A Negroni Doesn’t Need to Be a Drink For Reckless Gamblers

Negroni Week is finally here. Here's how to make a perfect Negroni every time.

Welcome to Negroni Week.

We’ve been preparing all month, but now it’s officially here.

To kick things off, I want to start with a story about the worst Negroni I ever had.

This was at a hotel bar in Los Angeles, specifically a hotel that was just barely fancy enough to have a hotel bar, the sort of nice-enough, half-an-upgrade hotel you stay at when you don’t really know what you’re doing in Los Angeles.

The bar had a cocktail menu, but it really shouldn’t have.

I don’t recall exactly what was on the menu—there were probably a bunch of drinks that relied on infusions—but it was ambitious enough that I took a gamble on ordering a mixed drink. Nothing too complicated, nothing even from the menu, which even then I suspected of overreach.

This was many years ago, before I’d learned the hard way that there are some bars where it’s just not worth ordering a cocktail, because serving well-made cocktails is not why these bars exist. That doesn’t mean these are bad bars. But there are establishments where you’re better off ordering a beer or a whiskey. (Or wine, if that’s your thing.)

In any case, I ordered a Negroni, figuring that even a bad one had to be pretty good. It’s an equal parts drink made with ingredients that just about every bar that can keep its doors open has on hand: gin, sweet vermouth, Campari.

I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece of craft cocktail showmanship. I just wanted a vaguely competent, mostly drinkable cocktail. How hard could it be?

Harder than I expected, it turns out. Much harder.

Instead of equal parts, the barkeep free-poured two parts gin with a splash of Campari and a finger of the worst sweet vermouth I’ve ever tasted—an open bottle of some very inexpensive brand that had probably been sitting on the shelf since, I estimated unscientifically, the bar had opened a decade or so prior. Possibly the bar had inherited the open bottle from some other hotel bar. I considered the idea that I might be drinking something so ancient as to be historic. But no, I was just drinking a Negroni made with the very worst bottle of vermouth on the entire planet.

If you’ve ever worked a service industry job where the end-of-shift routine involves mops and industrial cleaning solutions—well, imagine that smell, that sharp, sudsy, drain-room smell, a smell of despair that sticks with you for an hour or two after you clock out, a smell so miserable and so potent that it lingers in your mind for decades afterwards, a smell that leaves a taste in your mouth, even though you’re pretty sure you’ve never taken a sip from the mop bucket yourself.

That’s more or less what this Negroni tasted like.

Alright, maybe that’s a little bit of an exaggeration. I survived a sip or two and then did what I should have done from the get-go. I ordered a beer.

A Cocktail for Reckless Gamblers?

I am fond of the sometimes repeated idea that there’s no such thing as a bad Negroni, and I think that’s directionally true in the sense that most Negronis are at least pretty good.

But I also sympathize with tweets like this one, griping about the terrible Negronis you sometimes encounter at bars.

But with respect to the tweet’s author, it doesn’t have to be that way.

At the very least, it doesn’t have to be that way—if you make a Negroni at home.

And you should make Negronis at home.

Indeed, I firmly believe Negronis are best made and consumed at home, because there’s no reason to pay someone else to make a Negroni for you. Negronis are not just easy to make; they are easy to make really, really well. You can make the very best possible Negroni at home, easily, with no compromises.

A top-notch Whiskey Sour might require you to juice an orange or find a bottle of Velvet Falernum. A Jungle Bird can be made well at home, but you have to juice a pineapple as well as a lime, make syrup, and find a bottle of Blackstrap Rum. Even a basic, three-ingredient Daiquiri requires juicing a lime and making homemade syrup. These are not impossible challenges, but they do require time and preparation.

But a Negroni? Aside from acquiring three very basic bottles of booze, there’s no prep at all. Three measures, three pours, stir and strain over ice. You can build the drink in the serving glass if you want. The most technique-dependent aspect of making a Negroni is probably just peeling a strip of orange peel for garnish.

This is about as easy as home bartending gets.

Decisions, Decisions

The trick to making a great Negroni lies in the understanding that it’s about managing a three-way relationship, a partnership between gin, sweet vermouth, and Campari. You have to make them link up, harmonize, mind-meld, work together as a single cohesive unit. Making a Negroni is an artistic endeavor, a craft. But it’s also somewhat managerial. Your job is to get the best performance out of a small team of players.

That means you have some decisions to make. To be specific, you have three decisions.

The Campari is a must: Sure, you can make a Negroni-esque drink with some other amaro or bitter liqueur. But a Negroni—just a plain old Negroni—should include Campari. Otherwise, you’re in Negroni variation territory.

