The 7 essential cocktails

Every drinker should know how to make the classics.

Special To The Washington Post

Since the beginning of the craft cocktail renaissance, we’ve been given (and occasionally cursed) with a massive creative explosion of new drinks. Good drinks, bad drinks, a few great drinks. New classics that spread around the globe, and drinks doomed to be forgotten because they were mediocre, or too complicated to catch on, or required ingredients we could source only at the top of a particular mountaintop in Sweden, or simply because — holy gin fizz, Batman! — there are so many drinks now that it’s impossible to keep track of all of them.

This is not a rant against making new drinks. It’s merely a plea to get to know the classics first, to understand the rules before attempting to shatter them.

There are bartenders whose weirdness I trust, whose raspberry dill-sherry fizz, or fat-washed coldbrew and slivovitz Old-Fashioned, or yuzu and pickle juice sour I will try without hesitation. Those bartenders are, without exception, the same bartenders I am utterly confident can make me a perfect daiquiri.

I trust their creativity because I trust their foundations. They have mastered the drinks that have survived for decades — some for centuries — and know them inside and out. These are bartenders whose ambition is tempered by, even defined by, humility, who love exploring good spirits and liqueurs, and who have, on occasion, come up with a drink that deserves to be made and remade and shared widely.

If you’re trying to get into cocktails, start by learning the canon. There are reasons these drinks have survived and become essential: They’re good, they’re simple to make and they’re replicable almost anywhere that has a booze store and access to basic grocery items.

I surveyed nearly 100 bartenders, beverage writers and drinks enthusiasts about which drinks they consider essential. The martini topped the list, with a solid 84 percent of respondents voting it as core, but every drink on this Top 7 list had at least 50 percent support across those surveyed.

Of course, I’m sorry for the runner-up quaffs, the ones that just missed the critical (though admittedly random) 50 percent support mark in the survey.

Those include the Bloody Mary, the Whiskey Sour, the Sazerac, the Mojito and the Cosmopolitan, all classics in their own right, found on menus all over the world.

And, of course, every social cocktailer should have a punch recipe you can whip out on those evenings when you don’t have the time or patience for one-by-one drinks.

Once you’ve nailed down these first seven giants, there will be plenty more waiting for your exploration, and you’ll make them better because of what you learn making these.

DEB LINDSEY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST The seven essential cocktails, according to a survey of bartenders, negroni (from left), martini, daiquiri, old-fashioned, Manhattan, margarita, and gin and tonic. They were made by bartender Andrea Tateosian at Urbana in Washington.