10 decadent lockdown cocktails to make at home
Ordering a Martini in a dimly lit bar may be on pause, but that doesn't mean cocktail hour should cease to exist. Perhaps the mood calls for a Whisky Highball, or maybe a Singapore Sling to see in the new year.
With the expert help of some of the world's leading mixologists, these foolproof cocktails have been tried and tested so you can shake them up at home.
Alternatively - if this seems like too much effort, try one of these at-home cocktail delivery services.
Whisky Highball with Cocktail Porter
Like most classic cocktails, the origins of the Highball are hotly debated. One story posits that it was brought to the US in 1894 by English actor E. J. Ratcliffe, and that the name originated in golf clubs, where whisky in a tall glass was referred to as the ‘ball’. Another theory attributes the name to 19th-century train signals in the US, where a ball raised on a signpost signalled a clear track ahead.
Whatever its origins, the Highball is one of the simplest quarantinis to make, comprising one part spirit to two parts mixer, served over ice and garnished with lemon. It’s also one of the most versatile: this version uses whisky and ginger, but you can play around with flavoured syrups and mixers to suit your taste.
Ingredients
40ml Johnnie Walker Black (or your choice of whisky)
20ml your choice of flavoured cordial (e.g. ginger, lemon and mint, elderflower)
Soda water
Ice
Dehydrated lemon, lime or orange to garnish
Method
Fill a tall glass with ice up to the top
Add the whisky and cordial
Top up with soda
Stir gently so as not to destroy the bubbles
Top up with a couple more ice cubes and garnish.
Espresso Martini from The Lanesborough
Your home bar set-up may or may not bear much resemblance to The Lanesborough’s decadent, wood-panelled Library Bar, but that doesn’t have to stop you indulging in one of its signature cocktails whilst the hotel’s doors are shut.
"I love the Espresso Martini because it's an original, very popular cocktail that I've really enjoyed shaking and serving for the past two decades. It is a treat, a ‘celebration fuel’, accessible to everyone, everywhere, and if you haven't tried it, you should," says the hotel's bar manager Mickael Perron. "Use this time to play around with the recipe like you would play in a coffee shop, adding chocolate, flavoured syrups, spray cream and much more."
Ingredients
2 shot glasses of espresso, or instant coffee mixed with hot water (keep it strong!). We recommend two teaspoons of instant coffee with one spoon of caster sugar
2 shot glasses of vodka
2 drops of vanilla extract
Method
Shake well in a cocktail shaker, or a tin / glass jar if you do not have a shaker, with ice – about two or three ice cubes will do.
Strain and serve the cocktail in your favourite glass (ideally Martini) and enjoy.
Dukes Martini from Dukes Hotel
We say ‘Dukes Hotel’, those in the know say ‘martini’. The historic St James’s hotel is renowned worldwide for its extra-dry, extra-cold signature cocktail, hailed as the ‘world’s best martini’. The bar is said to have inspired James Bond’s preferred tipple (author Ian Fleming was a regular), but the Dukes Martini was invented in its current guise in the 1980s, by cocktail supremo Salvatore Calabrese.
The appeal of the Dukes Martini lies in its simplicity - there are just three ingredients - while the secret to its success is all in the quality of the spirits and the preparation (frozen gin is a must).
Ingredients
1 frozen martini glass
100ml frozen No. 3 Gin
5ml Sacred Dry vermouth
1 zest of organic Amalfi lemon
Method
Drop 5ml of Sacred Dry Vermouth into the frozen glass.
Top the glass up with 100 ml of the frozen No.3 Gin.
Finish off with a large twist of zest of organic Amalfi lemon, squeeze the lemon zest to extract the fragrant oils.
Finally, gently swirl the lemon zest around the rim of the glass, drop it into the glass and enjoy your Dukes Martini.
Coriander Sour from Kwant
Kwant, the hidden bar beneath Mourad Mazouz’s celebrated Moroccan restaurant Momo, is home to head bartender Erik Lorincz. Previously deployed at the Savoy, his personal collection of rare vintage spirits is extensive, but for home dwellers, he's chosen something more within reach: a coriander sour.
