The ONLY 6 Cocktails You Need To Know

There are really only six cocktails that you need to know as a bartender, or at least that's the theory that the Cocktail Codex put forth many, many years ago when it first published. The idea is quite simple in what they're proposing in the Cocktail Codex, which these are the same guys who wrote Death & Company, and they've written a couple of other cocktail books. The theory that they're proposing is that literally every single cocktail ever created comes from one of these six root cocktails in front of me right now. And basically that there's no such thing as a fully original cocktail kind of. While I don't fully believe and subscribe to this belief, I think that there's a lot of merit in going through and understanding these six root cocktails because you will start to see a pattern and realize that, yeah, they're kind of right. Most of the cocktails out there in the world are just variations on some of these base root cocktails here. With that being said, let's jump right into it. So the first root recipe that we're going to make is the Old Fashioned. I'm sure you've all heard of this, and it might seem like a basic cocktail, but there have been so many cocktails that have been built off of this template or this root cocktail. First thing we're going to do is I like to do a sugar cube or a Demerara cube because I really like bits of sugar in my Old Fashioned, and then two dashes of Angostura bitters. I also like to do two dashes of Peychaud bitters as well. These are some aromatic bitters that really just give you an incredible flavor. So this is a fun little tidbit. Bitters does not dilute sugar, but we are just going to break it up a little bit so that as we're stirring, the sugar will get diluted or, how do you say it, melted. Shit. English is hard. Incorporated into the water. That's the word. Whatever. And then we're going to do two ounces of a great whiskey. I'm using Redwood Empire's Pipe Dream bourbon. I've really been enjoying their bourbon lately, and actually pretty much anything that they make, I've been a big fan of lately. And then we're going to add some ice and stir it down until it's nice, chilled, and diluted. And you might be thinking to yourself, I've heard of Old Fashioneds and they're like muddled with cherries and oranges. Well, the way that we just made it here, this is the pre-Prohibition style of making an Old Fashioned. During Prohibition, a lot of people would make Old Fashioneds by muddling cherries and oranges into really crappily made bourbon because they were basically making it in bathtubs and in not the best places. And so they're using it to mask the flavor of crappy foods, or at least that's kind of how the story goes anyway, as far as it was told to me. If there's any cocktail historians out there, I think it's right. But double check me in the comments and make sure that I'm being put in my place if I'm saying something wrong. Let's grab our low ball and a very nice large cube and let's strain this out. And we're going to express the orange peel. And I actually like to do a lemon peel as well in my Old Fashioneds. I think that the combination of the citrus oils actually really complement each other well and give a nice citrusy balance to the cocktail. And there we have our first fruit cocktail, the Old Fashioned. Wow. That is so good. The thing that I love about Old Fashioned and Old Fashioned style cocktails is that the spirit is the star of the show. It is the thing that makes up the most part of this cocktail. And you're just adding a couple of slight ingredients and really elevating that base spirit. So it doesn't allow the base spirit to hide because if you use a crappy whiskey, for example, you're going to get a crappy Old Fashioned. You can then play with literally every single one of these elements and create a new cocktail, right? And that's kind of what's happened over, you know, the last couple of decades and centuries really. So if you use a combination of tequila and mezcal, you have a Oaxacan Old Fashioned. And you can also consider things like the Sazerac or the Mint Julep as members of this Old Fashioned family where they're just playing with a couple of elements, adding one thing here, removing something there, and really experimenting with that. Or if you're experimenting with the balance, you end up with something kind of like a Monte Carlo or so many other cocktails that come from this incredible root cocktail. The next root cocktail is the Everclassic Martini. So first thing we're going to do is two ounces and a quarter of a London Dry style gin. I'm using a Mazani gin, which is a gin from Brazil. They use botanicals from Brazil. A lot of folks would like to do like a two to one ratio in a martini. I like the gin to shine a little bit more. And then we're going to do three quarters of an ounce of Dolan Dry Vermouth, which