The Most Refreshing Gin Drinks to Mix

Before the Floradora was a drink, it was a musical. It was a smash hit in London in 1899, and an even bigger hit on Broadway the next year. At the time, it was the third-most successful Broadway run ever, and the stage production owed much of its popularity to a chorus sextette swishing around the stage who became known as the Floradora Girls.

So one night in 1901, the Florodora Girls were out on the town after a show. One of them, named Susie Drake, began refusing to drink anything but lemonade unless it was “something brand new,” made just for her, so the closest barman, Jimmy O’Brien, jumped to the task. He combined some fresh raspberries with lime, the best ginger ale he could muster and enough gin to “catch the taste,” and gave it to her. One can only imagine his bated breath as she took that first tentative sip of this florid red drink, and, as she happily approved of it, he named it the only thing he could: The Florodora.

For all of its massive successes, and for all of the fame, money, and love generated by this Broadway juggernaut, 125 years later the biggest lasting impact of Florodora is this spicy and fruity little cocktail, created for one particular girl in a particularly imperious mood. The Floradora is a drink of contrasts—bright fruit and spicy ginger, tall and refreshing but plenty strong—a lovely way to welcome in the warm glow of summer, and perhaps get a beautiful stranger to marry you while you’re at it. 

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker and shake hard on ice. Strain into a tall glass, and top with soda water. Garnish with a lime wheel or raspberries or both.

The Bee’s Knees—gin, lemon, and honey—is a simple drink with a rich backstory. It was invented in the Roaring ’20s in Paris by none other than “Unsinkable” Molly Brown, the woman who survived the Titanic sinking and went on to become a leading progressive activist, suffragette, and, eventually, a bon vivant in Paris. We show you how to make the classic below, but the Bee’s Knees is a great starting point for endless variations.

Add ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice, shake hard for 10 to 12 seconds and strain off the ice into a coupe or Martini glass. Garnish with a lemon peel, a lemon wheel or even nothing at all.

The Enzoni is a phenomenal little drink, a true banger when the sun comes out. It’s bright and refreshing, bitter and sweet, but its unique gift is its irrepressible juicy exuberance. The aforementioned illusion about grapes is that they should be in everything; they shouldn’t. Grapes are surprisingly subtle in a cocktail—they don’t offer flavor as much as they give the cocktail shape and a broad refreshing quality, disappearing behind the other ingredients, and in the balance tend to add a layer of noise that distracts from the clarity of what you’re trying to achieve. In other words, they’re not bold enough to be the main character, but too present to completely blend in. The reason the Enzoni is so special is that it has plenty of boldness, but what it doesn’t have is the right shape. It needs the grapes. 

Add grapes to a cocktail shaker and briefly smash with a muddler or something blunt—you’re looking to break the skins and press fruit, not pulverize it into jelly. Add liquids and ice, seal the shaker and shake hard for six to eight seconds. Strain over fresh ice in a rocks glass and garnish with some more grapes on a pick and, if you feel like it, an orange slice.

The turn of the millennium is when vodka was at the apex of its cultural power. Vodka had overtaken gin in popularity by 1967, but by 2000 had fully usurped it, like Claudius to King Hamlet—occupied its position, married its wife, and taken control of its lands. Cocktails like the Gimlet that had long been understood as gin stalwarts were treated as vodka drinks by default. This happened over and over: Vodka French 75s. Vodka tonics. Vodka Collins’. Even the mighty Martini, gin’s seemingly impenetrable fortress, was so conquered by vodka that it was then (and still for many is today) a surprising piece of trivia that the Martini was exclusively a gin drink for the first 50 years of its life.

This is when Audrey Saunders turned back the tides of time. Saunders was one of the earliest and most talented leaders of the mixology renaissance and in 2000 was working at a place called Beacon and had begun to see gin as something of a cause. She wanted to make the best tasting drinks she could, and a lot of times, that means gin, as it’s a spirit truly built for cocktails.