“I’ve chosen this drink as all the ingredients are very easy to find: most of them you’ll have in the house anyway,” he says. “It’s very easy to make and no special tools are required, apart from a cocktail shaker which can be replaced by a jar and a lid. It’s very fresh and a great pick-me-up, with lots of savoury elements."
Ingredients
50ml Sipsmith Gin
30ml lemon juice
15ml sugar syrup
Fresh coriander
Egg white
Method
Shake all ingredients in a shaker with ice and double strain into a glass.
Perfect Manhattan from The Beaumont Hotel
The Manhattan is widely said to have been invented at New York’s Manhattan Club in the mid-1870s. Cocktail lore has it that Lady Randolph Churchill (Winston’s mother) was hosting a banquet for presidential candidate Samuel J. Tilden on the night it was first concocted.
Experts dispute this story, on the basis that Churchill would have been in England, giving birth to Winston, on the date the banquet was allegedly held. An alternative story has it that the drink was invented by a man known only as ‘Black’, who “kept a place ten doors below Houston Street on Broadway in the 1860s - probably the most famous drink in the world at the time”.
A third legend posits that the drink was invented by Colonel Joe Walker, who ran a saloon in New Orleans, after he experimented with mixing whiskey and vermouth during a yachting trip with friends in New York.
Whatever the origins, the first written record of the Manhattan appeared in the 1884 book The Modern Bartenders’ Guide, and it remains widely unchanged ever since - although the original dash of absinthe is largely omitted from modern-day menus. One thing everyone agrees on is that it must be made with Italian, rather than French, vermouth.
The Manhattan is one of the bestselling cocktails at The Magritte Bar at The Beaumont Hotel in Mayfair, where it can be served dry, sweet, or ‘perfect’ (a 50:50 blend of sweet and dry vermouth).
Ingredients
60ml Rye whiskey
15ml Dry Vermouth (for a dry Manhattan use 30ml)
15ml Sweet Vermouth (for a sweet Manhattan use 30ml)
Two dashes Angostura Bitters
Orange zest to garnish
Method
Add all ingredients to a mixing glass
Add ice and stir until ice-cold and the dilution suits your palate
Strain into a chilled Martini glass and garnish with orange zest.
Singapore Sling from Raffles Hotel
Few cocktails are so closely linked to a specific bar as the Singapore Sling. The republic’s national cocktail was invented in 1915 by Ngiam Tong Boon, a bartender at the celebrated Raffles Hotel.
The hotel’s Long Bar, which had its roots as a simple row of tables where plantation owners would meet every weekend, was the place to see and be seen. Men and women mingled over a floor famously littered with peanut shells (a tradition that continues to this day).
While the men would nurse whisky or gin, etiquette dictated that women should not consume alcohol in public. The pink-hued Singapore Sling, infused with gin and liqueur, was invented to look like an innocent fruit juice. It has been the hotel’s bestselling cocktail ever since.
Ingredients
30ml Dry gin
10ml DOM Bénédictine
10ml Pierre Ferrand Dry Curaçao
10ml Luxardo Cherry Sangue Morlacco
10ml Crawley’s Singapore Sling Grenadine
A dash of Scrappy’s Spice Plantation Bitters
22.5ml fresh lime juice
60ml fresh pineapple juice
Cherry and pineapple to garnish
Method
Chill a glass with ice
Combine all ingredients into a shaker with lots of ice
Cap your shaker and give it a good vigorous shake for about 12 seconds
Strain the cocktail into your chilled glass
Garnish with a skewer of cherry and pineapple wedge.
Irish Coffee from The Westbury
The Westbury is one of Dublin’s most prestigious hotels, famed for its extensive art collection, sumptuous afternoon tea and elegant art deco-style cocktail bar which serves the classic cocktail: Irish Coffee.
An indulgent mix of Irish whiskey, coffee, sugar and cream, the Irish coffee is said to have been invented in 1943 by Joe Sheridan, head chef at a boat terminal’s restaurant near Limerick, who added whiskey to disembarking passengers’ coffees. Variations on the drink featuring coffee, alcohol and cream date back to the 1900s in Vienna.
