Cocktail Emoji 🍸

2 oz / 60 ml dry gin
3/4 oz / 22 ml lemon juice
3/4 oz / 22 ml honey syrup (2 parts honey, 1 part warm water)

Shake hard with ice, fine-strain into a chilled coupe. Lemon twist.

The honey and lemon were doing a job: they covered the raw edge of bootleg gin. Frank Meier printed it at the Ritz bar in Paris in 1936.

1 1/2 oz / 45 ml cognac
3/4 oz / 22 ml Cointreau
3/4 oz / 22 ml lemon juice

Shake with ice, strain into a chilled coupe. Sugar half the rim if you want it sweeter.

In print in London and Paris by 1922, with both Harry's New York Bar and the Ritz claiming it. The earliest recipes ran equal parts; this is the drier build.

2 oz / 60 ml dry gin
3/4 oz / 22 ml lemon juice
3/4 oz / 22 ml simple syrup
6-8 mint leaves

Shake all with ice, double-strain into a chilled coupe. Mint sprig.

Mint and lemon bury a rough gin, which is why the Chicago gang story sticks to it. The Southside Sportsmen's Club on Long Island has the older claim.

1 oz / 30 ml dry gin
1/2 oz / 15 ml lemon juice
1/2 oz / 15 ml simple syrup
3 oz / 90 ml Champagne

Shake the first three with ice, strain into a flute, top with Champagne. Lemon twist.

Named after the French 75mm field gun. The Savoy Cocktail Book fixed it as a gin drink in 1930; earlier versions used cognac.

2 oz / 60 ml dry gin
1/2 oz / 15 ml lime juice
Soda water to top

Build in a highball over ice, top with soda, drop the spent lime shell in. No sugar - that is the whole point of a Rickey.

Older than Prohibition, invented in 1880s Washington with bourbon. Lime and soda stretched bad gin, and Fitzgerald put it in Gatsby in 1925.

3/4 oz / 22 ml dry gin
3/4 oz / 22 ml green Chartreuse
3/4 oz / 22 ml maraschino liqueur
3/4 oz / 22 ml lime juice

Equal parts, all four. Shake with ice, strain into a chilled coupe.

From the Detroit Athletic Club around 1921 - a private club, which is how it was pouring at all. Ted Saucier put it in print in 1951.

2 oz / 60 ml white rum
1 1/2 oz / 45 ml pineapple juice
1/4 oz / 7 ml maraschino liqueur
1/4 oz / 7 ml grenadine

Shake with ice, fine-strain into a chilled coupe.

Built in Havana in the 1920s and named for the silent film star. Americans went to Cuba precisely because the drinking there was legal.

2 oz / 60 ml rye or bourbon
1 sugar cube, or 1/4 oz / 7 ml simple syrup
2-3 dashes Angostura bitters
Splash of water

Stir with ice until cold, strain over one large cube in a rocks glass. Orange twist.

Older than the era by forty years - by the 1880s the name was already a complaint about fancy new drinks. Muddled fruit came later.

1 1/2 oz / 45 ml rye whiskey
1 oz / 30 ml dry vermouth
3/4 oz / 22 ml lemon juice
1/2 oz / 15 ml grenadine
1 dash orange bitters

Shake with ice, strain into a chilled coupe.

The word won a Boston newspaper contest in 1924 to name someone who drinks against the law. Harry's New York Bar in Paris had the drink on within the week.

2 oz / 60 ml dry gin
3/4 oz / 22 ml lemon juice
3/4 oz / 22 ml simple syrup
Soda water to top

Shake hard with ice, strain into a chilled highball, top with soda.

No cocktail was ever really called this - the Gin Fizz is 1880s New Orleans. But bathtub gin was real, raw spirit flavoured with juniper, and a Fizz is what made it drinkable.

3/4 oz / 22 ml cognac
3/4 oz / 22 ml white rum
3/4 oz / 22 ml Cointreau
1/2 oz / 15 ml lemon juice

Shake with ice, strain into a chilled coupe. Lemon twist.

A Sidecar with the brandy split with rum. Paris in the 1920s, usually credited to Harry MacElhone, and the name is exactly the wink it looks like.

1 1/2 oz / 45 ml dry gin
1 1/2 oz / 45 ml sweet vermouth
2 dashes Fernet-Branca

Stir with ice until cold, strain into a chilled coupe. Orange twist, expressed over the top.

Ada Coleman built it at the Savoy in London, where American visitors could drink legally. It is in the Savoy Cocktail Book of 1930.

Cocktail Glass, U+1F378

Encoded in Unicode 6.0 in 2010, from the Japanese carrier sets. Every platform draws the same outline: a V-shaped stemmed glass – a martini glass – with a drink in it. What differs is the garnish and the colour. Some designs add a fruit slice or an olive on a stick, some leave the glass bare, and the liquid runs from near-clear to pale gold. That is why it reads as “cocktail” generally rather than as one named drink. Its official name is Cocktail Glass, not Martini; the naming question is answered on martini emoji.

Combos

• 🍸🧊 – on the rocks. Ice Cube is U+1F9CA, Unicode 12.0, 2019.
• 🫗🍸 – making one. Pouring Liquid is U+1FAD7, Unicode 14.0, 2021.
• 🍸🍋 and 🍸🫒 – garnished, sour or savoury.
• 🍸🍒 – the cherry version, for anything stirred and brown.
• 🍸🎷 – the bar-with-a-band string.

Four Prohibition-era recipes

Bee’s Knees

2 oz (60 ml) gin, 3/4 oz (22 ml) lemon juice, 3/4 oz (22 ml) honey syrup. Shake hard with ice, strain into a chilled coupe. Honey syrup is honey and hot water, roughly equal parts, stirred until it pours. The honey and lemon were there to cover rough bathtub gin, and the name is 1920s slang for something excellent.

Southside

2 oz (60 ml) gin, 1 oz (30 ml) lemon juice, 3/4 oz (22 ml) simple syrup, a small handful of mint. Shake with ice, double strain into a coupe, mint leaf on top. Bar lore ties it both to New York club drinking and to Chicago’s South Side; nobody can prove either, and it is a good drink regardless.

Last Word

3/4 oz (22 ml) each of gin, green Chartreuse, maraschino liqueur and lime juice. Shake with ice, strain into a chilled coupe. Equal parts, so it is easy to remember behind a bar. Credited to the Detroit Athletic Club in the Prohibition years, then forgotten for decades and brought back into circulation by Seattle bartenders in the 2000s.

Scofflaw

1 1/2 oz (45 ml) rye whiskey, 1 oz (30 ml) dry vermouth, 3/4 oz (22 ml) lemon juice, 3/4 oz (22 ml) grenadine, a dash of orange bitters. Shake with ice, strain. Named for the word coined in a 1920s public contest to label a person who drinks in defiance of the law, and mixed at Harry’s New York Bar in Paris, where that law did not reach.

Caveats

• There is no cocktail shaker character, and no shot glass character – see shot emoji for what people use instead. Tumbler Glass (🥃, U+1F943) is the nearest thing to a rocks glass.
• Screen readers announce U+1F378 as “cocktail glass”: fine once, tedious in a row of six.
• Ice Cube and Pouring Liquid are recent additions and show as empty boxes on older systems, so a combo built from them can arrive broken.
• Tiki is a different codepoint – Tropical Drink, U+1F379 – and those recipes live on tropical drink emoji.