Aviation
Gin, maraschino and a whisper of violette, shaken with lemon — pale purple and quietly complex.
- Difficulty
- medium
- Prep time
- 5 min
- Strength
- 28.6% ABV
- Glassware
- Coupe glass
- Base
- gin
- Serves
- 1
Ingredients
- Gin45ml
- Maraschino liqueur15ml
- Crème de violette8ml
Use sparingly — this should tint the drink, not dominate it
- Fresh lemon juice15ml
Garnish: Maraschino cherry
Method
- Add the gin, maraschino liqueur, crème de violette and lemon juice to a shaker with ice.
- Shake hard for 10–15 seconds until well chilled.
- Double-strain into a chilled coupe glass.
- Garnish with a maraschino cherry.
Equipment
Don't have everything? Here's what works instead.
Cocktail shaker
Household swap: A jar with a tight-fitting lid, shaken firmly, works well.
Citrus juicer
Household swap: Squeeze the lemon by hand and strain out the pips.
Missing an ingredient?
Each swap below says what it changes and how to correct for it, so you can decide whether you are making this drink or a neighbouring one.
Instead of Crème de Violette
Nothing else tastes like crème de violette, so the honest answer is to leave it out rather than approximate it. Without it you get a Gin Sour with maraschino — pleasant, and a real drink in its own right — but you lose the pale violet colour and the floral note the Aviation is named for.
Make it better
- Measure the crème de violette precisely — a few extra millilitres shifts the drink from pale lavender and floral to overtly perfumed.
- Chill the coupe in advance; this drink is served up with no ice, so it warms quickly once poured.
- Use a London Dry gin with a firm juniper backbone — softer gins get lost against the maraschino and violette.
- Shake hard for 12-15 seconds with plenty of ice — a proper shake chills and dilutes the drink in one step.
- Use freshly squeezed citrus juice rather than bottled — the aromatic oils fade fast once juiced, so squeeze just before making the drink.
Rescue this drink
- Tastes too floral or soapy
- You've likely over-poured the crème de violette — measure it precisely with a jigger next time, not a free pour.
- Colour looks grey rather than lavender
- This usually means too little crème de violette relative to the other ingredients; add a few more drops.
- Too sour
- Add a touch more maraschino liqueur to round out the sharpness.
- Tastes thin, with no weight to itgeneral guidance
- A short shaken drink with nothing rich in it depends on sugar and dilution for body. Try a slightly richer syrup — two parts sugar to one of water rather than equal parts — which adds weight without adding much more sweetness. Egg white or aquafaba does the same job more dramatically, and turns it into a sour.
- Shaken too longgeneral guidance
- Ten to fifteen seconds is a full shake. Beyond that the ice fractures and keeps diluting while you are still working, so the drink arrives cold, thin and slightly foamy when it should be sharp. Shake hard and briefly rather than gently and long — the two are not interchangeable.
- Too stronggeneral guidance
- Stir or shake for a little longer to add dilution, or add a splash of chilled water. This is a spirit-forward drink by design, so some strength is expected.
- Too sweetgeneral guidance
- Add a small amount of fresh citrus juice or a dash of bitters to bring the balance back — adjust gradually and taste as you go.
- Served too warmgeneral guidance
- Chill the glass, ice and every ingredient ahead of time — a warm pour is the fastest way to lose a cold drink's balance. For one serving, there's no real fix beyond rebuilding it properly chilled; for a batch, keep everything refrigerated until the moment of serving and add ice last.
- Over-diluted (tastes watery)general guidance
- Likely shaken too long, or with too much ice surface area. For one serving there's no fixing it after the fact — rebuild with fewer, larger ice cubes and a shorter shake. Planning a batch? Shorten the ice-contact time across the whole round, not just this glass.
- Under-diluted (tastes harsh or too concentrated)general guidance
- For one serving, stir in a few drops of chilled water to open it up. For a batch, extend the shake time slightly on the next round.
- No cocktail shakergeneral guidance
- A jar with a tight-fitting lid, shaken firmly, works well.
Make ahead & storage
Batch the base, finish at serving
Batch the 3 stable components days ahead and add fresh lemon juice when you pour.
Add about 27% water to the batch to replace what the ice would otherwise contribute, or it will pour noticeably harsher than a fresh one.
- Fresh lemon juice:
- Fresh citrus loses its aroma within hours and turns dull. Squeeze it on the day.
