Six drinks, and what they teach you about the rest.

The word “cocktail” got its first definition on May 13, 1806, in a small upstate New York paper called The Balance and Columbian Repository: “a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters.” That’s the whole genre in one sentence — and it also describes the Old Fashioned, obviously still popular today. The name came later: by about 1880, as bartenders increasingly reached for curaçao and liqueurs and other flourishes, patrons who just wanted spirit, sugar, and bitters began asking for their drink the old-fashioned way. (There’s a beloved origin story involving the Pendennis Club in Louisville, but it’s likely a myth — printed references predate the club’s creation by a year, as David Wondrich has shown.)

The template: spirit + sugar + bitters. This is the foundation for everything that comes after.

The next move was to make a drink long: stretch the spirit with citrus, sugar, and soda and serve it over ice for instant refreshment. The Collins emerged from the gin punches of early-1800s London — by tradition from a head waiter named John Collins at Limmer’s Hotel — and gained its current name from the Old Tom gin at its core. (There’s also a famous 1874 prank that swept New York about a fictional loudmouth named Tom Collins; historians generally treat that as the way the name caught on, not where the drink came from.) Harry Johnson printed the recipe in 1882.

The template: spirit + citrus + sugar + bubbles. Every highball, fizz, and spritz is part of this family.

Now take that same citrus and sugar, drop the soda, and concentrate it: spirit, something sour, something sweet, creating three-ingredient tension. The structure is ancient (sailors drank it as grog, the English as punch) but it got its name and fixed proportions in Cuba around 1898, when an American mining engineer named Jennings Cox mixed his rum with lime and sugar in the village of Daiquirí.

The template: spirit + citrus + sweet. No idea in the cocktail world has more descendants: the Margarita, the Whiskey Sour, the Sidecar, the Gimlet, the Daisy — they’re all related to the Daiquiri.

A different question: what if the thing you add to the spirit isn’t sweet or sour at all, but another, gentler wine? Vermouth — aromatized, fortified wine — reached American bars late in the 1800s, and the Martini’s sweeter ancestor, the Martinez, paired it with gin. Then came years of slow drying: less vermouth, less sugar, colder and more austere, until by 1904 you could order a “Dry Martini” and get something that was nearly all gin. There’s no single inventor — it’s the result of a fifty-year evolution.

The template: spirit + aromatized wine, stirred. The Manhattan, the Martinez, the Vesper — half the stirred canon shares this ancestry.

Until this point bitterness had been a seasoning, a couple of dashes here and there. The Negroni makes it the drink’s essence. It grew out of the Italian aperitivo, and the origin story everyone tells is from Florence in 1919 when a Count Camillo Negroni asks bartender Fosco Scarselli to stiffen his Americano with gin instead of soda. It’s a wonderful story and it might even be true... but the paper trail is thin, the Count’s title is disputed (Wondrich again), and the drink as we know it doesn’t show up in print until around 1950. What isn’t in doubt is how you build it: equal parts gin, Campari and sweet vermouth. It’s bitter, sweet, and strong, all in balance.

The template: equal parts, bitter-forward. The Boulevardier, the Americano, the whole amaro cocktail segment.

In 2005, at a small New York bar called Milk & Honey, the Australian bartender Sam Ross took the house honey-whiskey sour — the Gold Rush — and rebuilt it with blended Scotch, fresh ginger, and a float of smoky Islay whisky over the top. He called it the Penicillin. Robert Simonson would later call it “the most well-travelled and renowned new cocktail of the 21st century,” and it opened the era we’re still in: named creators, split bases, kitchen ingredients, and the embrace of creative new classics.

The template: the sour, reimagined. Proof the cocktail canon is still being written.