Gin Cocktails With 5 Ingredients or Fewer (12 Recipes)
Gin is the most recipe-dense bottle in the catalog here — roughly ninety drinks in the app use it, more than any other spirit — and the remarkable thing is how many of the great ones need almost nothing. Below are twelve gin cocktails, each five ingredients or fewer, all open on DrinkMixr with full specs. None of them is a dare; all of them are drinks people order.
Start at three ingredients
Dry Martini
Gin and dry vermouth, roughly five to one, with an olive. The ratio matters more than the brand: more vermouth makes it a wet Martini, less makes it colder and leaner. Stir, never shake, unless you want it cloudy.
What's in it: Gin, Dry Vermouth, Olive
Open the recipeAviation
Gin, maraschino liqueur, lemon — and, in most modern recipes, a dash of crème de violette for the sky-blue hue. The catalog version is the cleaner pale build; either way the maraschino is doing delicate work.
What's in it: Gin, Lemon Juice, maraschino liqueur
Open the recipeAngel Face
Equal parts gin, apricot brandy and calvados. Three ingredients, all of them spirit, and somehow it tastes like an orchard. Stir it, serve it short.
What's in it: Gin, Apricot brandy, Calvados
Open the recipeGibson
A Martini with a pickled onion instead of an olive. The brine changes the drink more than you expect — savoury where the olive is saline.
What's in it: Gin, Dry Vermouth, Pickled onion
Open the recipeFrench Negroni
Gin, Lillet, sweet vermouth, orange peel. A Negroni with the Campari traded for Lillet — softer, more French, dangerously easy at one-ounce parts.
What's in it: Gin, Lillet, Sweet Vermouth, Orange peel
Open the recipeFour ingredients, four directions
Gimlet
Gin, lime, sugar syrup. The one everyone has had badly in a hotel bar. With fresh lime and real syrup it is a different drink entirely.
What's in it: Gin, Lime Juice, Sugar syrup, Lime
Open the recipeClover Club
Gin, lemon, grenadine, egg white. Pink, tart, foam on top. If yours does not foam, the fix is technique, not recipe — see the egg white guide below.
What's in it: Gin, Grenadine, Lemon, Egg White
Open the recipeGin Fizz
Gin, lemon, powdered sugar, topped with soda. The original fizz: sweet-tart base, brightening bubble. Pour the soda down the side of the glass slowly to keep the head.
What's in it: Gin, Lemon, Powdered sugar, Carbonated water
Open the recipeBramble
Gin, lemon, sugar, with a float of crème de mure sinking through it like ink. The blackberry black-currant depth is what made this the modern garden-bar classic.
What's in it: Gin, Lemon Juice, Sugar syrup, Creme de Mure
Open the recipeA1
Gin, Grand Marnier, lemon, a splash of grenadine. Pre-Prohibition in origin and it reads that way — rounder and sweeter than a sour, with the orange liqueur doing the smoothing.
What's in it: Gin, Grand Marnier, Lemon Juice, Grenadine
Open the recipeFive ingredients, one masterpiece
Corpse Reviver
Equal parts gin, triple sec, Lillet Blanc and lemon with an absinthe dash. The famous "take two of these and drink it in your coffin" line from the Savoy Cocktail Book. Fresh lemon and a measured absinthe dash keep it precise rather than punishing.
What's in it: Gin, Triple Sec, Lillet Blanc, Lemon Juice, Absinthe
Open the recipeBijou
Gin, sweet vermouth, green Chartreuse, an orange-bitter dash. The Chartreuse is the loudest ingredient in any drink on this list and the reason the Bijou tastes like almost nothing else — herbal, honeyed, a little electric.
What's in it: Orange bitters, Green Chartreuse, Gin, Sweet Vermouth
Open the recipeAll twelve open in full on DrinkMixr — measurements, method and glassware, no account needed.
That is most of a home gin bar, from one bottle
Notice what this list actually requires: gin, sweet and dry vermouth, Lillet, lemons, limes, sugar syrup, grenadine, maraschino liqueur, apricot brandy, calvados, crème de mure, Grand Marnier, triple sec, Chartreuse, egg white, an olive, an onion, and soda. Trim to the essentials — gin, two vermouths, lemons, limes, syrup and one orange liqueur — and you can still build the Martini, Gimlet, Gin Fizz, Corpse Reviver and French Negroni. Everything else is a bonus bottle at a time.
One habit worth building
Measure everything, even the drinks you have made fifty times. Gin drinks punish eyeballing harder than any other family, because juniper is loud: a quarter-ounce too much citrus is visible in the glass, and a quarter too little vermouth is audible in the first sip. The jigger is the cheapest quality upgrade in the drink.
Try it with the bartender
Tell DrinkMixr what you have on the shelf and it will work out what you can build with it. Create a free account and every recipe and tool on the site, including the bartender, is yours to use.