is a fortified wine with different herbs and flavors and things like that. But you can certainly do this with two ounces of gin, one ounce of vermouth. This is just the way that I prefer it, and I was always taught this way. But you know, do you, right? Because the idea, it's still similar, right? And then we're going to do some orange bitters. I'm using Regan's. Regan's? Orange bitters. Two dashes of orange bitters. And then let's add some ice and stir. And then let's grab a nice chilled coupe glass. And we're going to pour our martini out, and we're going to finish it off with a beautiful lemon twist. Rub that rim. And there we have a classic martini. That's delightful. The gin and the vermouth play beautifully well together. It's very elegant. The citrus from the friole actually really comes through and elevates that whole cocktail, brings all those flavors together. And if you've never had a well-made classic martini, you're really missing out. One thing with this is that even if you just play with the proportions, if you go more gin than vermouth, like kind of how I did here, it goes to like a drier side, so like someone would say like a dry martini, you could do like two and a half ounces of gin with a half ounce of vermouth. A wet martini might have more vermouth, like say an ounce and a half of vermouth, two and an ounce and a half of gin. Or if someone's like, I want like a bone dry martini, you would just do the gin, stir with a little bit of orange bitters. Really, there's just a couple of links with all of these other classic cocktails, all rooted in the idea of the martini. The next root cocktail is the daiquiri, or I should say really the sour. It is three ingredients as well, so let's make it we can talk about. In its basic form, the sour is two parts of a rum or base spirit. For the daiquiri, it's a rum. For a sour, it's the base spirit. We're gonna do two ounces of our rum here, we're using Provitas, a light rum. And then we will do three quarters of an ounce of lime juice and three quarters of an ounce of simple syrup. Let's add some ice and shake. Grab another chilled Cooke and double strain this out, and then a nice little lime wedge to make it all break. And there we have a classic daiquiri. So good, so tart, nice and sweet, but also really well balanced. It may seem simple, but if a bartender can't execute a classic daiquiri right, I don't believe that they can execute other cocktails correctly. And so what other cocktails can you make that are within the sour family? Well, if you use gin, you have a gimlet. If you use cachaça, you have a caipirinha, which is within that same family as well. If you use pisco and add an egg white, all of a sudden you have a pisco sour. If you use whiskey and an egg white, or without an egg white, you have a whiskey sour. You also have the French 75, the Tom Collins, all of these are all within the same kind of sour family. And it all comes from this right here, baby. Cheers. The next root cocktail, it's actually quite similar to a daiquiri, but plenty different. We have the Sidecar. And the Sidecar is a pretty famous cocktail. I think it originated in World War I in France. And so obviously the first ingredient is going to be a nice and French ingredient. We have cognac. And we're going to be using Remy Martin's 1730, yay, hey. Sorry, I miss Fetty Wap. He's in prison now. I saw him live twice in a year and he was terrible live, but made some bangers. 1730, yeah. So we're going to do an ounce and a half of our cognac. So we're gonna do an ounce of dry Curacao. Cointreau does work, but I like the Pierre Ferrand's dry Curacao. It's also the basis of this is cognac as well. So I think it kind of, it matches the vibe. And then we're going to do three quarters of an ounce of lemon juice. I should have mentioned this, that because we're using dry Curacao, it's going to be a little bit on the drier side. We're just going to do a bar spoon of simple syrup, just so that we can balance it out a little bit. Add some ice. Let's grab our chilled coupe. And let's pour this out. And to finish this off, we have an orange peel. We're going to express. And there we have the Sidecar. Cognac is deep and rich and complex, brightened up with a little bit of that lemon juice and the dry Curacao. It gives it that nice orangey citrusy flavor. It's just incredible. It's amazing. I love a well-made Sidecar. I think it's probably one of the most underrated cocktails out there. I don't see it being made enough. I don't see enough people like talking about it. I think that this is the most underrated classic cocktail there is. And now why is the Sidecar important? Well, the Sidecar template is also the template for one of the most famous cocktails in the world right now, the Margarita. So if you were to use tequila instead of Cognac and using Cointreau instead of the dry Curacao, lime