The Menu.

Cannon was a bar on Capitol Hill that made this drink without any ceremony at all. No name on the menu, no story from the bartender, just four spirits and a swizzle stick. The first time I had it I was twenty-three and I assumed every cocktail bar in the world worked this way.

Some drinks are too good to leave in someone else's bar. The Cannon is gone now. The recipe is here.

There are people who treat old cocktail books the way archaeologists treat field journals. I am one of them. I found this one in a vintage book at a market in Berkeley, in a chapter nobody had bothered to crease, written down in the casual way you write things that you know are good.

Built in a tiki lounge in the lobby of the KL Hilton, and somehow forgotten for thirty years. I made it that night. I have made it most nights since.

I had this at a bar in Bed-Stuy whose name I have lost. The bartender would not tell me what was in it. I reverse-engineered it on the subway home, in the notes app, in handwriting that does not survive close inspection.

Cynar is either disgusting or brilliant. There is no middle ground. This drink is the case for brilliant.

Some weeks I miss bitter aperitivo bars more than I miss specific people. The Bitter Giuseppe is a Chicago drink that solves that problem for forty-five minutes at a time. It is not named for anyone in particular. Nobody named Giuseppe has ever ordered it.

It is the kind of drink that quiets a room. Make it for someone who claims they do not like bitter things, and watch them change their mind.

I almost did not go on the trip. I was tired, I had a deadline, and a friend talked me into it anyway. The bartender at the hotel poured me this without saying what was in it. I fell in love with two things that week and one of them was a drink.

The original Negroni in a pale linen suit. Floral, pale, slightly bitter, slightly sweet, completely composed. The bottle of Suze in my pantry is from that trip.

Eighty-eight degrees on Bryant Street. Too many bottles open. I poured them at the wrong ratios, on purpose, and then by accident, and somewhere in the third pour the drink stopped tasting like a mistake.

Named for the street, not for anyone named Bryant. The sauce is a closely guarded secret which is to say I have not written it down anywhere.

The Last Word's moody older sibling. A rainy Tuesday in October on the Lower East Side, in a bar with a name almost nobody pronounces correctly. The bartender swapped the lime for amaro and slid it across without a word.

The amaro folds the brightness into something darker. The drink stops feeling like spring and starts feeling like late autumn. Best in October. Tolerable in November. Inappropriate in July.