The 25 Best Gin Cocktails Every Home Bartender Should Know How to Make

The Tom Collins is one of our foundational drinks, invented sometime in the 19th century (it’s hard to say exactly when) and taking modern form around the time when sparkling water started being widely available. And while it’s a foundational drink in the cocktail canon (enough to have it’s own glass!), it feels like one that’s oft overlooked. But we argue it shouldn’t be. This gin sour lengthened with soda water is a simple yet tasty delight of a drink.

Add gin, lemon, and simple syrup to a cocktail shaker with ice, and shake hard for five to eight seconds. Strain over fresh ice into a tall (Collins) glass, top with soda, and stir briefly to incorporate the soda into the rest of the drink. Garnish with a slice of orange and a cherry, if you have them, or a lemon peel, or honestly nothing at all.

Properly constructed, a Martinez is plush with Italian vermouth but still prickly with gin, enjoying the diamond-clarity of a Martini but with the silken luxuriousness of a Manhattan. More than the Martini or the Manhattan, the Martinez evokes that Gilded Age, an echo of a long past era reflected in the quantity of vermouth and the unusual character of maraschino. I always find myself craving one around Springtime, when it’s somehow both warm and cold simultaneously and you have no idea how to dress yourself, and when the in-between things feel just right.

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

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.

James Bond has attempted to convince us that the Martini is a vodka drink, but the word “Martini” exclusively referred to a mixture of gin and vermouth for the first half of its life. And while vodka Martinis can be charming all their own, we write that “the aromatic complexities of gin and vermouth lock into each other like a vacuum seal, and render the cocktail’s 130-year dominance immediately clear.” We include the most straightforward variation below, but you can also see read two other variations on the Martini.

Add ingredients to a mixing glass with ice. Stir well for 10 seconds (if using small ice) to 25 seconds (if using very large ice), strain into a cocktail or Martini glass, and garnish with a lemon peel.

This equal parts cocktail may knock you on your ass. Invented at the Detroit Athletic Club in 1916, the Last Word was revived in 2003 by legendary Seattle bartender Murray Stenson at the Zig Zag Café. In video above, we show show you how this drink that languished in obscurity for many years because a darling of America’s cocktail revival.

Shake long and hard over ice, 12 to 15 seconds, longer than most drinks—a little added dilution helps this drink be its best self. Strain into a coupe and garnish with a maraschino cherry, a lime wheel, or just nothing at all.

It’s a devilish simple cocktail. Equal parts gin, Campari, sweet vermouth, stirred and served with an orange peel garnish. The Negroni is practically impossible to screw up and has been endlessly tinkered with since Count Camillo Negroni (or maybe someone else, who knows) invented the drink in 1919 when he ordered a version of the Americano made with gin instead of soda water. Who knows, and who cares, because this cocktail doesn’t need any sort of backstory to earn its legendary status.

Add all ingredients to a rocks glass with the biggest piece (or pieces) of ice you have. Stir five to 10 seconds (if you have small ice) or 15 to 20 seconds (if you have big ice). Garnish with an orange peel. Enjoy.

In his legendary 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book, Harry Craddock includes two recipes for Corpse Revivers No. 1, and No. 2. Corpse Reviver No. 1 is essentially a brandy Manhattan that Craddock specifically recommends “before 11 am,” and is so puzzling, so ill-suited to morning drinking, it makes one question the authority of the whole book. Then you turn the page and get to the Corpse Reviver No. 2 and faith is immediately restored, as it is perhaps the best brunch cocktail ever created.

Corpse Reviver No. 2 is equal parts gin, lemon, Cointreau and Lillet Blanc, with a couple dashes of absinthe. It’s tart, bright, juicy and easy, but also somehow simultaneously deep and complex and herbal, the ingredients fitting together tight as a jazz quartet. With Cointreau weighing in at a full 80 proof, it’s deceptively punchy, but not overwhelmingly so. It is one of those drinks that you keep going back to because every sip shows you something new.

Add ingredients to shaker and shake on ice for 10 to 12 seconds. Strain into a stemmed coupe or Martini glass. Garnish with an orange peel.

“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.

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 Aviation isn’t for everyone. However, if it’s for you, you’ll love it. That’s because this classic gin cocktail, invented by Hugo Ensslin in New York in 1916, it features the floral and divisive creme de violette along with maraschino liqueur. A little bit of creme de violette goes a long way. This variation on a gin sour was rediscovered more than a decade ago by David Wondrich and became part of the cocktail renaissance that make drinking in America so much better.

