The Best Fall Cocktails Every Home Bartender Should Know How to Make

The problem with adding smoke to your cocktails is that it’s a blunt tool that’s so easy to use wrong. When you’re out at a bar and see the glass cloche filled with smoke lifted to reveal a drink inside, it’s a pretty safe bet that the cocktail will not be good. Smoking a cocktail like that is far too imprecise. But there is a better way to smoke your cocktail and in an episode of our Cocktails for Grown Ups, we show you how to do it. First, we demonstrate how you can smoke your syrup if you’re making a bunch of smoky drinks. Second, we show you our method when you’re making just one drink at a time. The smoky cocktail in question here is the Palo Santo, one created for the Michelin three-star restaurant Addison.

Combine ingredients in a mixing glass with ice and stir for 10 to 25 seconds (shorter for small ice, longer for big ice). Then, put a piece of palo santo wood on a non-reactive surface (stainless steel, a cast iron pan, or just a larger piece of different wood) and burn it with a blowtorch until it starts to smoke. Invert your glass over the smoke and let it infuse there for eight to 10 seconds, then flip the glass right-side-up, allowing the smoke to escape. Then add ice to a rocks glass and strain the drink over that fresh ice, and garnish with an orange peel.

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.

Some products—not many, but some—just work in cocktails. And that’s the case with Bénédictine, the herbal French liqueur that gives the Monte Carlo its warming fall spice. The Monte Carlo is among the simplest drinks on this list or any other, but the complexity and charm of the Bénédictine, replete with honey, cinnamon, vanilla, cardamom, nutmeg, saffron and so much else, makes it a crowd pleaser. That the liqueur sports a 513 year “history” that’s almost certainly made-up is immaterial. What really matters is how it defines this outstanding drink.

Stir on ice in a rocks glass, the bigger the ice, the better. Garnish with a lemon peel. Sip slowly, and enjoy.

When we first wrote about the Morning Glory Fizz, we acknowledge right at the top that “there is nothing—nothing whatsoever—about scotch whiskey that suggests it might be nice to have for breakfast.” Nonetheless, this excellent and unlikely cocktail was, astoundingly and as the name suggests, conceived to be enjoyed in the morning. It does so by bridging the gap between the dark intensity of scotch whiskey and the breezy vibes of a bubbly cooler, which also makes it perfect for the ambivalence of fall, for when it’s too warm for a jacket but too cold without one.

Add all ingredients, except for the soda water, to a cocktail tin. Seal tightly and “dry” shake, without ice, for five to eight seconds, in order to whip the egg white. Add ice, reseal and shake well for 10 to 12 seconds. Strain off the ice into a tall glass without ice, add the soda, garnish with a lemon peel or orange peel.

If tequila is your best friend, mezcal is your best friend’s dangerous cousin, the one who rides a motorcycle and smokes cigarettes. It wouldn’t hit American cocktails until 2007, when a bartender named Phil Ward at Death & Co. in NYC decided to smuggle mezcal into people’s glasses, flanked on all sides by the now-acceptable tequila. Ward’s original Oaxaca Old Fashioned was three parts tequila to one part mezcal—if you, too, are a little iffy on the smoky, muscular spirit, feel free to make it his way.

Grab a rocks glass the biggest piece of ice you have that will fit into it. If you don’t have large cubes, fill with the biggest ice you have. Add ingredients, stir briefly to integrate them together and garnish with a large grapefruit peel, expressing the oils over the top of the drink before adding the peel to the glass.

These days, if you hear about this scotch classic at all, you probably hear it maligned. It’s the cocktail bartenders love to hate: “Too sweet!” you’ll hear, as if that’s some kind of insurmountable problem. But reduce the quantity of the sweet ingredients and add a splash of citrus, and it becomes suddenly clear why the Blood and Sand has lasted in the canon for almost 100 years. To avoid it is really to miss out: “The Blood and Sand is one of those cocktails that synergizes magically into something completely new” we say, with flavors that “lock together so tightly you can’t find the seams.”

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice and shake hard for 12 to 15 seconds. Strain up into a coupe or cocktail glass and garnish with an orange peel.

In hindsight, the American Trilogy is so obvious, it’s as if you asked for an fall-themed Old Fashioned from ChatGPT. When it was invented, though, in or around 2006 in New York, it was a revolution—at the time, no one was making split-based cocktails, so when Richard Boccato and Michael McIlroy combined apple brandy and rye whiskey into a single cocktail, it spread around the world. It’s not just novelty. Rye and apple brandy are fast friends—the apple brandy adding an autumnal echo to rye’s grainy persistence.

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.

to make an authentic Brooklyn cocktail, Amer Picon, is illegal in the United States. So despite this drink being perhaps better than its older brother, the Manhattan, you’re much less likely to encounter it in the wild. However we tinkered endlessly to a substitute for this French liqueur and has found one in using Amaro Ramozzotti and a couple dashes of orange bitters to go with the rye whiskey, dry vermouth, and maraschino liqueur.

