Shot Emoji 🥃

1 1/2 oz / 45 ml citrus vodka
1/2 oz / 15 ml triple sec
1/2 oz / 15 ml lemon juice

Rub a lemon wedge round a shot glass and roll the rim in sugar. Shake the rest with ice and strain in.

San Francisco in the 1970s, from Henry Africa's - a bar that built its name on drinks made to taste like sweets.

3/4 oz / 22 ml vodka
3/4 oz / 22 ml triple sec
3/4 oz / 22 ml lime juice

Equal parts. Shake with ice, strain into a shot glass or small coupe. Lime wedge.

Post-war American, everywhere by the 1970s. It is the Sidecar template with vodka in place of brandy, and it is far better with fresh lime than with cordial.

1/2 oz / 15 ml coffee liqueur
1/2 oz / 15 ml Irish cream
1/2 oz / 15 ml orange liqueur

In that order into a shot glass, each one poured slowly over the back of a bar spoon. Densest first, so the three bands stay separate.

Named after the bomber. Usually credited to a bartender in Banff, Canada, in the 1970s.

1 1/2 oz / 45 ml 100% agave blanco tequila
1 lime wedge
Coarse salt

Salt on the back of the hand, between thumb and finger. Lick the salt, drink the tequila, bite the lime.

Worth knowing: this is a bar custom, not a Mexican one. Good tequila is sipped neat, and the traditional chaser there is sangrita, not lime.

1 1/2 oz / 45 ml Irish whiskey
1 1/2 oz / 45 ml dill pickle brine, cold

Two separate glasses. Whiskey first, brine straight after as a chaser. Never mixed together.

Bushwick, Brooklyn, 2006. The salt and vinegar flatten the burn of the whiskey almost completely, which is the whole trick.

3/4 oz / 22 ml coffee liqueur
1/4 oz / 7 ml Irish cream

Coffee liqueur into a shot glass, then float the cream slowly over the back of a bar spoon so it sits on top as a head.

There is no Guinness in it. The whole joke is that it looks like a tiny pint, so pour the float gently or you lose the picture.

The shot glass that does not exist

No codepoint in Unicode is named for a shot glass. Two characters get used instead, and they are
not equally good.

• Tumbler Glass, U+1F943 🥃 – added in Unicode 9.0 in 2016. In a bar a
  tumbler is a rocks or lowball glass holding far more than a shot. It is still the right pick: the
  only short, heavy, straight-sided glass in the set, and it reads as a shot at message size.
• Sake Bottle And Cup, U+1F376 🍶 – Unicode 6.0, 2010. The ochoko cup beside
  the flask is the only genuinely shot-sized vessel in the whole emoji set. It drags a bottle along
  with it, and a screen reader says “sake bottle and cup” – a strange thing to hear attached to a
  tequila message.

Strings for a round

The repeat tool above is seeded with the tumbler for the obvious reason. A wall of them in a
group chat is the single most common thing anyone does with this character.

How it renders

Vendors disagree about the contents. Some draw the tumbler with ice in the amber spirit, some draw
it clean, and the fill level moves too. Check your own keyboard before relying on the ice being
visible – if it matters, append Ice Cube, U+1F9CA 🧊. The sake pair varies too:
the flask is upright on some platforms and tilted mid-pour on others.

Sidecar, served short

• 50 ml cognac
• 20 ml orange liqueur
• 20 ml lemon juice
• Sugar rim, optional and contested

1. Shake hard with ice.
2. Strain into a small chilled glass.
3. No garnish needed. Both Paris and London bars have claimed the drink; nobody has settled it.

Tequila shot, done properly

1. Use a decent 100% agave blanco. The ritual exists to survive bad tequila; good tequila does not
   need it.
2. Lick the back of the hand, salt it.
3. Salt, shot, lime – in that order, without pausing between them.
4. In Mexico the same spirit is more often sipped neat with sangrita alongside.

B-52, layered

• 15 ml coffee liqueur
• 15 ml Irish cream
• 15 ml orange liqueur

1. Pour the coffee liqueur first. It is the densest, so it stays at the bottom.
2. Float the Irish cream over the back of a bar spoon held against the glass wall.
3. Float the orange liqueur the same way. Density order is the entire trick; pour it fast and you
   get a muddy brown drink.

Before you paste it

• Neither character means alcohol to a machine. Moderation filters read the codepoint, not the
  intent, so nothing here is safe to assume about how a platform will treat it.
• U+1F943 sits outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, so older forms and legacy databases sometimes
  drop it or mangle it into a question mark.
• Same glyph, different job: whiskey emoji covers naming and the long
  stirred classics, bar emoji builds a whole bar sign out of Unicode, and
  guess the drink by emoji puts these strings to work as
  puzzles.