The Cold Weather Comfort Cocktail Canon

7 delicious, easy drinks, plus modifications, to take you through the winter.

Next week is Thanksgiving. If you’re planning to make Thanksgiving sour, the time to start is right about now. If you’re looking for another Thanksgiving-friendly drink to make, may I suggest a Pecan Pie Old Fashioned? Or a cranberry Sidecar?

Winter is coming.

We’re entering a period of cool weather and dark nights.¹ This calls for a certain type of cocktail: stirred, boozy, probably brown, tasty but not too challenging, rich and satisfying but not too complex. This is the time for Tuesday night cocktails, for sip-by-the-fire cocktails, for warming, familiar drinks that you can almost always put together with whatever’s on your bar cart — or a friend’s. 

These are cold-weather comfort cocktails, and I think they belong to an understood but unstated canon, a short list of widely known, widely loved, widely respected drinks that will take you through the winter. 

So for this newsletter’s four-year anniversary, I wanted to make the case for the seven drinks that belong in that canon — and the easiest ways to make them well. 

You can think of this as your winter-weather cocktail cheat sheet — a list of always-satisfying, go-to drinks, with recipes, plus some suggestions for variations and substitutions. 

I say easiest rather than best because part of what joins these drinks is their simplicity, their all-purpose functionality, their workhorse-like nature.

With the ideal cold weather comfort cocktail, there might be an idealized, complex, obviously superior, contest-winning version, but the pretty good versions that you can whip up with whatever is on hand work quite well too. 

To be included in the canon, then, a drink should meet a few requirements: 

• It should be easy to make, ideally with zero advance prep other than stocking the relevant bottles. This means no juice! (Which, sadly, means no Jungle Bird, no Gold Rush, and no Whiskey Sour.)

• It should involve just a few, easy-to-procure ingredients. No dozen-ingredient tiki drinks. No sous-vide infused, barrel-aged, fat-washed, clarified whatevers. Just things you can pour into a mixing glass and mix together in a minute or two.

• It should be tasty even in its lesser forms, though this does not mean that care and attention to detail aren’t important. 

• It should be relatively accessible — these drinks are not intended to chart bold new flavor paths or challenge palates.  

• It should probably have whiskey of some sort, though that’s not an absolute requirement.

I think the following drinks meet that test. 

Only one involves more than three ingredients. None of them require any advance prep, although one is improved by the use of a homemade syrup. Most involve whiskey. The strangest bottle involved in any of these recipes is Bénédictine, a surprisingly useful herbal-sweet liqueur that should be on every cocktail enthusiast’s bar cart. They’re all easy to make on a weeknight, and they should all be winners with just about anyone who likes cocktails of the stirred-and-boozy variety. Cocktail connoisseurs may have fiddly, fine-tuned preferences for some of these drinks, but the basic versions are elementally satisfying.

This is the cold weather comfort cocktail canon. 

The Boulevardier

Perhaps the ultimate cold-weather comfort cocktail, and probably the drink I have made most often in my life, the Boulevardier is essentially just a Negroni but with whiskey swapped for gin. 

You can use rye or bourbon, and in fact my fine-tuned, slightly fiddly preferred spec uses both, along with a combo of vermouths. One of the most celebrated versions of the drink, the Toby Cecchini recipe used at Brooklyn’s Long Island Bar, uses two different ryes as well as two different vermouths.

But three-ingredient versions are still excellent, especially if you give the whiskey portion a bit more presence with a larger pour. For best results,  a somewhat higher-proof whiskey like Wild Turkey 101 or Rittenhouse Rye.

• 1 ounce Campari 

• 1 ounce sweet vermouth, preferably Carpano Antica formula 

• 1 ½ ounces whiskey

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass. 

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

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

4. Garnish with an orange peel.

Modifications and substitutions: You can swap out the Campari for nearly any dark amaro with excellent results. Cynar is, of course, a goes-in-anything favorite. For an especially wintry spin on the drink, try an alpine amaro like Braulio or Amaro Dell'Etna. If you’re feeling extra fancy, blend two vermouths. 

The Milano Torino

Probably the least well-known drink on the list, and also the simplest: It’s just a combination of sweet vermouth and Campari, in equal parts — essentially a Negroni without the base spirit. 

This drink has many virtues: It’s not just easy to make, it’s also incredibly easy to twist, tweak, and modify, mainly by swapping or blending the vermouth and the bitter liqueur. It’s also relatively low ABV, which isn’t true of most spirit-forward winter cocktails, and yet it drinks like a boozy slow sipper. 

• 1 ½ ounces sweet vermouth

• 1 ½ ounces Campari 

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass. 

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

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

4. Garnish with an orange peel. 

Modifications and substitutions: I’ve made countless multi-vermouth, multi-amaro versions of this drink, and virtually all of them have been delicious. If you have three different bottles of bittersweet amaro, make an in-drink blend, using a half ounce of each instead of the Campari. You can also drop in some warming bitters, like Bittermen’s Mole, for additional complexity. 

The Old Fashioned

You can never have too many Old Fashioneds.