No fridge run required
Store-cupboard cocktails
No fresh citrus, fruit or herbs — every ingredient here keeps in a cupboard or the fridge door for weeks.
Most cocktail recipes assume you'll pick up a fresh lime on the way home, and for a lot of drinks that's genuinely the right call — nothing replaces fresh citrus juice. But some nights the point is making something decent with what's already in the flat: a bottle of spirit, a liqueur, some bitters, maybe a syrup that's been sitting in the door of the fridge since the last time you made something else.
Every drink below is built entirely from spirits, liqueurs, syrups, bitters and shelf-stable mixers — long-life bottled juices like cranberry or pineapple count, since they keep for weeks once opened, but fresh lime, lemon, orange or grapefruit juice, whole fruit and fresh herbs are excluded, since those are exactly the things you're most likely to have run out of.
74 cocktails
Shirley Temple
Ginger ale and grenadine with a maraschino cherry — a bright, fizzy classic mocktail.
Espresso Tonic
Chilled tonic water over ice with a fresh double espresso poured on top — bittersweet, fizzy and cold.
Brandy Alexander
Cognac, dark crème de cacao and cream, shaken smooth — a dessert cocktail dusted with nutmeg.
French Connection
Cognac and amaretto, built over ice — a simple, warming two-ingredient sipper.
Death in the Afternoon
Absinthe topped with ice-cold Champagne — a stark two-ingredient drink credited to Ernest Hemingway.
Coffee Old Fashioned
A classic Old Fashioned given a cold-brew twist — bourbon, coffee and bitters, stirred slow.
Vietnamese Coffee Cocktail
Dark rum stirred into strong iced coffee and sweetened condensed milk — a spirited take on Vietnamese cà phê sữa đá.
Corpse Reviver No. 1
Cognac, apple brandy and sweet vermouth, stirred cold — the older, spirit-forward half of the Corpse Reviver family.
Oaxaca Old Fashioned
Tequila and mezcal with agave and bitters, stirred over ice — an Old Fashioned built on agave rather than grain.
Roy Rogers
Cola and grenadine with a maraschino cherry — the cola-based sibling to a Shirley Temple.
Alcohol-Free Bellini
Peach purée topped with alcohol-free sparkling wine — two ingredients, and the same drink the original always was.