The 7 essential cocktails

Every drinker should know how to make the classics.

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 cold-brew 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.

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.