What it tastes like
The taste, and what drives it
dry, sharp, very light — a sour-structured drink served straight up, no ice.
Dry
Dry → Sweet
Barely sweetened. The spirit and the acid are what you taste.
What drives it: Crème de violette — carries the most sugar into the glass.
Sharp
Soft → Sharp
Properly sharp. This is the axis the drink is built on.
What drives it: Fresh lemon juice — supplies the acidity.
Very light
Light → Rich
Almost weightless in the mouth — closer to a long soft drink than to a sipper.
What drives it: Gin — adds most of the weight.
Very bold
Delicate → Bold
Very bold — concentrated, and served small for that reason.
What drives it: Gin — is the most concentrated thing in the glass.
What you smell first
- Citrus peelLeads
From Gin, Fresh lemon juice
- Juniper and botanicalsLeads
From Gin
- Stone fruit
From Maraschino liqueur
- Floral
From Crème de violette
Every aroma here comes from the liquid itself; nothing is layered on top.
How it was worked out
Each reading comes from the recipe's own recorded taste scores combined with what each ingredient contributes, weighted by how much of it is in the glass. Almost everything in this drink has detailed ingredient data behind it.
How balance actually works →If it isn't right
What goes wrong with this drink, and why
Only the faults this particular recipe is actually prone to — each with the likely cause, the adjustment, and what the adjustment costs you.
It's too sour
- Likely cause
- Fresh lemon juice varies more than any other ingredient in the drink. Limes differ by weeks of ripeness, and a sharp one can be half again as acidic as a mild one at the same measure.
- What to change
- Add sweetener a few millilitres at a time rather than diluting — you are correcting a ratio, not a concentration.
- What that does
- Sourness recedes and the drink gains a little weight. Overshoot and you will be reading the too-sweet entry above instead.
It's too strong
- Likely cause
- Gin dominates by design here — this is a drink built to be sipped, and it is under-diluted more often than it is over-poured.
- What to change
- Shaking for longer, or add a measured 5–10ml of water. Both are the same correction; one is just more honest about it.
- What that does
- Alcohol heat drops and the aromatics open up — a slightly diluted spirit-forward drink usually smells better, not worse.
It's watery
- Likely cause
- Shaking adds water while it chills, and the two cannot be separated. Wet ice from a freezer door, or small cubes, will over-dilute before the drink is properly cold.
- What to change
- Use bigger, drier, colder ice and stop sooner. Chilling the glass first buys you time you would otherwise spend diluting.
- What that does
- More flavour concentration at the same temperature. Under-dilute instead and the drink will taste harsh — this is a target, not a direction.
It doesn't smell of anything
- Likely cause
- This drink's aroma comes from citrus peel and juniper and botanicals, carried in the liquid. Serving it too cold suppresses that: volatile compounds do not leave a very cold drink.
- What to change
- Let it sit for a minute before drinking, and use a glass that narrows towards the rim to concentrate what does escape.
- What that does
- More of the aroma escapes and the drink reads as more intense. The cost is temperature: a drink left to warm also dilutes faster, so this is a trade against how long it stays right.
It tastes one-dimensional
- Likely cause
- With 4 components there is nowhere for complexity to hide — a sour-structured drink is exposed by design, so a dull one is usually a dull ingredient rather than a missing step.
- What to change
- Change the quality of what is there before adding anything new: fresh citrus rather than bottled, a better base bottle, a dash of bitters. Bitters add layers at a scale nothing else matches.
- What that does
- More going on at the same strength and sweetness. Adding a whole extra ingredient instead usually produces a muddier drink rather than a deeper one.
Taste profile
- Sweetness
- 1/5
- Sourness
- 3/5
- Bitterness
- 0/5
- Strength
- 4/5
- Fruitiness
- 1/5
- Freshness
- 2/5
- Creaminess
- 0/5
- Smokiness
- 0/5
Nutrition & alcohol
Estimate onlySmall-volume liqueurs make precise ABV estimation harder; brands vary in strength.- Calories
- 170 kcal
- Sugar
- 11 g
- Carbohydrates
- 12 g
- Alcohol units (UK)
- 2.4
- US standard drinks
- 1.37
- ABV
- 28.6%
- Serving size
- 85 ml
Show calculation assumptions
Source: Calculated from standard measures
Calorie breakdown: ~134 kcal from alcohol, ~36 kcal from sugar and mixers.
