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Every year, the U.K.-based Difford’s Guide publishes a list of what they call the World’s Top 100 Cocktails. It’s not an opinion piece, or an editorial endorsement—when they say “top” they mean by popularity, the list is ranked by web traffic, and is therefore objective and purely democratic. And what was No. 1 for 2022? The eternal Margarita, or the hip Negroni, or the trendy Carajillo? Nope. It’s the Pornstar Martini, crowned in the top spot for an incredible eighth year in a row. Now, the name may sound salacious, but it’s actually an outstanding drink. Invented by bartender Douglas Ankrah at Townhouse in London, it’s made from vodka, vanilla and passionfruit.

• 45ml vodka
• 20ml lime juice
• 20ml vanilla syrup
• 20ml passion fruit liqueur or passion fruit syrup

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice and shake hard for eight to 10 seconds. Strain into a martini glass, and garnish with a lime wheel, a lime peel, or, if you’re feeling rich, a half passion fruit bobbing in the top of the drink. Serve alongside a sidecar of Champagne or other sparkling wine, if you wish.

Yet another disco-era cocktail that just needed a few tweaks to make it a refreshing classic, the Kamikaze is worthy of your attention in the here and now. As O’Bryan wrote when he chronicled the plight of the Kamikaze that, “Put the smallest effort toward its development—recruit fresh lime juice and a high quality triple sec—and the Kamikaze can be a great drink: clean, bright and refreshing. It’s a vodka gimlet made a little juicier with orange liqueur, lean and tart, avoiding the lingering presence of tropical fruit or the piquant sweetness of berries. Its clarity reads effortlessly as refinement. The fact that it was conceived without thought and for decades was produced and consumed without thought is immaterial. It really is quite good, and worthy of (unironic) attention.”

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice, and shake hard for 10 to 12 seconds. Strain up into a cocktail glass, and garnish with a lime wedge or wheel.

The Sex and the City reboot was cancelled this summer, so it’s only fitting to mix yourself one of these drinks in its honour. Like the groundbreaking show, the Cosmopolitan is a phenomenon that comes and goes from the culture. When it was perfected back in the late ’80s at Odeon in New York, it became ubiquitous and then shunned. Carrie and the gang helped bring them back before fading again. The problem is, people were drinking a lot of bad ones, sullying their opinion of the drink. But you can make a great one. As O’Bryan said on his treatise on the Cosmo, “Pay a little attention to the principles of balance and use the right stuff, however, and the Cosmopolitan becomes an absolutely delightful drink, juicy with citrus, bright with cranberry, surprisingly strong and impressively clean. Made well, it’s an ideal cocktail for vodka fans who want something bright and fruity and not too sweet.”

Add all the ingredients to a cocktail shaker, and shake well on ice for 10 to 12 seconds. Strain into a stemmed glass (a classic Martini glass would be traditional, and if it can have a hopelessly ’90s Z-shaped stem, even better), garnish with an orange peel, and say something risque and impertinent, like “Meanwhile across town, Samantha getting a ride of her own.”

It’s the cocktail that helped make vodka a thing in America. At the Cock ‘n Bull on Los Angeles’s famed Sunset strip, the drink was a serendipitous union the owner of Smirnoff trying to get Americans to drink vodka, and another man trying to get them to buy his ginger beer. Enter the Moscow Mule. The two ingredients mixed together—with the help of some lime and bitters—helped each other take off after the drink was created around 1940. The Cock ‘n Bull closed after 50 years in 1987, but the Moscow Mule still lives on.

Add all ingredients over ice in a copper or copper-plated mug and stir to combine. Garnish with a lime wedge.

The French Martini isn’t really French. It’s not really a Martini either. It’s unclear when it was invented or by whom, but it shows up in New York City in 1996, and starts a craze. Until then, the word “Martini” almost exclusively referred to a spirit-forward mixture of gin or vodka, possibly with vermouth. The previous “French Martinis” were subtle tweaks on the classic, while this one, the one that would become famous, obliterated it. It’s vodka, pineapple juice, and Chambord, not a Martini by any stretch of the imagination, but kept the name anyway, and the V-shaped glass for good measure. In his Craft of the Cocktail, Dale DeGroff calls it “one of the sparks that got the cocktail-as-Martini craze started.”