Add all the ingredients to a cocktail tin with ice and shake for 10 to 12 seconds. Double strain it into a coupe and garnish with a maraschino cherry.

Before gin and Champagne ever got involved, the French 75, officially “Matériel de 75 mm Mle 1897,” was a 2,700-lb field gun rolled out by the French to fight WWI. As for the cocktail, made as it originally was—which is to say, a full-strength drink into which was mixed a half glass of wine—the French 75 certainly had the firepower to earn its name. That first reported recipe differs from what you find now. For years the French 75 was served on the rocks in a tall glass, essentially a Tom Collins with the soda water swapped for sparkling wine. The modern incarnation is in a flute, sans the ice. In the video above, we show how to make the two versions of the beloved Champagne cocktail the French 75 and explain the key differences between the two.

Proper French 75

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

Old School French 75

Shake first three ingredients over ice. Strain into a tall glass over ice, and top with about 3 oz. of sparkling wine.

The White Lady’s origin story involves a fairly dull dispute and we’ll spare you the details, but the cocktail took its current form in the foundational Savoy Cocktail Book, published in 1930. Within the decade bartenders would start using egg white as well, which is still what most people do today. But the recipe we lean toward is the one offered up legendary Japanese bartender Hidetsugu Ueno, who eschews the egg for his carefully crafted take on the classic.

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice, and give it a long, hard shake, about eight to 10 seconds. Strain off the ice into a chilled coupe or Martini glass, and garnish with an orange peel.

Invented by bartender Henry C. Ramos in the late 19th century at a bar in New Orleans, the Ramos Gin Fizz is one of those cocktails you really have to want in order to make it. That’s because you shake the Ramos Gin Fizz for a long time. Like, a really long time. We’re talking up to 12 minutes of shaking. But this gin cocktail is oh so worth it.

Add all ingredients except cream and soda water to a cocktail tin. Seal and shake without ice for 15 to 20 seconds. Open, add three to five cubes or a generous handful of pebble ice, seal and shake vigorously for about three to four minutes. Meanwhile, add about 1 to 2 inches of soda water to the bottom of a chilled, 10-to 12-oz. straight-sided collins glass. Now add the cream, and briefly shake (five seconds or so) to mix it all together, then strain the cocktail off the ice into the glass until the liquid line reaches nearly to the top. Then put the glass in the fridge to let the foam set for at least a minute, ideally three or four.

Once it’s set, retrieve the glass, poke a small hole in the center of the foam with a straw or bar spoon and slowly pour the remainder of the cocktail into the center hole until the foam head lifts above the rim of the glass. If you run out of cocktail, you can add a bit more soda, but don’t push your luck, even the best made Ramos will mushroom if the head gets too tall. Garnish with a straw balanced atop the foam and a sense of accomplishment.

A century after the Hanky Panky’s invention, the cocktail’s name has aged like a lace doily, but while it may sound like an antique, it thankfully doesn’t taste like one. The gin and sweet vermouth complement each other famously (it’s two-thirds of a Negroni, after all) and the latter at a quantity that might suggest that this is a mild and genteel cocktail, but for the black magic of Fernet-Branca—that most pugilistic of amari—where the tiny addition is still enough to sharpen the drink’s softness, festooning it with a mane of needles. The resulting cocktail is like a Golden Age movie star, seductive but bracing, beautiful but with a quick tongue, and every bit the “real hanky-panky” that it was when Coley invented it all those years ago.

Add all ingredients to a mixing glass with ice and stir for 10 to 20 seconds. Strain up into a cocktail or martini glass, and garnish with an orange peel.

This variation on the Martini, named for a stage production that came out in 1941, highlights the incredible versatility of gin. The Arsenic and Old Lace is what would happen if you took the resonant clarity of a Martini, and gave it, as we write, “a floral punch from creme de violette and a piquant zing of absinthe.” These two accent marks—a quarter and an eighth of an ounce, respectively—utterly change the character of the drink.

Add all ingredients to a mixing glass with ice. Stir well for 10 seconds (if using small ice) to 25 seconds (if using very large ice), strain into a cocktail glass or coupe, and garnish with a lemon peel.

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.

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.

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The Bramble is a vibe. “As the days get longer and the sun gains strength,” we wrote around this time last year, “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.

We know the Vesper comes from Casino Royale, the first James Bond novel, penned into modest fame by Ian Flemming in 1953 and shoved onto the global stage by Daniel Craig in 2006. We know both the proportions and the preparation, spelled out with unusual alacrity by Bond himself: “In a deep Champagne goblet… three measures of Gordon’s [gin], one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large, thin slice of lemon peel.” We also know it’s named for his alluring companion, Vesper Lynd.

