Variations are part of what make cocktails fun, and—when executed with precision—they have the potential to result in incredible drinks. They offer an opportunity for creativity and personalization, allowing bartenders and cocktail enthusiasts to shape unique flavor profiles that cater to diverse tastes.
These variations inject fresh energy into classic recipes, delivering a novel and memorable experience for imbibers. When approached with skill and finesse, these adaptations can elevate the drinking experience, showcasing the boundless versatility and depth of cocktail creation. Whether a riff involves subtle modifications or bold reinterpretations, confidently executed variations have the power to captivate and surprise the palate, making the exploration of cocktails an endlessly enthralling journey.
In many of my articles, I’ve delved into various iterations of cocktails. I’m fascinated by the creativity and skill it takes to elevate traditional drinks. So, I contacted several bar professionals to find their favorite twists on classic cocktails that will endure the test of time.
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The Swizzle
Haleigh and Cody Brown, cofounders of the Home Bar Network, host private craft-cocktail events throughout the Metro Atlanta area. They founded the network in 2020 and have experienced overwhelming success in bringing the bar experience directly to the people. When I ask about some of their favorite cocktail variations, the Browns choose the Queen’s Park swizzle, a close relative of the mojito. Their view is that variations on rum swizzles—including the mojito—are timeless and open to creative interpretations.
This cocktail dates to the 1890s, created at the luxurious Queen’s Park Hotel in Port of Spain, Trinidad. The hotel was a popular draw for the Hollywood crowd and elite wealthy travelers. This swizzle’s profile is a bit drier and less mint-forward than its relation. It was a favorite of the famed bartender and restaurateur Trader Vic, who mentions it in two of his books. He describes it as “the most delightful form of anesthesia given out today.”
“Lately, we’ve been on a real Queen’s Park Swizzle kick,” Haleigh says. “We like to do a little riff on the original by adding some Amaro Montenegro. It’s also crucial to have super-fresh mint and pebble ice, and to go heavy on the Angostura bitters. Honestly, it’s kind of the perfect summer-to-fall transitional cocktail because you have the bright, fresh elements of a mojito with the added baking-spice notes and subtle, bitter complexity of the Angostura and Amaro.”
Queen’s Park Swizzle
8–10 fresh mint leaves
¾ oz simple syrup
2 oz Demerara rum
1 oz fresh lime juice
4 dashes Angostura bitters
Add the mint leaves and simple syrup to a Collins glass and gently muddle. Add the rum, lime juice, and bitters. Fill the glass most of the way with pebbled ice. Using a bar spoon, swizzle the ingredients until the glass becomes frosty. Add more pebbled ice so it mounds in the glass and garnish with mint.
Below, the Brown family’s variation highlights the adaptability of classic and pre-Prohibition cocktails. The goal is not to completely reinvent the cocktail but to add a twist and change its "hair color," so to speak, without giving it a total makeover.
Queen’s Park Swizzle No. 2
8–10 mint leaves
½ oz rich demerara syrup (2:1, demerara sugar and filtered water)
1 oz fresh-squeezed lime juice
½ oz dark amaro, such as Amaro Montenegro or a locally made version
2 oz aged rum
8 dashes Angostura bitters
In a Collins or hurricane glass, gently muddle mint leaves with syrup to release the oils. Add lime juice, amaro, rum, and crushed ice. Swizzle with a swizzle stick or bar spoon to mix. Place the shaft of the stick or long spoon handle between your palms, rubbing your hands to rotate the stick back and forth. Add more crushed ice and several dashes of Angostura bitters over the top to create a nice layering effect. Garnish with a mint sprig.
Rum and Amaro …
Diving deeper into its elements, here are some essential notes about making this cocktail.
Let’s start with the rum. Besides the delicious, high-quality Caribbean aged rums that truly represent the category, there are also excellent aged American rums on the market that deserve some attention. Bayou Rum is one of the most decorated rums in the United States. Others of note include Privateer in Massachusetts, Greenbar in California, and Sugarfield in Louisiana.
And what about the amaro? Averna is a staple in my home bar. But I also have several other amaros on my shelf that rotate, including a few that I tend to pour more often than my Averna. Not every dark amaro tastes the same, just as not every aged rum tastes the same, whether it’s Caribbean, American, or from farther abroad. Terroir is a strong component of flavor and profile in quality spirits.
