100% agree. It's a difficult cocktail to get your head around, but the reward is significant.

Just added a couple of dashes of VÉGÉTAL de la Grande-Chartreuse. Makes a great cocktail even better.

My recipe:
1 fl oz Peated Single Malt Whisky (Bowmore 8yo)

5⁄6 fl oz Elderflower liqueur (St. Germain)

1⁄2 fl oz Blended Scotch whisky (Chivas Regal 12)

1⁄2 fl oz Gentian liqueur (Suze)

1⁄2 fl oz Lemon juice (freshly squeezed)

1 1⁄2 fl oz. Sparkling Water (S. Pellegrino)

Kind of a wake-up call to the palate. Smoky, bitter, floral and tart with the effervescence providing and all too easy drinkability. Keeps getting better the further the level drops in the glass.

My suggestion is to use a very peaty single malt to help counterbalance the sweetness and bitterness from the mix of ingredients. That Bowmore has a very phenolic creosote pitch character to produce a balanced cocktail.

I reversed the reversed proportions to great effect.

60ml Gin (Thresh&Winnow Forét)

45ml Sake (Dassai 45 Junmai Daiginjo)

5ml Maraschino liqueur (Lazzaroni)

Stir ingredients in an ice-filled mixing glass. Fine strain into a chilled Coupe glass. Garnish with salt-preserved Sakura blossoms.

This resulted in an awesome martini due to the Japanese-influenced Shiso gin. It seemed a shame to cut back according to the OG recipe.

This a great riff on TLW. Hard to come up with something new since this is probably one of the cocktails having the most variants. Here’s my tweak on the OG:

1 fl oz Espadin Mezcal (Montelobos)

1 fl oz Yellow Chartreuse

1 fl oz Maraschino liqueur (Lazzaroni)

1 fl oz Lime Support Pseudo Juice

1 fl oz Sparkling Water (S. Pellegrino)

Honestly, I could probably knock back several of these if I had nowhere to go and was sitting oceanside on a beach being served.

Made two of these side by side. One with freshly squeezed line juice and one with Pseudo Juice using the STB recipe. Indistinguishable! Nicely refreshing with the aforementioned bitter/sour/sweet profile. A new favorite cocktail using Suze.

1 oz Gin (Plymouth Navy Strength)

1 oz Campari infused with cacao nibs

1 oz Amaro Montenegro

1⁄6 oz Coffee liqueur (Kōloa)

4 dash Cucumber bitters (TBT)

The OG calls for a cucumber-forward gin. I prefer the Plymouth Navy Strength when mixing up strong flavors. To compensate, I added a healthy splash of cucumber bitters, which also helps tamp down the sweetness.

I also diverged by using the cacao infused Campari I made a couple of days ago. The combination of the cacao and coffee liqueur really brings that element forward even though there’s only about a barspoon’s worth of the coffee liqueur. That Kaua’i coffee liqueur is sooo good.

Next time I’m going to try using just regular Campari to see if the coffee is subjugated to the background. As someone who enjoys a damn good cup of coffee like the director of the eponymous film, I feel it’s only fitting to amp it up a bit with this variant.

I don’t know what it’s called, but my “bone dry” Gibson preferred ratio is 8:1. 2oz. Gin .25oz. Vermouth. I’m also using vermouth-brined onions which leach out a little bit of that flavor.

1 1⁄2 fl oz Cognac (PF 1840)

2⁄3 fl oz Campari

1⁄3 fl oz Sweet Vermouth (Cocchi Storico VdT)

1⁄3 fl oz Cinnamon Demerara Syrup

4 dash Chocolate bitters

Stir all ingredients with ice. Strain into chilled DOF glass over a large cube of block ice. Express orange zest twist over cocktail and garnish with dark chocolate.

A nice hint of cinnamon and dark sugar to play against the Campari. I upped the cognac, which was a bit lost in the OG recipe and added extra bitters to bring more of the chocolate/orange connection to the fore.