Taste profile
Spicy cocktails
Spicy cocktails borrow heat from ginger, chilli or spiced syrups, using warmth the way a bartender would use bitters — as an accent rather than the whole point. That heat plays especially well against citrus and sugar, which keep the drink from turning into a dare rather than something you actually want a second round of. A Moscow Mule's ginger kick is the mildest end of the spectrum; muddled chilli cocktails sit at the other.
20 spicy cocktails
Ginger Lime Fizz
Ginger beer, lime and soda over ice with mint — a spicy, fizzy CocktailHQ original.
Three Dots and a Dash
Dark and gold rum shaken with citrus, falernum and allspice dram — a spiced tiki classic named for its Morse-code cherry garnish.
Alcohol-free
Spicy without the alcohol
6 alcohol-free spicy options.
Ginger Lime Fizz
Ginger beer, lime and soda over ice with mint — a spicy, fizzy CocktailHQ original.
What drives it
What makes a cocktail spicy
Not simply the most common ingredients — the ones that appear far more often in spicy drinks than across the catalogue as a whole.
Ginger Beer
In 5 of these · 9.4× the catalogue rate
Tomato Juice
In 4 of these · 9.4× the catalogue rate
Worcestershire Sauce
In 4 of these · 9.4× the catalogue rate
Tabasco Sauce
In 4 of these · 9.4× the catalogue rate
Honey Syrup
In 4 of these · 4.7× the catalogue rate
Lime Juice
In 11 of these · 2.0× the catalogue rate
Dark Rum
In 4 of these · 2.1× the catalogue rate
Lemon Juice
In 6 of these · 1.4× the catalogue rate
The flavour graph
Where spicy sits
Measured from the catalogue rather than asserted: which flavours actually travel together, and the drink that gets you from one to the other.
- Sour
Spicy drinks are mildly associated with sour ones: 13 carry both, making a spicy drink 47% more likely to also be sour than a drink picked at random.
Drinks that bridge across
Spicy + Sour
Reads as spicy and sour at once — the shortest way across if you already like one of the two.