Revisit the French Martini 25 years later, and the biggest surprise is not just that it’s still delicious, but how versatile of a template the recipe is. You can put Chambord in there, of course, and it’s juicy and fleshy and sumptuous with vanilla, but the combination of vodka and pineapple juice can do a lot more. You can use creme de cassis, for a sharper, more adult French Martini, or you can go rogue and put Aperol in there, or Campari, or Benedictine, or Cynar. Or Chartreuse, for that matter, or ginger, or falernum. You can do almost anything. The worst thing it’ll be is insufficiently complex (vodka, tasting like nothing at all, sometimes has this problem). The fact that it’s about as French as French Stewart is immaterial. It’s delicious. Isn’t that what matters?

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice and shake good and hard for about eight to 10 seconds. Strain up into a conical glass (if it can have a zig-zag stem, all the better), and garnish with a piece of pineapple, or a raspberry and/or blackberry on a pick, or both, or neither.

One of the best ways to start a summer day is a leisurely alfresco brunch sipping on a good Bloody Mary. There are certainly a myriad of recipes out there for you to choose from and you don’t even have to use vodka as your base, as mezcal or tequila would work quite well if that’s your pleasure. O’Bryan shares his more details on his favourite recipe here, but he has an iron-clad rule of Bloody Mary’s: “Don’t consume them after sunset. Drinking a Bloody Mary at night just feels wrong and confusing, sacrilegious even, which is hilarious because everything else goes. If I were to add, say, barbecue sauce into a Moscow Mule, the only thing I know for sure is that is definitely no longer a Moscow Mule.” So use the recipe below for your hair of the dog, not your nightcap.

Assemble the cocktail with ice in the glass you’ll drink it in, and then roll it back and forth between that and another glass, mixing the ingredients without breathing too much air into the tomato juice. Do that five or six times and then garnish with a celery stalk, and perhaps something ostentatious like a poached shrimp or a cheeseburger, and enjoy.

Back in 1997 the Appletini was born at Lola’s in West Hollywood when bartender Adam Karston played around with the brand new at the time DeKuyper’s Pucker Sour Apple Schnapps. He mixed it with some vodka and sweet and sour mix and essentially made a boozy Sour Patch Kid. The cocktail took over L.A., spreading across the Southland to the point where it seemed every bar had to have an Appletini on the menu. At it’s core, the drink is a green apple sour and it’s so much better than you remember it being. To make his Appletini, O’Bryan swaps in fresh ingredients for the artificially flavoured ones and you have an outstanding drink to take you from late summer to fall.

Add all ingredients with ice into a cocktail shaker and shake hard for eight to 10 seconds. Strain off the ice into a Martini glass and garnish with a couple apple slices, or just for fun, a cherry.

The White Russian abides.

Add all ingredients to a rocks glass with ice, Stir briefly to incorporate, or otherwise dump it, ice and all, into another container and then dump it back, to mix. Do not shake. Do not garnish. Drink and enjoy.

The Lemon Drop is one of those guilty pleasure drinks that so many people love, what are we even being guilty for at this point? It’s practically the poster child for the boring sweet-and-sour drink, so it’s too basic and chemical for craft bartenders to take it seriously, to elevate it to the canon of “respectable” drinks. But the push and pull of sweet and sour is a deeply satisfying one—so much so that for much of the drinking public, the cocktail has overcome the sweetness problem. But it’s worth considering the template we’re working with here: Spirit, orange liqueur, and lemon juice. If you used Cognac, you’d call that a Sidecar, among the most celebrated cocktails ever made. I prefer to point out that gin, orange liqueur, and lemon juice is called a White Lady, a precise and delicious classic cocktail from the 1930s, so technically, the Lemon Drop is a White Lady with vodka. Isn’t that something everyone can agree on?

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker. Add ice and give a good shake for 10 to 12 seconds, and strain up into a coupe, cocktail or martini glass with a half-sugared rim, and garnish with a lemon peel.

We have to acknowledge that the Long Island Iced Tea has something of a reputation itself. It has been understood, since the ‘70s, as “one of the most famous hangover instigators the bar has ever known,” according to Punch. Liquor.com acknowledges that “the recipe reads more like a frat-house hazing ritual,” and Jeffrey Morgenthaler’ points out that the drink dominated the world, but also took up residence in “dorm rooms, seedy karaoke bars and overturned glasses next to some poor bastard curled up by a toilet.”