Likely range: 128–213 kcal, reflecting the confidence level above — not a lab-measured figure.
Based on 45ml gin at 40% ABV, 15ml maraschino liqueur at 32% ABV and 7.5ml crème de violette at 20% ABV.
These figures are estimates, not laboratory measurements — individual tolerance to alcohol varies. See our responsible drinking guidance.
Variations
Blue Moon
An earlier, related cocktail using just gin, lemon and crème de violette without the maraschino.
What kind of drink this is
The structure behind the recipe
A shaken build: a sour-structured gin-based drink, served straight up, no ice — light and lively in the mouth.
Sour-structured
Something sour and something sweet held in balance over a base — the structure behind the whole sour family and everything descended from it.
Base
Gin
Spirit in the largest measure — read as the base.
Modifier
Maraschino liqueur
Liqueurs modify: they flavour and usually sweeten at the same time.
Sour element
Fresh lemon juice
A short, sharp measure — recorded acidity 5/5, and nothing sharper is poured short, so this is the sour element.
Sweet element
Crème de violette
Sweet liqueur (4/5) and nothing else in the drink sweetens — so this is the sweet element, the way triple sec is in a Margarita.
Drinks built this way are collected as the Sour family.
4 components' roles areworked out from the ingredient's category and recorded taste attributes rather than set by hand — the reasoning is shown above so you can disagree with it.
Technique
shaken
Ice is thrown against the liquid and against itself, chipping fragments off and driving air through the mix. Chilling, dilution and aeration all happen at once and cannot be separated.
A lighter, briefly frothy body and a cloudy appearance that settles as it stands. The aeration blunts alcoholic heat, which is why a shaken drink tastes softer than a stirred one of the same strength.
What it ruins: Clarity, and any carbonation. A shaken spirits-only drink arrives cloudy with ice shards floating in it, and shaking anything fizzy is the one rule with no exceptions.
Everything about shaking →How the technique works →Dilution
During mixing, then strained
Water from ice typically makes up around 30% of the finished drink for a shaken build (commonly 25–35%). Dilution is an ingredient here, not a side effect.
Why dilution is an ingredient →Served
Straight up, no ice
Coupe glass · 85ml
Chilled during mixing and then strained away from the ice, so it arrives at its coldest and most concentrated and warms from the first sip — which is why 85ml is the right size for it.
Texture and aroma
Shaking whips air through the drink, giving a lighter, briefly frothy body that settles as it stands.
No dedicated aromatic component — what you smell is the spirit itself, which is a deliberate choice in a drink this spare.
Where to go from here
Each of these is here because of something specific about this drink, not as a standard set of links.
Why this drink matters
This one carries one kind of the evidence used to identify influential drinks — each with a test you can check rather than a ranking.
Drinking this with food: seafood, oysters and anything raw
On its recorded taste scores this drink meets the test for seafood, oysters and anything raw — the page explains the principle behind it rather than simply asserting the pairing.
Understanding why drinks work
Once you can make this, the intermediate path is where recipes stop being things to memorise.
Where this fits in a home bar
Gin is bottle 1 in the order that unlocks the most drinks — buying it opens up 10 recipes beyond the ones before it.
Where it comes from
Origin and family
Origin of the Aviation
American classic cocktail first published in the early 20th century.
Family
Sour2 parts spirit · 1 part citrus · 1 part sweetener — shaken, strained, served up or over ice.
The wider history
Every claim on these pages is labelled by how well the evidence supports it — documented, disputed, or folklore.
Try this next
Questions people ask
- I don't have crème de violette — what now?
- See the substitution guidance above — it can genuinely be omitted rather than forcing a substitute, since nothing else gives quite the same colour or floral note.
- Why is my Aviation grey instead of lavender?
- See "Rescue this drink" above — the colour is sensitive to exactly how much crème de violette goes in, so grey usually means too little (or none).
- What's a Blue Moon?
- A real variation listed above, built the same way with a different violette-to-citrus balance for a bluer, less floral result.
Use up your ingredients
Bought a bottle just for this? Here's what else it's good for.
Related tools
Scale this for a party
Work out bottles, mixers, ice and total alcohol units for any number of guests.
Recipe confidence
Well-documented historic recipe, revived and standardised by modern cocktail bars.