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This year, it seems a little escapism was in order. That is, at least, according to our most popular drinks from 2024, which include a milk punch capable of transporting you to the tropics in the dead of winter and an aperitivo with the same vibe as an afternoon in Italy. Hailing from Tokyo, Mexico City, Melbourne and beyond, here are the drinks you loved most this year.
1) Piña Colada Milk Punch
A perennial favorite, this clarified cocktail takes a drink whose essence relies on both a beach and a blender, and makes it the sort of drink you’d sip near the fire. Our Piña Colada Milk Punch maintains the drink’s tropical spirit with coconut water, pineapple juice and rum (with Velvet Falernum for extra credit), but it’s transformed through the addition of scalded milk and clarification of the mixture with a cheesecloth before being ladled, punch-style, on the rocks.
2) Margarita Soda
The key to the Margarita Soda is simplicity. The ingenious highball mashup from Ridgewood, Queens’ Hellbender Nighttime Café starts with a base of a Tommy’s Margarita, which is topped with club soda, opening up the earthy tequila notes and the sharp lime, offering balanced, layered complexity.
3) Nuclear Daiquiri
Spawned in the late aughts at LAB—London’s influential high-energy, high-volume bar—this spin on the rum classic has had a cult following since its creation in 2005. More recently, the drink has united online cocktail enthusiasts who are in search of the best substitute for green Chartreuse, the drink’s key ingredient, which has become increasingly scarce.
4) Toreador
The Toreador, which is considered obscure stateside, is a well-known classic in Australia and a standard entry in the mental recipe book of most professional Aussie bartenders. Hayden Lambert, owner of Above Board in Melbourne, Australia, describes the drink as “classic but not extremely well-known,” which fits with the bar’s ethos of putting twists on familiar cocktails.
5) White Mezcal Negroni
The wine-based gentian liqueur used in this recipe in lieu of Suze adds an extra-bitter element that complements the base spirit and blanc vermouth for a drink that has far more depth than its three ingredients would suggest: It’s minerally, herbal and bitter, but not all at once, creating layers of flavor that evolve with each sip.
6) Enzoni
When it was created in the early 2000s, the Enzoni was ahead of its time. It would take two decades and a wave of aperitivo mania for the bittersweet Campari-spiked sour to shine in the spotlight. Today, it has become a popular entry point for drinkers just discovering the world of bitter cocktails.
7) Pantheon
Daisuke Ito, owner of Tokyo’s Land Bar Artisan, created the Pantheon specifically so others could take it and play with it. At a time when invention so often means novel syrups, cordials or distillates and an appliance or two, a three-ingredient, easy-to-replicate formula seems to have struck a chord with its simplicity, making it onto menus as far away as Thailand and Germany in just five years.
8) Rome With a View
Michael McIlroy’s Rome With a View falls somewhere between an afternoon-appropriate Collins and an Americano. Where an Americano is built with bitter Italian Campari and sweet vermouth, McIlroy swaps in dry vermouth, and, as with a Collins, he built this with the refreshing structure of spirit-citrus-sweetener-soda. Low-alcohol and bracingly bittersweet, it conjures warm afternoons looking out over an ancient Italian city.
9) Salmoncito
On paper, the Salmoncito looks like the byproduct of international cocktail diplomacy. The gin is a London dry from England, the Campari from Italy. Tonic water and grapefruit, the two ingredients that finalize the recipe, are used with abandon in drinks across the globe. And yet, many consider the pink-hued highball just as Mexican in spirit as classic bedfellows like the Paloma or Margarita.
10) Christine Wiseman’s Margarita
The winner of our 2024 Margarita tasting, Christine Wiseman’s recipe reads like a hybrid of a classic Margarita and a Tommy’s Margarita. There’s a half-ounce of orange liqueur, the default in classic iterations of the drink, plus a half-ounce of agave syrup, the sweetener of choice in the latter build. The result is a Margarita with zip, body and balance and a tequila that shines through beautifully.
Source: Neubauer Artists | United Stars
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