Making cocktails is a fun and rewarding hobby that can be a great way to train your sense of taste, experiment with new flavors, and delight your friends, who get to enjoy the delicious creations (and occasional bizarre flops) that you come up with. However, no one can deny that cocktail-making can get fiddly. From highly specialized liqueurs that you have to hunt down from specialty stores to finicky techniques that require great precision and have the potential to make a real mess of your kitchen, coming up with the perfect cocktail can be hard work.
That’s part of the fun, of course; with each new technique or dubious failure, you learn more and expand your skills. But sometimes, you just want a delicious drink, and you don’t want to have to reinvent the wheel. When that mood strikes, you could always grab a beer, a glass of wine, or even a premixed drink. But if you still want to be creative and experimental without having to go through endless failures to find something that works, or if you’re getting started in making your own drinks and you’re a bit overwhelmed by all of the options, then there are a few drinks formulas which can make your life easier.
One of the cocktail world’s great creations is the equal parts cocktail. As you can tell from the name, that refers to drinks that are made up of equal amounts of various ingredients, making them easy to measure. But even better than that, once you understand how equal parts cocktails work as a template, you can create endless versions and riffs of your own, using whatever ingredients you have on hand. It’s the cheat sheet of cocktail making, and some knowledge of the format will make your life easier and your
The triple hit: The negroni
Possibly the most famous of all equal parts drinks, the negroni matches up equal amounts of gin, sweet vermouth, and Campari for a drink that is bitter, deep, and complex. Traditionally, the drink is stirred with ice before being poured into a tumbler glass, but you can even get away with putting a large ice cube into the serving glass and just giving the ingredients a good mix. It’s also one of the rare cocktails that you can make well without having to measure, as you can eyeball equal parts in a pinch (though I’d still recommend using a jigger to be precise in your measurements).
That means you can make this drink with virtually no special equipment whatsoever, and it will still be delicious every time.
We’ve already talked about the many variations on a negroni, but it’s worth going through a few favorites to understand how the equal parts principle works. The negroni consists of a spirit (gin), a sweetener (sweet vermouth), and a bitter/herbal addition (Campari). To start making variations, just swap in other ingredients with similar qualities.
So, for example, you can swap the gin for bourbon, both spirits, and make a boulevardier. Or swap the sweet vermouth for sherry, a similar sweet wine, as seen in the charming man. And you can change out the Campari for another bitter herbal option like Suze, as seen in the white negroni.
This formula for three-part drinks allows you to make endless variations, especially if you enjoy your amaros and bitter flavors.
Four-part magic: The last word
However, there’s an even more flexible template for equal parts cocktails, which uses four equal parts. Perhaps the prototypical four equal parts drink is the last word, an iconic cocktail from the 1910s that shot to popularity over the last two decades during the craft cocktail boom. It’s complex, it’s interesting, it’s both sharp and bitter and sweet, and if you’ve never tried one before, then you absolutely must. The recipe calls for equal parts of gin, lime juice, green Chartreuse, and maraschino. Roughly speaking, you could interpret that as spirit, citrus, herbal, and sweet, respectively. The four ingredients are shaken together and then strained into a coupe or cocktail glass.
A popular riff on the last word is the paper plane, which uses equal parts of bourbon, lemon juice, Amaro Nonino, and Aperol. While those are four completely different ingredients from the original, you can see it follows the same pattern of spirit, citrus, herbal, and sweet. The result is a well-balanced cocktail that incorporates both bitter and sweet and has a hint of the crowd-pleasing nature of an Aperol spritz but with a much more complex and interesting character.
Another equal parts classic that you must try is the corpse reviver no. 2, a Prohibition-era cocktail that was designed to bring drinkers back from the dead after a night of heavy drinking. While it would take a brave person to crack into one of these at breakfast, it is a delicious combination that has stood the test of time thanks to its complex but easy-to-drink character. It’s made with equal parts of gin, lemon juice, Lillet blanc, and Cointreau, standing in for the spirit, citrus, herbal, and sweet ingredients. This includes an absinthe rinse, where you pour a small amount of absinthe into the glass, swirl it around, and then throw it out before pouring in the drink. That adds just a tiny hint of
There are some lesser known four equal parts drinks that are also delicious and worth a try, like the Monte Cassino. This one combines rye whiskey, lemon juice, Benedictine, and yellow Chartreuse, for a combination that shows off the interesting layers of Benedictine, a home bar favorite. It’s got an almost earthy quality to it which plays with the honey-like spice of Benedictine delightfully.
Another must-try is the Naked & Famous, which combines equal parts of mezcal, lime juice, Aperol, and yellow Chartreuse for a slightly sweeter version that includes the smoky notes of mezcal. To me, it’s a summer sipper perfect for when you want something interesting but not heavy, and the sweetness of the Aperol tempers the bitterness that many of these four equal-part cocktails have.
Working with equal parts
As the wide range of cocktail riffs has hopefully demonstrated, the real power of equal-parts drinks is the ability to mix and experiment with what you have. While following recipes is a great way to build up your skills and your palate, there’s also something to be said for going wild and coming up with your own creations. If you don’t have the budget or space for endless bottles of liqueurs or amaros, then learning how to interchange ingredients can help you learn how to work with what you do have. And even if your bar and budget is endless, there’s something very satisfying about taking a group of ingredients that you enjoy and combining them into something perfectly suited to your taste.
One thing to remember about all cocktails, but particularly simple ones like equal parts combinations, is that there isn’t much room to cover up bad ingredients. You want to use fresh citrus juice, for example, and decent-quality spirits or off-flavors will make their way into your drinks even if you combine your other ingredients well. You’ll always be better off with a small number of high-quality bottles than having a huge selection of bottom-tier booze.
The converse is that high-quality ingredients will do a lot of work for you. Chartreuse, for example, used in many of these drinks in either its green or yellow form, is undeniably expensive to purchase. But even small amounts of it contain a lot of complexity and interest, so a bottle will generally last you a long time and consistently add depth of flavor to a wide range of cocktails.
Once you begin to understand how different ingredients work together, there’s no end to the variations that you can explore, so try a few of the classic recipes and then run free to come up with your own creations using this basic formula.