The first decision, then, is which gin to use. The gin is sometimes cast as the star of this drink, but really it’s the foundation, the sturdy base on which the other elements do their work. You don’t need a high-end, collector’s unicorn-type gin here. Not only are they expensive and difficult to source, but they also tend to have unique flavors that are hard to meld with other ingredients. The gin is the straight man here, the workhorse that keeps everything else in line. My favorite gin for a Negroni is Ford’s, a perfectly balanced, widely available, relatively affordable gin specifically designed for cocktails. It’s good in a great many drinks, but it especially shines in a Negroni.

The second decision is which sweet vermouth to use. This might be the single most important decision you make: Using a musty, old, cheap vermouth that’s been sitting on the counter for years and years is the quickest way to ruin a Negroni. Vermouth is fortified wine, so it keeps longer than a bottle of delicate table wine, but it’s still wine. Freshness matters.

But even using a freshly opened bottle can be a recipe for sadness. Many sweet vermouths are quite syrupy and one-note. They lack the complex spice array of the best vermouths, as well as the tannin-y, slightly acidic pushback you get from better bottlings. A lot of vermouth is sweet and boring.

And even the very good stuff sometimes doesn’t play well with the other ingredients: Dolin Rouge doesn’t have quite enough presence. Carpano Antica Formula has a little too much. Foro di Torino is spicy, inexpensive, and underrated, but the winter notes are just a little too aggressive. Punt e Mes can be excellent in a Negroni variation mixed with some other vermouth—see the Cornwall Negroni—but it is much more bitter than other sweet vermouths in a way that just doesn’t feel right in a no-frills Negroni.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to produce a great Negroni with those vermouths. But why bother in a world where we have Cocchi di Torino, which plays so well with Ford’s and Campari, and makes for a truly idealized Negroni.

Finally, you have a choice that isn’t about the specific ingredients. It’s about the ratio.

Although classic Negroni recipes tend to call for equal parts, usually with an ounce of each ingredient, modern Negroni theorists—OK, internet cocktail nerds and bartenders—have almost universally settled on more gin-forward proportions.

A 5:4:4 Negroni, with slightly more gin, is a popular ratio for contemporary versions of the drink. My personal preference, however, is for a gin-forward 4:3:3 ratio, with one ounce of gin and ¾ ounce each of Campari and sweet vermouth.

At just 2 ½ ounces pre-dilution, it’s a smaller drink. But a Negroni isn’t supposed to be a Big Gulp. If you want more, make another one.

Stir of Echoes

Now you have the basic spec. But you still have to put it together. And that means stirring, chilling, and diluting the drink.

Stirring a cocktail over ice before serving it is a crucial step: It chills the drink and adds dilution, pulling water into the mix from the ice as you circulate it. Chilling the mix makes the alcohol more palatable. Diluting it helps integrate the ingredients, sanding off the rough edges and serving as a sort of mortar that weaves them all together.

You need some chill and dilution—but not too much.

The late great bartender and cocktail writer Gary Regan, who, among his many accomplishments, wrote a book on the Negroni, said that a Negroni just needs a brief stir with a finger, just enough to mix things together.

I stir my Negronis over ice for a little longer than that. But not much longer.

That’s partly because this isn’t a super high-ABV cocktail to begin with, so you don’t want to mute it too much. But it’s also because, unlike a Manhattan or a Martini, you’ll be serving it over ice, which means that additional dilution will occur in the glass.

The exact time to stir will vary somewhat based on the amount and type of ice you’re using, the vessel you’re stirring in, and the ambient room temperature. (If you’re stirring outside during a Texas summer, you’ll probably want to stir a little less than if you’re stirring in a shady spot in Newfoundland.) In general, however, you want to stir a Negroni quite briefly, until the mix has only barely begun to cool. This might take a few tries to get exactly right, but the main thing to avoid is overstirring up front: You can always add dilution to a cocktail, but you can’t take it out. 

Finally, you’ll twist an orange peel over the mix for garnish.

This is a straightforward operation: Use a vegetable peeler to cut a fat strip of orange peel, then twist or fold the peel over the drink with the outer peel facing down towards the top of the drink. This will release a spray of orange oils on top of the drink’s surface, giving it an extra orange-y scent as you hold it under your nose. You don’t need to wipe the peel on the surface of the glass or attempt to wring every last bit of orange essence out of the peel. A quick twist and fold is plenty. 

And there you have it — a perfect Negroni, no recklessness or gambling required. 

A Negroni. Just a Negroni.

• ¾ ounce Campari

• ¾ ounce sweet vermouth, preferably Cocchi di Torino 

• 1 ounce gin, preferably Ford’s 

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass. 

2. Add ice, then stir briefly to chill and dilute

3. Strain into a rocks glass over a single large piece of ice. 

4. Garnish with a twist of orange peel, expressed over the top. 

The Big Gal Is Pumped for Negroni Week