Roger Kamholz

This is so easy to make at home.

It was at El Floridita that Ernest Hemingway conducted his love affair with the daiquiri. During his many stints in Cuba, where he escaped to and from his home in Key West, Florida, the writer was known to post up in a favorite corner of this Havana watering hole and quaff glass after glass of barman Constantino Ribalaigua Vert’s simple, sublime concoctions of rum, lime, sugar, and ice.

For fans of sweet vermouth, the Fig Leaf cocktail is the kind of drink that ought to be in your regular rotation. Unlike the majority of cocktail recipes, in which the spirit is the most plentiful ingredient, the build of the Fig Leaf is heavy on the aperitif wine rather than the booze (in this case, light rum). This drink falls into the category bartenders often call “reverse cocktails.

If you go about constructing a versatile at-home cocktail bar with a limit of just nine bottles, an initial impulse might urge you toward filling those nine precious slots with as many types of liquor and spirits as you can. That ought to cover your bases for the largest number of cocktails, right? With a vodka, a gin, a whiskey, a tequila, and so on, you probably think that suddenly you’re able to mix up practically anything. Wrong.

The Ward Eight, as drinks historian David Wondrich has written, is one of the City of Boston’s few contributions to the classic-cocktail pantheon. It came into being sometime around the turn of the 20th century and riffs on a Whiskey Sour with the inclusion of a special, somewhat mysterious ingredient: grenadine.

This drink, which supposedly originated at the bar of a British private club in the Burmese capital of Rangoon sometime in the 1920s, is squarely in the wheelhouse of the 9-Bottle Bar. It calls for four of the nine bottles, with lime juice as a fifth, acidity-adding ingredient. Being a British invention by way of a steamy ex-colony, the Pegu Club starts with London dry gin and then goes long on both citrus and bitters. In fact, the build is pretty darn close to that of the Margarita.

Even if all we did was admire it from afar, the Clover Club — with its colorful palette of pale pink, crisp Naval white, and ruby red — would be a winning drink. To its credit, it tastes mighty fine, too. This classic cocktail is an upgrade to the basic build of a sour cocktail (the Pisco Sour and the Whiskey Sour are two examples) thanks to a hit of sweet, tangy raspberry syrup.

We’re closing out the 9-Bottle Bar’s month-long look at rum with the recipe for a drink aptly named for the occasion. The alphabet-ending XYZ Cocktail appeared in the famous Savoy Cocktail Book, by bartender Harry Craddock, first published in 1930.

The devilishly named Satan’s Whiskers cocktail is a longstanding classic, catalogued in the Savoy Cocktail Book (1930) and likely of even older vintage. It’s a “perfect” drink, meaning that it contains equals parts of sweet and dry vermouth. The base spirit is gin, and many versions of the recipe call for orange liqueur, orange juice, and orange bitters, resulting in a rounded, layered exploration of the citrus fruit in all its bitter-juicy-sweet complexity.

It’s July, outdoor drinking is in full swing, and orange liqueur is our muse of the month here at The 9-Bottle Bar. Based on those three facts, we seem practically duty-bound to mine our cocktail-recipe resources for a drink that suits these summery climes. So let’s get busy mixing up the Beachcomber. This cocktail, which appears in the famous 1947 Bartender’s Guide by tiki legend Trader Vic (Victor Bergeron, Jr.

Drinking a really good dry martini is a sublime experience…tinged by disappointment. Sublime because you suddenly realize what dazzling magic gin, vermouth, bitters, and lemon peel can make; disappointing because you also realize that you’ve suffered through a sad, shuffling parade of subpar, thoroughly ungifted-with-magic martinis over your drinking years. Let’s vow never to drink bad martinis again.

It’s easy to imagine the circumstances: A social function, gathering that worldly stratum of government officials whose members go by titles such as consul, attaché, and ambassador. The drinks are flowing, the pressures of one’s post are at their most acute, and yet the wisest of the group know well that conducting sensitive state business could be gravely jeopardized by dulled faculties. Enter the Diplomat.

This combination of gin, sweet vermouth, bitters, and maraschino liqueur makes for a complex, brooding libation that scratches the itch for a Manhattan. But instead of foregrounding woody, vanilla notes from whiskey, the use of gin in the Martinez turns up the volume on the herbal aromatics. Far more astute and knowledgeable writers than this one have done a superb job delving into the history of the Martinez.

There’s a cocktail named for each of New York City’s five boroughs, so why not its neighborhoods, too? The Red Hook cocktail shares its moniker with a waterside enclave in south Brooklyn. Recipe-wise, this bold and booze-driven drink is a cross between the Manhattan (rye whiskey, sweet vermouth, bitters) and the Martinez (Old Tom gin, sweet vermouth, maraschino liqueur, bitters), pulling ingredients from both.

Were it not for the linguistic ingenuity of one Henry Irving Dale of Andover and one Kate L. Butler of Dorchester, the Scofflaw cocktail might very well go by the name Hooch-Sniper, the Barnacle, or Bottle-Yegger. Indeed, this Prohibition-era cocktail comes with its own story and a nice twist at the end.

Creating drinks named the “Turf Cocktail” was evidently a popular pastime during the decades hugging the turn of the 20th century. There are no fewer than three distinct drink recipes bearing this name or a slight variation that come to us from old bar books. In today’s cocktail, we focus on a version that starts off like a Dry Martini before galloping in its own direction.

Spirit, sweetener, citrus, bitters. These elements form one of the great quartets of the cocktail canon. So many important drinks boil down to a meditation on this tried-and-true formula. And it works wonders when applied to the Cuba Libre, also known as the Rum and Coke. As Brad Thomas Parsons points out in his book on bitters, the traditional build of a Cuba Libre doesn’t call for the cocktail ingredient he holds so dear.

Steeped in ritual and beautiful in its simplicity, the Old Fashioned is the quintessential (and quite essential) classic cocktail. Even back when cocktails were newly making a home for themselves in beverage culture, the Old Fashioned — as the name suggests — was already the tried-and-true, the throwback, the cool original.

So delicious and simple to make, the Boulevardier is one of those cocktails that seems primed for the spotlight yet never manages to capture our attention. You’d think that, what with the soaring popularity of the Negroni, a drink that differs from it by only one ingredient would enjoy some reflected glory. But this handsome devil has instead kept a relatively low profile. So here’s to giving the Boulevardier its due.