There are some who earnestly enjoy it, but many more who are trying to get as drunk as possible and believe (accurately) that the Long Island Iced Tea is the quickest way to get there. This is why bartenders tend to not like them—it’s not because they’re difficult to make, or even some kind of pretentious dismissal of the “flavour profile.” It is because we have a legal responsibility to make sure no one gets too drunk, so if someone says “give me a Long Island” (or god forbid, a “Strong Island”), what we hear is “there’s a decent chance that pretty soon, I’m going to become a problem for you.” But in our version, we turn down the booze in order to turn up the flavour and not make this drink a guaranteed hangover.

Add all ingredients except coke to a shaker with ice, and shake for six to eight seconds. Pour into a tall glass or pint glass, top with ice and the Coke, mix it all together with a straw, and garnish with a lemon wedge.

Though many people love a Vodka Martini, there’s a fundamental flaw in their construction compared to the gin version. That being that without the botanicals of gin, the vermouth has little to play with in the glass when paired up with just vodka. But there is a way to make it better. Meet the Poet’s Dream, a Vodka Martini with a subtle kiss of spiced sweetness from the French herbal liqueur Bénédictine. Fittingly, the original Poet’s Dream is a gin drink, from the 1931 Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Days by Albert Stevens Crockett, but it’s the vodka version that really stands apart. It’s the smallest touch of Bénédictine— honey-sweet, with cinnamon, nutmeg, citrus and herbs—that brings the whole thing together, the cocktail dry and bracing, but charmed by the botanicals of the vermouth, which find a dancing partner in the spices of the liqueur. It’s a Vodka Martini without an identity crisis, one that doesn’t fight against its namesake, and that can embrace its full self.

Add all ingredients to a mixing glass, add ice, and stir for 10 to 15 seconds (if you have small ice) or 25 to 30 seconds (if you have big ice). Strain off the ice into a cocktail glass or coupe, and garnish with a lemon peel.

No one has taken the Harvey Wallbanger seriously since 1979, and honestly, it’s hard to say that they ever had. The drink is vodka, orange juice, and an Italian herbal liqueur called Galliano, and as best we can tell, was invented by Donato “Duke” Antone in or around 1952. Antone claimed to be working in Los Angeles at the time (where he met the apocryphal surfer Harvey, who would bang into walls), but might actually have been living in Las Vegas. Or possibly Connecticut. Even for drink historians, it gets murky. Antone’s relationship to the truth was less robust than one might hope, and considering that he also claimed to have invented the Rusty Nail, Kamikaze, and White Russian (no, no, and no)—and that in 1955 was sentenced to six years in federal prison for his role in a heroin ring—it’s difficult to take his claims at face value. Still, this drink was a massive hit in its day.

Does that mean that version was great? No. But there’s greatness there—it just needs to be coaxed out of it. So to make a Harvey Wallbanger you really want to drink, forget the liqueur float that doesn’t float and add some desperately needed lemon juice, and the Harvey Wallbanger’s decade-long dominance of the disco era starts to make a bit more sense. At its best, the drink tastes like the platonic ideal of a Screwdriver, a boozy orange juice with just enough complexity to avoid feeling like you’ve spiked your kid’s breakfast, and a perfect example of taking a silly thing a little seriously just so you can enjoy it unseriously again.

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker, and shake on ice briefly, three to five seconds. Alternatively, you could just build it in the glass you intend to drink it from—it’ll be less cold, and slightly less compelling, but still delicious. If shaken, strain into a tall glass with ice, and garnish with an orange slice and/or a cocktail cherry.

This is a drink that should be known far and wide as a modern classic, but hasn’t quite caught on as it should. Invented at the legendary bar Employees Only, the Amelia was meant to take the ubiquitous Cosmo drinkers of early aughts New York City and push them toward more nuanced flavours. The delicious drink has become a staple of all four Employees Only locations that exist now in N.Y.C., L.A., Sydney, and Singapore, but the combination of vodka, blackberry, elderflower liqueur, and mint hasn’t found purchase much elsewhere. Make one for yourself and you’ll wonder why it isn’t more popular.

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker, and shake good and hard for eight to 10 seconds. Fine strain into a coupe or cocktail glass, and garnish with a mint sprig.