Start here
Beginner cocktails
Easy builds with few ingredients and almost no equipment — the drinks to learn on, chosen for forgiveness rather than simplicity alone.
The right first cocktail is not the one with the fewest ingredients. It is the one that still tastes good when your measurements are slightly off, which is a different and more useful property — a Negroni has three ingredients and punishes every one of them.
Everything here is easy by the catalogue's own difficulty rating, needs four ingredients or fewer, and needs no more than a couple of pieces of equipment. Most can be built straight in the glass.
Shirley Temple
Ginger ale and grenadine with a maraschino cherry — a bright, fizzy classic mocktail.
Ginger Lime Fizz
Ginger beer, lime and soda over ice with mint — a spicy, fizzy CocktailHQ original.
Espresso Tonic
Chilled tonic water over ice with a fresh double espresso poured on top — bittersweet, fizzy and cold.
French Connection
Cognac and amaretto, built over ice — a simple, warming two-ingredient sipper.
Vietnamese Coffee Cocktail
Dark rum stirred into strong iced coffee and sweetened condensed milk — a spirited take on Vietnamese cà phê sữa đá.
Kombucha Mule
Ginger kombucha and lime over ice — a tangy, faintly funky alcohol-free take on the Moscow Mule format.
Sparkling Cranberry Mocktail
Tart cranberry juice lengthened with soda and lime — a bright, festive-looking three-ingredient mocktail.
Roy Rogers
Cola and grenadine with a maraschino cherry — the cola-based sibling to a Shirley Temple.
Virgin Sunrise
Orange juice and grenadine, layered so the colour bleeds from red to gold — the Tequila Sunrise without the tequila.
Alcohol-Free Bellini
Peach purée topped with alcohol-free sparkling wine — two ingredients, and the same drink the original always was.
How this list is built
Recipes rated easy in the catalogue, using four or fewer non-optional ingredients and no more than two pieces of equipment.
Nothing on this page is hand-picked or sponsored — the list comes straight from the recipe data, so it stays correct as the catalogue grows. Lists only exist once enough real recipes match; that is why some categories you might expect aren't here yet.
Keep looking