The 7 Best Summer Cocktail Recipes Made With Rum, Gin, Vodka or Whiskey

Smoke and tropical fruit are already best friends—make an appointment with an al pastor taco for more examples of this—and this cocktail invented by San Francisco bartender Thad Vogler pairs them beautifully. The Single Village Fix’s pineapple syrup harnesses the vibrant smoke and character of mezcal, embracing and even amplifying its charms, and the lime cuts through any the sweetness and makes the whole thing refreshing. That’s what’s so cool about the Single Village Fix. It’s a beautiful cocktail, but it doesn’t neutralize the eccentricities of the mezcal the way a drink like the Naked and Famous does. Instead it showcases them, putting the mezcal’s characteristics on a stage in the best possible light, so more people can appreciate it.

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.

Meet the Red Raider. It’s bourbon, lemon, pomegranate, and orange liqueur, and comes to us from an old printing of the Mr. Boston Official Bartender’s Guide, where it’s reportedly been since at least 1974. Where they got it, we can’t know—probably Lubbock, Texas, as the mind immediately goes to Texas Tech, whose famous football team has answered to the “Red Raiders” since 1937, though it’s worth noting that at the time there were several Red Raiders across the country, from Southern Oregon University to Colgate University in New York, so it’s really hard to say.

Regardless, the Mr. Boston is not exactly a hallowed text in the mixology community, and in this book the cocktail almost certainly would’ve stayed, were it not for famous bartender and owner Erick Castro, who dusted it off and featured it in a video in 2022. From there, it’s been seized upon by various cocktail bloggers and influencers, all of whom have been impressed by the ease, accessibility, and deliciousness of this overlooked little sour. The Red Raider “is a bourbon sour that can definitely use a bit of a spotlight,” said Castro, “which is wild because the drink is incredibly delicious, it goes back decades, but you never ever see it on any cocktail menus.”

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker and shake good and hard for six to eight seconds. Strain over ice into a rocks glass and garnish with an orange peel if you’ve got one, a lemon peel or wheel if you don’t, or maybe just nothing at all. 

The Jet Pilot is essentially a Daiquiri—rum, lime and simple syrup, one of the world’s great three ingredient drinks—put through a kaleidoscope. The citrus is split in two (now both lime and grapefruit), the sweetness is split in two (now both cinnamon syrup and falernum), it picks up a couple dashes along the way (both absinthe and Angostura bitters) and, incredibly, uses not one rum but three. It’s delightfully overpacked and absurd and delicious.

Shake on crushed ice and dump into a large rocks glass. Top with more crushed ice and garnish with a cinnamon stick, a spent lime half, a grapefruit half-moon and/or a small figurine of a Pan Am airplane, if you happen to have one lying around.

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.

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.

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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.

New Yorkers are still basking in the afterglow of the Knicks’ first NBA title in 53 years, so this week’s rye whiskey cocktail is for them. Now, the real cocktail nerds among us will retort that it wasn’t a New Yorker who invented this, but some unnamed Chicago bartender in the early 1880s had the improbable idea of taking a Whiskey Sour and adding a little red wine to the top. And in a bizarre flash of insight this Windy City denizen created one of the great warm weather whiskey drinks of our time. Alone, a Whiskey Sour without an egg white is a serviceable, if incomplete, cocktail. Add a little red wine, though, and it becomes juicy and charming, the fruit in the wine perfectly filling in the gaps in the cocktail. It would eventually be called a New York Sour, but does this make sense to dedicate this to New York when it’s actually by a guy from Chicago? Well, Jalen Brunson grew up in Chicago, and New Yorkers have no trouble embracing him.

Add rye, lemon juice and simple syrup to the shaker tin with ice and shake hard for 10 to 12 seconds. Strain over fresh ice in a rocks glass, leaving 0.5-inch clearance on the top of the glass. Top with between 0.5 oz. and 1 oz. of light red wine.

There was a time, not too long ago, when the everyday bar patron viewed mezcal’s flavor as a bit too assertive. Bartenders still found ways to incorporate the smoky agave spirit into drinks by using a little less mezcal and supplementing it with tequila, a method known as “splitting the base.” Lots of cocktails split the base to create new and interesting flavor combinations in a drink. Such was the case with the Cobra Clutch, an agave cocktail with pineapple and lime that combined mezcal and tequila. Although mezcal has been embraced by the drinking public much more since the Cobra Clutch was invented more than a decade ago, this cocktail isn’t improved by getting rid of the tequila in favor of its smokier cousin. In fact, the Cobra Clutch is a shining example of how and when to split the base in your cocktail to achieve a flavor you couldn’t get from just picking one spirit or another.

And all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with crushed ice. Briefly shake to incorporate the ingredients, then pour into a large rocks glass. Top with more crushed ice, and garnish with a mint sprig.