As for my favorite cocktails, my wife and I are big into the classics. We've got dozens of bottles of random things, and I love trying unfamiliar drink recipes, but we always come back to the same handful of drinks. I'll use ratios instead of ounces or ml since this is an international forum and I'm always scaling these things up or down anyway:
Manhattan
2 parts rye or bourbon to 1 part sweet vermouth, dash or two of whatever bitters I'm in the mood for, garnished with lemon peel and Luxardo cherry. I like bottled-in-bond whiskey for this one. Carpano Antica Formula vermouth is pricey, but it's like a cheat code for making drinks even more delicious.
Man o' War
4 parts bourbon, 2 parts Cointreau, 1 part lemon juice, 1 part sweet vermouth. It doesn't historically call for bitters, but I like to throw in a dash of Angostura. The garnish is supposed to be a fancy arrangement of a lemon peel and cherry on a skewer, but I'm lazy and just toss those into the glass as per Manhattan.
Aviation
8 parts gin, 2 parts lemon juice, 1 part Luxardo liqueur, 1 part creme de violet. Any basic gin works, but I really like how the floral notes of Hendricks Midsummer Solstice play off the violet liqueur. I tried a bunch of recipes from the Internet, but many of them are too tart for my taste (too much lemon juice), and some omit the creme de violet since it was hard to get for a long time. I like these ratios because it's a very nicely balanced drink and gives the perfect sky-blue color that inspired its name.
Kentucky Orange Blossom
4 parts bourbon, 2 parts orange juice, 1 part Cointreau. This one doesn't usually call for bitters, but I like a dash of Fee's Black Walnut Bitters. One cool thing about this drink is that you can tinker with the ratios and it will always turn out good.
Last Word
Equal parts gin, lime juice, green Chartreuse, and Luxardo liqueur. Green Chartreuse is unfortunately hard to come by, so I've been using Dolin Génépy or Fontbonne as a substitute. The substitutes are a bit weaker than the real thing, so I'll generally use a smidge more of them.
Negroni
Equal parts gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth. Build in rocks glass with ice, garnish with orange slice or peel. This drink is pretty forgiving if you don't get the ratios exact, too.
Martini
4 parts gin to 1 part dry vermouth. I don't like olives (to say nothing of olive juice) in these, so they're garnished with a lemon peel. Here again, I like a strong gin, ideally a 94-proof dry gin. But I'll play around with whatever I have on hand.
Everybody's keeping their vermouth in the fridge to keep it fresh, right?
) and then add ice. Strain the whiskey / bitters / sugar mixture from the tumbler into the Herbsaint coated glass and garnish with a lemon peel.
