The base spirit, and the four the catalog leans on.

Four spirits underpin most of the catalog. Gin (46), whiskey (43), rum (42), and vodka (30) serve different roles: gin brings botanical notes, whiskey brings a barrel-aged flavor, rum runs from bone-dry to molasses-rich, and vodka brings a blank canvas that lets the other ingredients lead. Between them they’re behind the Martini and the Gin Fizz, the Old Fashioned and the Manhattan, the Daiquiri and the Mai Tai, the Moscow Mule and the Espresso Martini.

One wrinkle: whiskey looks like a single pillar, but the catalog splits it four ways — bourbon (19), rye (16), scotch (7), and Irish whiskey (2) — because they’re genuinely different. A rye Manhattan and a bourbon Manhattan are different drinks, and the Old Fashioned is filed under bourbon and rye at once.

Before whiskey took over, the American cocktail ran on brandy. It’s still the base of 24 drinks here — the Brandy Crusta, the Sidecar — and it includes grape-based spirits from further afield, like pisco in the Pisco Sour. Brandy can feel older and rounder than whiskey; it’s the base that tastes like the nineteenth century.

Agave is two spirits born from one plant: tequila and mezcal. Tequila anchors the Margarita and the Paloma; mezcal turns up in your favorite smoky cocktail, and the Oaxacan Old Fashioned uses both at once. It’s the newest of the major bases to go mainstream, and its section of the catalog is growing fast.

Not every base is a full-proof spirit. Two of the more interesting ones are lower proof and more aromatic. Amaro — the bittersweet Italian liqueurs — is the base of 22 drinks, but rarely on its own: it’s the bitter half of a two-spirit drink, the Campari in a Negroni, the Aperol in a Spritz, the amaro in a Boulevardier. Wine itself anchors 20 more — sparkling in a Champagne Cocktail, fortified in a Sherry Cobbler. These are the drinks you sip before dinner, not the ones that knock you back.

And about 10% of the drinks in our catalog have no base spirit at all. The catalog treats non-alcoholic as its own base, not an absence — these drinks stand on distinctive acid, sugar, spice, and bitterness the way a spirited drink stands on its spirit. A Virgin Mary isn’t a Bloody Mary with the vodka left out; it’s engineered to work without it, the same way a Nojito is.