instead of lemon, and a little bit of sugar, you have yourself a classic Margarita. If you use gin, you have a White Lady. Then if you start playing with proportions and playing with different elements here, you can even get to eventually like any of those equal parts cocktails, like a Naked and Famous, The Last Word, as well as a Cosmopolitan, or even a Corpse Reviver No. 2. Those are all cocktails that kind of stem from this original template. But please, you guys, you should give some love to the Sidecar. Come on. And now for like one of the most simple cocktails ever, a whiskey highball. Let's grab a highball glass, add a nice long spear of ice. We're going to do two ounces of a scotch. I'm going to use monkey shoulder and then soda water. That's it. And yes, this is a cocktail. And it does say to stir once. And there we have a whiskey highball. The whiskey highball, it's so simple. It's another one of those cocktails where the base spirit really shines and the effervescence of a soda water really kind of helps brighten it up and bubble it up and lengthen the flavor that is in that base spirit. And there are literally so many incredible highball variations. The Paloma is an incredible tequila highball variation. Another tequila highball variation would be the Batanga, which I talk about way too much. Or how could you forget the Gin and Tonic, which is another massively famous highball and just so many other examples out there. It's simple, but it's effective. And now for the last cocktail template that we have, the Flip. The Flip is a cocktail that is categorized by usually like a fortified wine and the use of a whole egg. And now, if you're a bartender, you need to not be scared of this. I know a lot of people on the internet will be like, ew, eggs in a cocktail. It's important that you understand the role that eggs have played in the history of cocktail making. Traditionally, sherry or other fortified wines have been super important in the history of cocktail making. And eggs were also used to add texture, to combine elements, to add so much to a cocktail. There's so much an egg can do, whether you just do the egg white or just the egg yolk or the whole egg in the case of the most common Flip recipe. But let's make this cocktail and then we can talk about it. I like to do the egg first. We're just going to crack this on the side of the tin and put the whole egg right in there. And now we're going to do two ounces of sherry. I'm using Lustau Zoloroso sherry here, two ounces of that. And sherry is a fortified wine made in the south of Spain, in the Andalusia region of Spain. And then we're going to do a half ounce of Demerara syrup, which is just a syrup made from Demerara sugar, which is just not that bleach sugar, it's just the sugar in the raw. And now we're going to shake this once without any ice, called a dry shake. Just kind of like break up that egg, emulsify it, make it get really involved with the sherry. And that alcohol is going to help make this stable to drink and super safe to drink if you do it correctly. So we're going to do our dry shake for about 30 seconds to a minute. Pop that open and let's fill up with ice and repeat the process. Grab our cocktail glass and then we're going to double strain this out. And then usually a flip is finished with grated nutmeg or a different kind of spice to season the cocktail. And there you have a very classic flip. Very rich, very decadent, really tasty. You've had a flip before. If you've had eggnog, you've had a flip. Eggnog is like so close to what a traditional flip is. Everybody talks about it around the Christmas time. It's a flip. But if you swap out the egg for cream or milk, you can start to experiment with so much more. You've got things like the White Russian, the pina colada, a grasshopper, a brandy flip, and even like a mudslide. All of those are part of the flip family, whether it uses a whole egg or cream or some sort of variation. Even like a Ramos Gin Fizz has a little bit more elements, but it's kind of there as well. All of them come from the flip family. And so there you have it. The only six cocktails that you'll ever need to know, sort of. You'll need to then experiment with them and play with them. But I guarantee you that understanding these six cocktails is going to open your mind so much more to all of the other possibilities, especially if you follow on to the theory that every single cocktail ever created came from one of these six root cocktails. So understanding these as the core, you can then play with all the elements that make these cocktails and create your own unique spin on any of these. And who knows? Maybe you'll create the next big it cocktail out there. Jesus Christ, this hair keeps getting in my face. But if you enjoyed this video, I have this whole other playlist here of other cocktail basics that you can check out next.