Add all ingredients to a chilled mixing glass. Add ice and stir briskly for 10 seconds (if using small ice) to 25 seconds (if using big ice). Strain into a chilled coupe or cocktail glass, and garnish with a maraschino cherry.

Of the 10 million or so variations on the Negroni the Boulevardier is probably the oldest and almost certainly the best. A mixture of bourbon, Campari, and sweet vermouth, the Boulevardier replaces the prickly gin with the broad oaky shoulders of a good American whiskey, bringing a welcome touch of vanilla to Campari’s orange. It’s branchy herbaceousness, ample fruit, and bittersweet character fit into the season perfectly, equally at home in both warm and cold weather, and either before or after dinner,

Add ingredients to a rocks glass with ice. Stir for 10 seconds if the ice is small, 30 seconds if one big cube and somewhere between if ice is somewhere between. 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 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.

Manhattan (the place) may be inimitable, but Manhattan (the cocktail) gets imitated all the time. This is where the Greenpoint comes from, an excellent neo-classic riff on a Manhattan that was invented at Milk & Honey in New York, and comprises the classic build of Manhattan—rye, sweet vermouth, and bitters—into which has been spliced the inimitable French herbal liqueur, Yellow Chartreuse. The Chartreuse charms the cocktail, giving it a bright herbaceousness and seductive spice, playful and fascinating, with the liqueur’s full battery of gifts echoing into a long, ambrosial finish.

Add all the ingredients to a mixing glass with ice and stir for about 10 to 15 seconds (if using small ice) or about 20 to 30 seconds (if using big ice). Take heed: This drink benefits from a slight bit more dilution than a standard Manhattan. Once perfect, strain off the ice into a chilled coupe or cocktail glass, and garnish with a lemon peel.

In 2004 in San Francisco, everyone who was doing “mixology” was leaning into the region’s year-round availability of fresh produce, so the city’s cocktails were full of things like satsuma mandarins and fennel bulbs and garnished with fistfuls of lemon balm. Jon Santer, with his Revolver, went a different way. This dark and broody Old Fashioned variation is, we claim, “among the best cocktails in the neo-classic pantheon,” and comes with a bonus kick of caffeine to help with the shift back to standard time, for when you go to Happy Hour and it’s already pitch black outside.

Add all ingredients to a rocks glass over a large piece of ice and stir. Garnish with a flamed orange peel or a regular orange peel.

This quintessential New Orleans cocktail, the Sazerac, has a beautiful spice character from the rye whiskey, compared to an Old Fashioned that would use the sweeter bourbon. To merely dismiss the Sazerac as yet another Old Fashioned variation is to miss its charms. The Peychaud’s Bitters, all cherry and anise as opposed to Angostura Bitters’ cinnamon and clove, combines with the herbal pop of absinthe and the spicy backbone of the rye to create something wholly new. Served as it is without ice, the herbaceousness transforms as it warms, evolving contemplatively in your glass.

Take a rocks glass and either chill it in the freezer or with ice water. While it gets cold, in a separate mixing glass, combine liquid ingredients and stir for 10 seconds (if using very small ice) to 30 seconds (if using bigger cubes). Grab your now cold rocks glass, coat the inside with absinthe and empty the excess, then strain the cocktail into the absinthe-rinsed glass. Express a lemon peel over the top and then discard, serving the cocktail without garnish.

This classic from 1937 is the perfect autumnal whiskey drink, with half its soul in summer and the other half in winter. On one hand, it’s made refreshing with lime juice, and is totally suited for backyard barbecue sipping. On the other, the recipe incorporates a small but significant amount of allspice liqueur, which gives it an avalanche of textured spice that finds it a home by the fire. The Lion’s Tail is a transitional drink that tastes like if a Jamaican jerk chicken and a Whiskey Sour couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker. Add ice and shake hard for eight to 10 seconds. Strain off the ice into a cocktail or coupe glass. Garnish with a lime peel, a lime wheel, or nothing at all. 

This Old Fashioned variation is an Improved Whiskey Cocktail (whiskey, maraschino, bitters, and absinthe) without the absinthe. True, getting rid of just a spoonful of absinthe isn’t a huge reinvention, but that lack of the spirit’s strong flavors lets the marschino really shine in the Fancy Free.

Build in an Old Fashioned glass over the biggest piece of ice you have. Stir 10 to 15 seconds and garnish with an orange peel.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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. 

This is a drink that practically started a cocktail revolution on its own. When bartender Don Lee decided he wanted to add bacon to a drink while working at famed bar PDT in New York, he eventually came upon the technique called fat washing, that chefs at experimental restaurant WD~50 had been toying with. To get the flavor of bacon without the greasiness, Lee and Co. found that he could combine bourbon and bacon fat, then freeze the mixture and strain out the solids, leaving a spirit infused with the flavor compounds behind. Now numerous cocktails are made with fat-washed spirits that add an exciting layer of flavor (like our Olive Oil Martini), but the Benton’s Old Fashioned is the originator and one of the best.