Ingredients
40ml Teelings Irish whiskey
120ml filter coffee
One teaspoon Demerara sugar
Heavy cream - aerated but not over-whipped
Grated nutmeg (optional)
Method
Heat latte glass with hot water
Add whiskey and coffee to glass
Stir in a teaspoon of sugar
Pour over the aerated cream
Top with grated nutmeg
Mountain Spring from Swift
This fresh cocktail offering comes from one of London’s best bars, Swift, currently number 41 of the World’s 50 Best Bars list.
A subterranean drinking den in central Soho from the team behind award-winning bars Nightjar and Oriole, Swift offers one of the widest selections of whisky in London. But it’s vodka that takes central stage for this simple cocktail: the Mountain Spring, which also includes sake and Akvavit, a spiced Nordic spirit.
Ingredients
20ml Absolut Elyx (or vodka of your choice)
10ml pine needle-infused Åhus Akvavit
40ml Junmai sake (or any dry sake)
10ml Jasmine green tea syrup
40ml soda water
Cucumber to garnish
Method
Fill a mixing glass with ice and add all the ingredients except the soda water.
Stir gently to combine.
Pour into a glass over ice and top up with soda.
Garnish with a thin ribbon of cucumber around the rim.
Future Days from New York's NoMad bar
Once you’ve mastered the basics - the perfect martini and a crowd-pleasing espresso martini - it’s time to stretch yourself. This quarantini requires more preparation than most, but the results will impress dinner party guests for years to come.
The Future Days cocktail comes courtesy of Nathan O’Neill, bar director of New York’s NoMad bar. The Midtown bar is number three on the World’s Best Bars list, and is rightly hailed as one of the city’s best.
O’Neill, who was once crowned the ‘World’s Most Experimental Bartender’ at the Glenfiddich Global Cocktail Competition, blends fennel seed-infused vermouth and coffee-infused Campari in this cocktail, which he describes as “a riff on a Negroni - but not as you know it”.
Ingredients
30ml fennel seed-infused Dolin Rouge (or any good sweet vermouth)
30ml coffee-infused Campari
30ml Sombra Mezcal (or any good Espadin mezcal)
Method
Fennel seed-infused Dolin Rouge
Toast one gram of fennel seeds under a warm grill for three or four seconds until very lightly toasted, or in a warm dry pan that has been pre-heated. Infuse into the Dolin Rouge for 24 hours. Once infused, pass through a coffee filter to remove the seeds and refrigerate.
Coffee-infused Campari
Infuse 20g of South American coffee (I used beans for Colombia) into the Campari for four hours. Be cautious with the time as you do not want to over extract. Once infused, pass through a coffee filter paper to remove the beans and then refrigerate.
Cocktail
Stir all ingredients together and strain into a large glass, over a block of ice or pebble ice (be careful not to dilute the drink with smaller ice cubes).
Home Collins from The Connaught
Officially the World's Best Bar according to the latest 50 Best Bars list, The Connaught’s doors are sadly once again closed. But its award-winning Director of Mixology Agostino Perrone is taking the time to refine the bar’s signature creations, and come up with new concoctions for guests to enjoy.
For those too eager to wait for December 2nd, he suggests the ‘Home Collins’ - inspired by the old-school classic cocktail, the Tom Collins, and featuring a homemade lemon sage sherbet.
Lemon Sage Sherbet
500ml fresh lemon juice
400g caster sugar
5 sage leaves
Squeeze the juice of the lemon and store in the fridge.
Peel the skin of the lemon without the white pith.
Place the lemon peel, the caster sugar and the sage in a plastic or glass container and gently muddle to mix the ingredients together (without breaking any of the peel or leaves) and let it rest for one hour to allow the sugar to extract the flavours of the other ingredients.
Add the lemon juice to the container and gently stir until the caster sugar dissolves. Strain and store in a bottle in the fridge for four days.
Ingredients
50ml Connaught Bar Gin
20ml Lemon Sage Sherbet
5 drops of lavender bitter 150ml Fix8 Strawberry & Tulsi Kombucha (available at fix8.com)
One strawberry
Method
Pour all the ingredients in a mixing glass filled with ice cubes.
Stir and strain into a highball glass filled with ice.
Garnish with the strawberry and enjoy.
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