This drink, as described by 007 himself, is ludicrous. It’s four ounces of high-octane booze and although it’s all booze, it’s shaken when the rules of cocktails deem it should be stirred. So we played with the proportions a little bit and held onto the shaking to help mitigate the booziness a bit.

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker. Add ice, shake hard for 10 to 12 seconds, strain up into a large martini or cocktail glass and garnish with a lemon peel.

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.

People call the Alaska Cocktail a Martini variation, but it’s much more like a Gin Old Fashioned: It’s spirit, bitters, and a sweetener, except in this case, the sweetener is 80 proof. There’s no rich oak-aged whiskey to cushion the blow here—it’s the crystalline purity of gin, cold and clean like a mountain top, only softened and deepened by the inimitable honeyed complexity of the Chartreuse. The golden liqueur plays off the spirit like sun off snow, bringing some herbal warmth through the bracing chill. It’s a high-stakes game, but drink one, and the appeal of high stakes games start to make a little more sense.

Stir on ice for 20 to 30 seconds. Strain off ice into chilled coupe glass, and garnish with a lemon peel.

The Army & Navy, we know now, is a gin sour—a stout pour of gin with fresh lemon juice, whose acidity is balanced by the sweet almond syrup orgeat, and spiced with a couple dashes of Angostura Bitters. The orgeat adds a creamy texture while obviously avoiding cream, the cocktail remaining tart and bright, lightly piney and lightly floral, and to me reminds me of nothing so much as the first budding of the season, which makes it perfect for these nascent days of spring.

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker, add ice, and shake good and hard for eight to 10 seconds. Strain up into a cocktail glass or coupe, and garnish with a lemon peel or lemon wheel, or nothing at all.

The White Negroni was invented in 2001 by English bartender Wayne Collins in a move of apparent desperation. Collins, along with Plymouth Gin director Nick Blacknell, had traveled from London to Bordeaux for a spirits exposition and the gentlemen were struck one evening, as cocktail people often are, with a sudden and urgent thirst for a Negroni. They went to what passed for a liquor store but, finding no Campari, opted for Suze, a French bitter liqueur—similar in type to Campari but highlighter yellow instead of Campari’s candy-apple red—and the light local Lillet Blanc instead of sweet vermouth.

Collins stirred it up and served it with a slice of fresh grapefruit, and both gentlemen, pleased, agreed that the drink deserved a name. Collins, in a flash of insight, saw the drink’s potential: “Let’s just call it a White Negroni,” he said. The Negroni was the inspiration, after all, and it follows the same template, just with the two red ingredients subbed for white ones (yellow, really, but then as now, “Yellow Negroni” feels unacceptable). The drink made its way across the channel to London, then across the ocean to New York, and once Audrey Saunders started serving it at her legendary SoHo bar Pegu Club, it quickly spread around the world.

Add all ingredients to a rocks glass with a large piece of ice and stir for 10 to 15 seconds. Garnish with a grapefruit peel. Enjoy.

Cocktails made with fat-washed spirits have been around for nearly 20 years now, with the pioneers at New York’s PDT creating a bourbon Old Fashioned infused with the flavor of real bacon. It only made sense for the fat-washing trend to come to other classics like the Martini as well, with olive oil being the fat used.

We’ve tried countless Olive Oil Martinis over the years and never really found one we’ve liked. That was until we tried one with fresh, high-quality olive oil. The oil you use is so vital that the infused spirit is not even worth making if you aren’t reaching for the good stuff. If you do have great olive oil, you will have an excellent drink.

Add all ingredients to a mixing glass, add ice, and stir briskly for 10 to 20 seconds (longer for bigger ice, shorter for smaller). Strain into a Martini or coupe glass, and garnish with three high-quality olives and, if you feel like it, a few drops of olive oil.

If the Martini is a tailored suit, then the Tuxedo No. 2 is, well, a tuxedo. It’s a dressed-up Martini—or perhaps dressed down, more on that in a moment—but in either case it’s a Martini with a bit of extra panache. It trades the Martini’s diamond-like clarity and simplicity for the resonant depth of maraschino and the punch of absinthe—a bold act, perhaps, but also one that earns the cocktail its name.

Add all ingredients to a mixing glass with ice. Stir for about 10 seconds (if using small ice) or up to 30 seconds (if using large ice), until cold. Strain into a stemmed cocktail glass, express the oils of a lemon peel over the top and garnish with the peel and, if desired, a cocktail cherry.