The Essential Cocktail Structures
Create your own drinks with these 8 fundamental drink templates.
A bit of housekeeping: Earlier this year, the fine folks at Works in Progress invited me to write about progress in cocktails. The resulting essay is now part of WiP issue 13; you can read it online here. Issue 13 also appears in a dead-tree edition. I’ve seen the finished product, and it’s pretty snazzy.
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In this week’s edition, we’re going to look at a system for taking any modestly stocked home bar and a few pantry ingredients and making a vast number of cocktails without referring to a recipe.
But first, I want to tell you about my cocktail hero, and why his advice to home bartenders still matters today.
From the day I started writing this newsletter almost exactly three years ago,1 I have tried to write in the spirit of David Embury, the author of the greatest mid-century cocktail book: The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks.
There are many qualities that I find appealing about Embury.
There’s the spryness and clarity of his prose; his words are both amusing to read and briskly informative.
There’s the balance of opinionated assertion and open-minded generosity about drinks and tastes he does not care for. He prints many recipes and recipe variations he says he doesn’t like, but he wants readers to be able to experiment for themselves. He knows his own mind and his own taste, but he’s not mean-spirited about other preferences.
There’s the combination of humility — he admits up front that he has not tried every possible brand of liquor, and he makes clear that his recommendations are just personal preferences — and exhaustiveness when it comes to ingredients and recipes and techniques. The book contains everything he knew about making cocktails, which was everything he thought everyone else should know about making drinks at home. In Embury’s comprehensive, methodical, easy-to-follow organization of techniques, tools, ingredients, drink types, and recipes, you can see the roots of so many recent cocktail books.
But more than anything else, what draws me to Embury is that he was not a professional in the bar or spirits business.
He was a lawyer by trade, and he simply enjoyed his drinks and wanted to make them well at home — and teach others to do the same. That meant developing a deep understanding of the tools, ingredients, methods, and, most of all, the underlying principles and systems by which quality cocktails were constructed.
As Embury wrote in the book’s preface, too many “people fail to understand the basic principle of the cocktail. Either they regard a cocktail as any haphazard conglomeration of spirituous liquors, wines (aromatic or plain), bitters, fruit juices, sugar or sugary syrups, milk, eggs, cream and anything else that happens to be leftover from last wecks picnic supper, or they woodenly follow the myriad recipe books how available at every bookstore.”
This systematic, generalizable approach allowed him to create what amounts to the first General Theory of Cocktails, in which most cocktails are grouped by structure and ingredient type. Like a good lawyer, Embury treated cocktails as fact patterns with historical lineages that could be logically grouped. In his view, nearly every cocktail had a precedent; you could see it as a familiar type of case, perhaps with a few idiosyncratic elements.
Embury was the first writer to seriously attempt to group most cocktails into categories. And while few others immediately followed in his footsteps, the last few decades of cocktail writing have been defined by this sort of systematic thinking. From the spreadsheets of cocktail families in Gary Regan’s The Joy of Mixology to the six fundamental cocktails in Death & Co’s Cocktail Codex to the “mother drinks” in The Bartender’s Manifesto to Michael Ruhlman’s recent, excellent Book of Cocktail Ratios, much of the most serious, most innovative, and most useful cocktail writing of this century has treated cocktails not only as specific, unalterable recipes but as general systems with consistent, recurring features.
For many of today’s cocktail writers, the primary benefit of those cocktail systems is to understand popular drinks that already exist. Embury, of course, took pains to categorize the many drinks he knew. But he also took this a step further. He was a home bartender himself, albeit before people tended to conceive of themselves as home bartenders, and he understood that making drinks at home often means working with a limited ingredient set.
That’s a problem if you treat cocktails as hyper-specific recipes from which no deviation is acceptable. And it’s a different sort of problem if, as Embury grumbles, you merely toss together random ingredients in haphazard proportions, resulting in terrible drinks.
But if you understand cocktail categories and principles and systems, he argued, the limitations of the home bar need not be an impediment to making excellent cocktails.
From this insight came what is arguably his most important concept: Roll your own.
In Embury’s view, you could always buy a cocktail recipe book with hundreds of recipes, and some of them might be worthwhile. But Embury encouraged readers not to be intimidated by what we now refer to as the recipe development process.
“You yourself — anyone — can invent cocktails, good cocktails, palatable cocktails, delicious cocktails by the dozen — nay, by the hundred,” he wrote. “You need no recipe book. All you need is an understanding of a few fundamental principles and a reasonably discriminating taste.”
For Embury, this was the essence of making drinks at home. Good home bartenders were those who knew how to roll their own.
So for this week’s newsletter, we’re going to do something different. Instead of a specific drink or recipe, we’re going to look at the eight essential structures — the drink templates — that I use most often to make cocktails, and that you can use to make your own.
Many will be familiar to seasoned home bartenders, and inevitably there will be some overlap with the systems outlined by other writers, including Embury. But there will be some departures, too. And while I won’t be able to account for every possible variation or permutation — this is a newsletter, not a book — I’ll discuss common ways to modify, adapt, and tweak each of these structures.
I don’t claim that these structures will produce the world’s most delicious cocktails every single time they are followed without fail. But they work with great regularity. And even when they don’t quite work on the first try, the drinks they produce are frequently pretty close to on the mark, allowing you to iterate your way to a great cocktail with just a few tweaks. These are my starting points, my baselines, my go-to formulas when creating new drinks, testing novel ingredients, or modifying existing recipes.
In many ways, I consider this edition a follow-up and companion to last year’s 41 Bottle Bar.
Even if you don’t have all 41 bottles, this list of structures will allow anyone with a modestly stocked home bar and a handful of basic pantry ingredients to make a near-infinite number of tasty cocktails and variations without consulting a recipe.
This is how I roll my own — and how you can too.