flavors like styling an outfit for fall. The sweetness of the amari mixes with the gin’s juniper and Peychaud’s slight anise edge, followed by the bittersweet Campari and the brightness of the orange bitters, but right when the Campari would turn rusty bitter that quarter ounce of Fernet Branca prickles up all peppermint and menthol, only to be batted back down by the long, earthy finish of the Cynar. It’s like a relay race, each ingredient holding the baton for a moment before handing it off to another. It really is remarkable.

Add all ingredients to a mixing glass with ice and stir well for 15 to 20 seconds. Strain up into a coupe or cocktail glass and garnish with an orange peel.

The Michigander was created by a cocktail bartender Jason Schiffer, who grew up in the Midwest and relocated to Southern California and in the process missed having true seasons. So he wanted to make a drink that capture what it felt like to be back home in autumn. “I had a picture in my mind with these nostalgic tastes and smells,” he says, and so he grabbed apple brandy, an obvious seasonal choice, and added to it Cynar, a bitter earthy Italian liqueur that, when mixed with the apples, tastes like how a freshly raked pile of leaves smells. Honey, normally a springtime flavor, serves here to give a warm sweetness to the apples and fresh lemon juice ensures the whole project doesn’t get too sweet. As a garnish, a grapefruit peel, adding a slightly numbing textured bitterness to the experience, ties the whole thing together. It’s autumn in a glass. It really is remarkable.

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker. Add ice and shake for eight to 10 seconds. Strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice and garnish with a grapefruit peel. 

Even though cranberry “juice” is so ubiquitous that it comes out of a plastic gun behind almost every bar in this country, cranberries—whole, actual, cranberries—appear like magic in the stores a few weeks before Thanksgiving and disappear after Christmas just as swiftly. Cranberries are inherently festive. They are the fruit of the holiday season. But to capture the fruit’s essence in your drink, there’s a little bit of a problem. Pretty much all the cranberry juice you’ve ever had is actually cranberry “juice cocktail” (some cranberry, mixed with lots of grape and apple juices) and is sweet and featureless and so ubiquitous it breeds contempt (Cosmopolitan, anyone?). On the other hand, actual 100 percent cranberry juice is punishingly bitter and tart, and is not improved by the pasteurization required before being bottled and shelved. So what to do? We suggest getting fresh cranberries and making your own syrup as the true backbone of this drink. It’s not too much work and we show you how to make it below. And for the Spiced Cranberry Sour, you can use any spirit you like, though we’re partial to an aged rum.

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker. Add ice and shake hard for six to eight seconds. Strain over fresh ice into a rocks glass and garnish with an orange peel, a cinnamon stick or a smile.

*Spiced Cranberry Syrup

Add all the ingredients to a sauce pan, bring to a simmer and let it bubble away on low for 15 minutes. The cranberries will begin to pop—you can put a cover on to keep splatter down but be careful of boil-over. After 15 minutes remove from heat, let cool, strain into a jar or Tupperware and store in the fridge. The recipe yields 12 oz. and will last in the fridge about one month.

Most tequila recipes are bright and refreshing, leaning on the spirit’s inherent affinity for sunshine. The Rosita is the other kind. It’s a world away for Margaritas, another affair entirely—a cocktail bitter and sweet, darker and more complex. It was modernized and popularized (twice!) by none other than early cocktail revivalist and notorious eccentric, the late, great Gary “Gaz” Regan.

Add all ingredients to a mixing glass with ice. Stir for five to 10 seconds (if using very small ice) to 25 to 30 seconds (if using very large ice), strain either into a rocks glass over fresh ice or up, in a coupe, depending on your preference. Garnish with a grapefruit peel.

See Also

The 7 Best Chillable Red Wines to Drink Now

If you’re serving to a big crowd, the cocktail hour before your big feast screams out for a good punch. You may enjoy mixing each drink yourself, but with a great punch there are too many positives to ignore: It’s easy, it’s precise, it’s all pre-made and it remains the quickest way to get a glass in someone’s hand. Keep it on the lower-alcohol side, and it’s the perfect opening salvo to ease into the night. You can serve this from a big bowl, but you can also make a batched and bottled version as directed in the recipe below where you pre-dilute the mixture and keep it ice-cold in large, sealable bottles. With an empty glass in hand, your guest can be poured the punch as if it’s a bottle of wine.

Combine all ingredients and stir well. Pour into a one-liter bottle with a stopper. Serve ice-cold.

One of the biggest problems with an Espresso Martini has been that so few restaurants (let alone homes) have espresso, and aren’t going to get it—we just simply weren’t willing to do the work to make this drink great. But the past decade has done us two favors: It has given us better liqueurs and made cold brew (ice coffee’s stronger big brother) universally available. Suddenly, it’s easy to make the Espresso Martini great, as cold brew has a much longer shelf life than espresso, and is incalculably easier to procure. This has allowed the Espresso Martini—the version that isn’t bad—to be democratized and modernized at the same time. This updated take has an arching dynamic complexity, a deep coffee richness and a sweetness held very much in check. It’s a delightful little drink to have with dessert, if you’d like something stiffer than just a cappuccino with your pie.

Add ingredients to shaker tin, and shake well over ice. Strain up into a coupe or cocktail glass, and garnish with three coffee beans. 

Consider the Brandy Alexander, a cocktail so old the mere mention of it invites the images of grandparents and gramophones. The Brandy Alexander is brandy (Cognac, usually, that most celebrated type of brandy), crème de cacao, and cream. Almost as early as you can find it mentioned you can find it insulted and dismissed—in 1930’s host guide Shake Em Up, authors Virginia Elliot and Phil D. Strong lump it into a category for “tender young things who have just been taken off stick candy,” and offer that you can use crème de cacao to “make them up some kind of [drink] and push them under the piano to suck on it.” The reliably grumpy David Embury, in 1948, calls it “deadly” because it “taste[s] harmless,” and waves it off as “a futile waste of good liquor.”

If you catch yourself nodding along, I have a question for you: Have you ever actually tasted a Brandy Alexander? If you had, you’d already know that the Brandy Alexander is not just worth your time but is in fact shockingly delicious, and one of the best things you can have after a meal. There is, of course, a way to make it too sweet, but increase the measure of Cognac just a touch and the drink becomes locked into balance, a decadent delight, the chocolate and cream round and deeply satisfying, all driven by the Cognac’s powerful oak and fruit.

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice and shake hard for eight to 10 seconds. Strain off the ice into a cocktail or coupe glass, and garnish with a shave of fresh nutmeg.