Lockhouse Distillery in Buffalo, New York, is known for crafting a remarkably delectable dark amaro that’s delightful and easy to work with. They sweeten this artisanal spirit with turbinado sugar and age it on sassafras for a month, resulting in a rich flavor profile reminiscent of oranges and root beer, with herbal undertones.
Based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Long Road Distillers produces a special dark amaro called Amaro Pazzo. They infuse their distinctive blend with traditional botanicals, roots, and spices such as myrrh, wormwood, gentian, and chicory. Long Road enhances the blend by combining their amaro with locally sourced Madcap coffee, resulting in a rich and intricate flavor profile highlighted by bitter chocolate notes. The coffee addition is inspired, elevating cocktails to new heights without overshadowing the other flavors. Long Road has masterfully balanced the blend, allowing its unique flavors to shine while introducing a captivating hint of subtlety.
With just a half-ounce of amaro, the Browns have taken their swizzle to an entirely new realm without losing the plot completely—and that is the No. 1 threat when testing out variations: My rule when training mixologists is that the resulting cocktail must still resemble the original build. Not only will the variation be popular and a significant revenue source—since drinkers can still feel connected to their favorite cocktail—but you also don’t have to reinvent your program to add a variation on a cocktail that might already be on your menu. For home bartenders, it’s an easy twist: With one or two different ingredients, you can offer your guests a whole new perspective on classic flavors.
… And the Muddle
Among the experts, there’s much discussion about the technique of muddling. I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about it: I rarely stir anything, even when I’m supposed to. I usually let a gentle stir or shake do the job for me. The muddle is critical in this type of cocktail because the mint stays in the glass, much like in a mojito.
Muddling is the act of pressing down on herbs or fruit and possibly (gently) twisting to extract oils. This is a delicate process. What you don’t want to do is tear the herbs. If you rip or tear the herbs, such as mint, you’ll release chlorophyll, which adds a bitter, grassy flavor to your drink. Use a smooth muddler without teeth or ridges on the bottom and avoid varnished muddlers; stainless steel is best. Ensure your herbs or fruit are intact—just smooshed—when you’re muddling.
Besides the Queen’s Park swizzle, there are endless other variations with which you can experiment. Add a splash of soda water, and you have a royal mojito. Marco Dionysus of Smuggler’s Cove in San Francisco ditched the rum for the coveted French herbal liqueur Chartreuse, adding pineapple juice and Falernum to the mix. That cocktail is quite a departure from the mojito, yet it remains a swizzle.
Speaking of cocktails that can transition from summer to fall, the fever cocktail by Salt Lake City bartender Samuel Miller has it going on—and as much as I love this cocktail, it’s a long-distance departure for me. Here, Miller keeps the rum and adds sweet vermouth, banana liqueur, and an allspice liqueur while topping it off with ginger beer. Yet I add it to the discussion because it’s an excellent example of building something new from a beloved classic. Being a rule-breaker here is okay with me—we don’t have to compare this cocktail to anything that came before it.
The Negroni
A favorite cocktail with endless variations, the negroni has earned a special place in American hearts. When I ask professionals about their favorite cocktails, most choose the negroni. There are several reasons why, but to name two: It’s easy to make, with three spirits measured equally; it’s also popular—so much so that there’s a whole week every September dedicated to celebrating it worldwide.
So, let’s have a look at the original build.
As the story goes, the drink came to be in 1919, when Count Camillo Negroni asked bartender Fosco Scarselli to make an Americano—1 ounce of Campari, 1 ounce of sweet vermouth, and soda water—except with gin instead of soda water. (He must have been having a rough day.) It seems that Scarselli garnished the drink with an orange slice instead of the traditional lemon.
The Classic Negroni
1 oz gin
1 oz Campari
1 oz sweet vermouth
Add all the ingredients to a mixing glass and stir with cubed ice. Strain into a rocks glass over cubed ice and garnish with an orange slice.
Deviations, Mistaken or Otherwise
A modern adaptation uses orange peels rather than orange slices as the garnish.
