Cocktail Emoji 🍸

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.