The Negroni and Three-Act Structure in Cocktails

Plus! A split-vermouth Negroni variation from the early days of the cocktail renaissance.

For most of my adult life, I have been obsessed with three-act structure.

Three-act structure is a way of thinking about how stories work. It is most commonly associated with stage and screenplays, which tend to follow a broadly recurring — or in the case of many screenplays, quite rigorous and prescriptive — dramatic arc. 

But I am convinced that it occurs in cocktails too. Cocktails are stories. They have narrative arcs built on the juxtaposition of contrasting elements that come together into a pleasing, succinct whole. 

So for this edition, I want to discuss why and how three-act structure works in the glass as well as on stage and screen. And there’s no better drink to support this idea than the Negroni, the ultimate three-act cocktail. 

You can think of this as an exercise in conceptual preparation for Negroni Week, which is coming very soon. (Because I love Negronis, we’ll be celebrating Negroni Week all month.)

Finally, at the very end, we’ll make a tasty, clever, riff on the Negroni that calls for a slightly unusual structure involving two different vermouths, while demonstrating how three-act cocktails work in practice.

Three Act Your Age 

Three-act structure is a complicated subject; whole books have been written about it. I can’t possibly cover every nuance in the space of a newsletter, and everything I say here will necessarily be a gloss on a sometimes-contentious subject. 

But the simple version goes something like this: We meet our hero in his or her ordinary life. That ordinary life is disrupted by something unusual happening — a chance meeting with an attractive stranger, a bite from a radioactive spider, an alien invasion, a bus blowing up — and then, after some initial resistance, the hero sets out on a difficult journey of self-discovery, which includes a big success/high point (typically in the middle of the story) and a big defeat/low point (typically around three quarters of the way through), and eventually a reconciliation of the hero’s new, changed life with his or her old identify. 

An even simpler version goes like this: A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. 

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. 

When I first began to dig into the mechanics of three-act structure, its prevalence and prescriptiveness shocked me. As regular readers know, I watch a lot of movies, and suddenly it felt like I could see the seams of the stories, could predict where there were going to go and when. So many stories seemed schematic rather than organic, organized primarily to hit formulaic beats. 

One of the most popular articles I’ve ever written was a 2013 piece for Slate that was essentially a  deconstruction of three-act structure, and in particular the “beat sheet” laid out by the screenplay guidebook Save the Cat. 

The article was written out of genuine frustration with the way that screenplays reliant on prescriptive formulas tended to hit the same beats over and over just because those beats were required or expected.

But it was also a gimmick article with a third-act twist — spoiler alert! — the whole thing was written in three-act structure, according to the Save the Cat beat sheet. 

The final argument of the piece was that three-act structure can be employed poorly, but it’s also quite useful as a way of organizing a story and telling it in a compact, satisfying, complete way. Most of my favorite movies also rely on some version of the three-act formula; used well, it sharpens the pacing of a story and heightens the impact of key moments. 

The trials of the second act are juxtaposed against the baseline daily life of the first act. And the second act itself is typically split into two parts — a segment where the hero seems to learn to master the new world, leading to an impressive victory, and then a segment where everything seems to fall apart, leading to an equally stunning defeat. 

Those juxtapositions help demonstrate the full range of the story’s emotional potential: You see how well things can go (the high point) — and also how badly (the low point). 

That brutal, downbeat moment of total failure at the end of the second act, furthermore, is what makes you so invested in the finale: You’ve seen the hero reach a breaking point, a point where it seemed like all was truly lost. Rising up from that seemingly catastrophic defeat makes the final victory so much more powerful. Finally, in those climactic moments, everything comes together. 

Three Act Cocktails

Which brings us back to cocktails, and specifically the Negroni. 

Just like a three-act screenplay, the Negroni is a three part creation, built on a series of carefully proportioned juxtapositions, with a baseline element (gin), a sweet element (vermouth), a bitter or bittersweet element (Campari or similar amaro), and an ultimate synthesis of the components into a pleasing whole with a distinctive arc. 

You see this sort of three-element, three-act structure in all sorts of cocktails: strong/sweet/bitter describes not only the Negroni but the Old Fashioned and the Manhattan. For the Daiquiri and the Whiskey Sour, the formula is strong/sweet/sour, but it’s still just a series of juxtapositions arranged in a recurring, highly formulaic arc.