Not surprisingly, there are a lot of strong views on the subject of negroni variations. Can you build a negroni without Campari? That all depends. Purists will say the cocktail isn’t a negroni without Campari. You’ll also hear strong opinions about whether it’s a negroni without gin. In my view, it’s not—the base spirit, I feel, needs to remain in place. But you can add whiskey in place of gin, and it becomes a boulevardier.
The bitter liqueur and vermouth are there for the taking. You can replace them at will with similar products, and it’s still a negroni, albeit a variation. The wildly popular variation that went viral on TikTok—the negroni sbagliato—challenges this opinion.
Mirko Stocchetto invented the sbagliato in the early 1970s in a bar in Milan. The word sbagliato means “mistaken,” and as Stocchetto’s son explains in a 2022 interview with Slate Magazine, “It’s not a mistake. My father was pretty full of himself, so it was really impossible for a professional bartender to make such mistakes. But he actually [tells] a story … sometimes the positions of bottles are in certain orders so you can always know where each bottle is. And if you respect the order, you can work without looking at the bottle, just like on the keyboard of the computer or the piano, because you know exactly in what position the bottle is, and so on. So, some bartender put the wrong bottle in the wrong place. One day, a gentleman walked into the bar and asked for a negroni at the counter. So, my father took a glass, filled the glass with ice, he garnished it with a slice of orange, then he grabbed the bottle of Campari, then he grabbed the bottle of vermouth. Then, without looking, he grabbed the bottle of gin. But instead, he found himself with a bottle of sparkling wine, a prosecco. So, he didn’t feel like changing the bottle. It occurred to him that the combination made some sense. And so he poured the sparkling wine saying, ‘Oh, today, it’s a sunny day, so let’s get something smoother.’ And so he poured the sparkling wine, and it was just a simple twist of fate at the end.
“Sbagliato in Italian means mistaken. It doesn’t mean clumsy.”
The Negroni Sbagliato
1 oz Campari
1 oz sweet vermouth
1 oz prosecco or sparkling wine
Add Campari and sweet vermouth to a mixing glass with cubed ice. Stir well and strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice or a champagne flute. Top with prosecco and garnish with an orange peel.
So, here we have the cocktail without its base spirit, still called a negroni—a “mistaken” negroni—by the Italian experts. There goes my opinion out the window.
Simplicity is the magic of this cocktail—and by simplicity, I don’t mean the flavor profile. A negroni’s flavor is anything but simple. The simplicity is in the build, and that makes it fun and easy to create variations. The white negroni is a beautiful example: Replace the sweet vermouth with Lillet Blanc, a wine-based aperitif, and go for something like a Suze or a blanco amaro in place of Campari.
There are many ways to riff on the white negroni and create a cocktail with subtle flavors—or to go for bold flavors, depending on your choice of dry vermouth and bitter liqueur. Here’s a fan favorite that I serve at just about every party I throw.
Blondie
1 oz Fast Penny Amaricano Bianca
1 oz gin
1 oz Rockwell Dry Vermouth
Add all the ingredients to a mixing glass. Stir with ice and strain into a coupe. Garnish with an expressed lemon peel.
Here’s another fantastic variation that I like to build with a juniper-forward gin. I want the gin to be the star of the show and the other components to be supporting acts. The goal is to go for bold herbal flavors with some soft sweetness and a nice, well-weighted mouthfeel. I get that with the addition of Lillet Blanc and the gentian-based Salers.
Negroni in Paris
1 oz Astraea Forest Gin
1 oz Lillet Blanc
1 oz Salers Aperitif
Add all the ingredients to a mixing glass. Stir with ice and strain into a coupe. Garnish with an expressed orange peel.
Toward Your Own Twists
“Variety is the spice of life, as they say, and it just seems right to take these classic cocktails that are so beloved and have stood the test of time—especially cocktails [that] famed bartenders have called ‘perfect’—and make modern adaptations,” says Jenn Harrington, a bar program director in Texas.
“Putting your own stamp on a cocktail, especially when it generates a following, is a really big deal for bar professionals,” she says. “And we are, in the end, honoring the classics. We aren’t here to say, ‘Hey, this cocktail isn’t good enough.’ It’s more that we love it so much, we want to continue [its] evolution.”