Benton’s Old Fashioned

Add a large piece of ice to a rocks glass, add liquids, and stir for about 10 seconds. Express the oils of an orange peel over the top and place the peel in the drink as a garnish.

*Bacon-infused Bourbon

Put two or three strips of bacon in a pan, and heat gently and slowly—you want to make extra sure not to scorch or smoke the fat. When the bacon is almost cooked, pour off the liquid rendered fat into a separate container. 

You need 0.5 oz. (1 tbsp) of fat for every 8 oz. of bourbon, so start with that ratio and scale up if you desire. Combine the two in a non-reactive container and stir. Let sit at room temp for four to 24 hours, then transfer to the freezer until frozen (about 2 hrs). Strain the

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.

One of the most influential figures in cocktail history is David Embury, author of The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks. In his 1948 book he lays out the essential libations you need to know: the Martini, Daiquiri, Old Fashioned, Manhattan, Sidecar, and the Jack Rose. Now, that list made total sense until the last one. The Jack Rose, of all drinks, is in the pantheon of cocktails? We weren’t so sure ourselves. That was, until we realized that the greatness of the drink was totally dependent on making your own grenadine (a.k.a. pomegranate syrup). Using store-bought slop makes the Jack Rose not worth it all. But craft your own grenadine and combine it with apple brandy (either American apple jack or French Calvados) and you have a transcendent drink. In the video above, you’ll learn how to make grenadine yourself and then how to deploy it in this outstanding drink.

Add all ingredients to a cocktail tin and shake hard on ice for 8 to 10 seconds, then double-strain into a coupe. No garnish.

The truth about Manhattans is that the specifics are everything. You’ll make a great Manhattan and think, “Ok! That’s my go-to Manhattan vermouth,” but then you try that same vermouth with a different whiskey and it’s terrible. Same with whiskies for a different vermouth. We spent months trying Manhattan combinations—the same rye across six vermouths, the same vermouth across six ryes, etc., etc., etc.—and what he consistently found was that it’s not about any one special bottle of whiskey or vermouth, but about how each two unique products work together. So after all of that tinkering and myriad of combinations, we didn’t emerge with one perfect Manhattan, but instead a series of different Manhattans that can suit your tastes or mood. Try each recipe below and tell us which one is your favorite.

The Opulent Manhattan

For this cocktail and the additional recipes below, add ingredients to mixing glass, stir on ice for 15 seconds (small ice) to 30 seconds (bigger ice). Strain into stemmed cocktail glass and garnish with a quality cocktail cherry.

The Dark Manhattan

The Eccentric Manhattan

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.

It’s the granddaddy of them all. The Old Fashioned first appeared in print in 1880, but surely existed before then. The name is fitting, as it’s a timeless classic. It’s simple and malleable, thus tweaked constantly by bartenders for well over a century. But sometimes its just great to come back to the original.

Assemble ingredients in a rocks glass, add ice (the bigger the better) and stir for 8 to 20 seconds. Smaller ice will need less stirring. Remove a thin piece of peel from a lemon (for rye) or orange (for bourbon), getting as little of the bitter white pith as possible; hold the peel between your fingers with the outside facing the top of the drink and pinch slightly to express the citrus oils over the top.

The classic Manhattan has numerous variations on its mix of rye, vermouth, and bitters. And with each one, there’s a new name, paying homage to the neighborhood or borough where it was created. The New Orleans version was created in the city’s French Quarter—or Vieux Carré—where there’s the addition of Benedictine and Cognac.

Stir for 20 to 30 solid seconds. Strain into cocktail glass, garnish with a lemon peel.

Created by bartender Zachary Gelnaw-Rubin, the Debbie Don’t is an unlikely marriage of reposado tequila, Averna, lemon juice, and maple syrup. The cocktail appears in Regarding Cocktails, the collection of the late Sasha Petraske’s recipes and methods. Petraske is the single most important mixological figure in the last 25 years—he founded the speakeasy Milk & Honey in N.Y.C. in 1999, and in doing so created modern cocktail culture as we know it, as well as seeded a handful of other major cities and a dozen or so bars—and it was under his exacting tutelage that many if not most of the neo-classics cocktails were invented: the Gold Rush, the Penicillin, the Red Hook, I mean, it goes on and on.

The story is that Gelnaw-Rubin was working at one of Petraske’s bars in the early 2010s, Dutch Kills in Queens, and made Petraske a drink he was working on: He started with reposado tequila, for a vegetal agave note sanded down a bit with a light oaky spice, and combined it with the dark coffee-like bitterness of the Sicilian amaro Averna, the bright tartness of lemon juice and the sweet depth of maple syrup, and gave it to Petraske to try. “He surprised me by telling me it was the best drink I’d ever come up with,” recounts Gelnaw-Rubin, with Petraske adding, “if you don’t understand why, that’s OK.”

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice, and give it a long hard shake, 10 to 12 seconds, before straining either up into a coupe or over fresh ice in a rocks glass. Garnish with a lemon peel, a lemon wheel, or nothing at all. 

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.