Inspired by a proper Mojito, she recruited fresh mint, which harmonizes with gin’s inherent herbaceousness. Lime and simple syrup echoed the satisfying push and pull of a proper Gimlet, and a splash of homemade ginger beer gave a spice that lingers on the palate, a compelling closing argument for cocktails with fresh ingredients. It was, of course, a hit. She took it with her from bar to bar until she opened her own, the revolutionary Pegu Club, in 2005, where the Gin-Gin Mule was on the opening menu. It converted vodka-philes by the legion, which was good because when Pegu Club opened, there wasn’t a bottle of vodka in the building. 

Add mint, gin, lime, and ginger syrup to a cocktail shaker with ice, and shake good and hard for six to eight seconds. Strain into a tall glass over fresh ice, top with soda, and garnish with a mint sprig.

The Gimlet is a classic cocktail that didn’t start behind some fancy bar, but on the high seas. Well, kind of. The British Navy was suffering from scurvy when it ruled the high seas, until Lauchlan Rose found a way to preserve lime with sugar. Rose’s Lime Cordial was born. Sailors could mix Rose’s concoction with their rum ration, but officers required good British gin, and gin with lime cordial is a Gimlet. Despite being a simple two-ingredient cocktail on paper, the right cordial is crucial. You’ll want to throw away that mass-produced Rose’s Lime Juice you’d find today in stores today and opt for one you make yourself. Fortunately, in the video above we show you how to make that cordial and the drink as well.

Add ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice and shake hard for 10 to 12 seconds. Strain off the ice either up into a cocktail glass or else onto fresh ice in a rocks glass, and garnish with a lime wheel or peel.

*Lime Cordial

Recipe from jeffreymorgenthaler.com

Zest the lime and put the lime zest into a blender. Juice the zested lime(s) into the blender, then add the sugar, water, and citric acid. After blending on medium speed for 30 seconds, strain with a fine strainer. Bottle and refrigerate or mix a cocktail immediately, if you so choose.

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.

The Bramble is a vibe. As the days get longer and the sun gains strength, cocktails like the Bramble float back into our minds, as if compelled by the season. English bartending legend Dick Bradsell invented this charmer back in the 1980s, inspired, he would later explain, “by the fresh blackberries I used to get on the Isle of Wight.” Tart, bright, and fresh, this is essentially a gin sour with a plush kiss of blackberry liqueur, made extra refreshing by crushed ice.

Add gin, lemon juice, and simple syrup to a shaker with a handful of crushed ice. Shake briefly to aerate and incorporate the ingredients, then dump contents into a rocks glass. Top with more crushed ice, then drizzle the crème de mûre on top. Garnish with a lemon slice and a blackberry.

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.

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.

You could spend weeks drinking nothing but different tasty gin sour variations, but personally, we 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.

Holland Gin is also called “genever,” and is, if you haven’t met it, weird. It’s a fat, malty, proto-gin, and dates from the 1600s or so, when the Dutch would infuse juniper berries into alcohol believing them to be medicinal, then additionally infuse other spices for more medicine or better taste or both (the word “gin” comes from “genever,” which literally means “juniper”). It’s the kind of spirit we had before the clean purity of modern gins was technologically possible, and so has much more in common with a botanical white whiskey than any modern gin anyone’s ever had. As for the experience of it—well, that can be polarizing.

Enter Ernest Hemingway, a man who ostensibly never found a spirit he didn’t like. Hemingway and his friend and author Charles Baker Jr. were on a multi-day boat trip sometime in the 1930s, fishing for giant tuna in the gulf stream. Like anyone trying to go round-for-round with Hemingway, Baker was, by the second day, “withering slightly on vine.” So Hemingway whipped up a hangover remedy, the author’s favorite beverage of the moment—genever, lime, and a heaping dose of bitters, tall and strong, on crushed ice. Given the circumstances and the fact that Hemingway had recently coined his other cocktail Death in the Afternoon, Baker christened it Death in the Gulf Stream.

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake good and hard for eight to 10 seconds, strain into a rocks or tall glass onto cracked or crushed ice, and garnish with a lime wheel, wedge, or peel.