Cachaça and Tonic

Long drinks are just so refreshing on hot summer days. And tonic water is the ideal mixer with almost any spirit: gin, brandy, whisky, calvados, or, as here, cachaça -  fermented, fresh sugarcane juice that has been distilled. It's Brazil's national spirit and is mostly known from the drink called Caipirinha. The various brands have their own characteristics, but they all share an initial sweetness that comes from fresh sugarcane juice.

4 cl cachaça

Tonic water

2 lime slices

Pour ingredients into a highball glass filled with ice. Add two lime slices. 

Seventh Heaven

Drinks with citrus fruit are always refreshing and as such appropriate in sunny seasons. Why not go old-school and try this cocktail from the late 1920s? If you appreciate earthy and delicately bitter notes in your drink, this combination of a liqueur based on maraschino cherries and fresh pink grapefruit juice is seventh heaven.

4 cl gin

2 cl Luxardo

2 cl pink grapefruit juice

Shake the ingredients with ice. Strain into an elegant glass. Some people garnish it with a mint sprig.

The Seventh Heaven cocktail appears in Harry Craddock's famed book from 1930, The Savoy Cocktail Book. His recipe is by some bartenders called the French version, and instead of grapefruit it uses a now little known South African vermouth called Caperitif. The recipe given here is known as the English version. In this version the ratio of the ingredients moves up and down. If you prefer a gin-forward drink add less maraschino liqueur and grapefruit juice. If the drink is too sour, go easy on the grapefruit juice.

Source: O. Blunier, The Barkeeper's Golden Book, Zurich 1935.

Milanese G&T

Gin and tonic is an all-time favourite and probably the most well known of all mixed drinks. And its popularity keeps rising with the appearance of small batch craft gins produced in almost every country in the developed world today. If you want to up the ante when inviting friends over for a drink on a sunny afternoon, you should try this version with the bitter Italian amaro from Milano, Campari. It adds spicy and herbal notes to supplement the botanicals from the gin and quinquina from the tonic water.

3 cl gin

3 cl Campari

Tonic water

A few drops of lime juice

Add the Campari and gin to a tall glass filled with ice, top with tonic water. Squeeze a few drops out of a lime and garnish with a lime wedge.

Source: Joe St Clair-Ford, co-owner of a recently opened club and bar in Soho, London, called Disrepute, 2017