Champagne Cocktail

Novice

The Champagne Cocktail is a sugar cube soaked in Angostura, dropped into a flute, given a small measure of cognac and topped with cold champagne. Jerry Thomas printed it in 1862, which makes it one of the oldest recipes still in general circulation and comfortably the oldest sparkling one. It also qualifies as a cocktail under the original 1806 definition: spirit, sugar, water and bitters. The water simply arrives as champagne, which is a considerably better joke than most drinks manage. The cube is the mechanism and the theatre at once. Dropped in whole it sits at the bottom of the glass streaming bubbles for the drink's entire life, dissolving slowly and releasing sugar and bitters as it goes, so the first mouthful is dry and the last is noticeably richer. It is the simplest piece of kinetic sculpture in the canon, and it is why the drink must be built and never stirred.

BuiltCelebratoryAperitifClassic

Glassware: Champagne Flute

Garnish: Lemon Twist expressed and dropped in

Ingredients

Serves

Sugar Cube

1 cube

The engine. Dropped in whole it streams bubbles from the base and dissolves across the drink's whole life, so no two mouthfuls are the same. Loose sugar dissolves at once and removes the mechanism entirely.

Angostura Bitters

2 dashes

Two dashes soaked into the cube rather than into the wine, so the clove and cinnamon release gradually alongside the sugar. It is also what makes this a cocktail by the 1806 definition.

Cognac

10ml

A later addition that became standard. Ten millilitres deepens the drink from aperitif to occasion without crowding the wine, and the 1862 original had none at all.

Champagne

90ml

Brut and properly cold. There is nothing between you and the wine except a cube, two dashes and ten millilitres of brandy, so this is the one drink in the family where the bottle genuinely matters.

Instructions

Soak a sugar cube with the Angostura and drop it into a chilled flute.

Add the cognac.

Top slowly with cold champagne, poured down the side of the glass.

Express a lemon twist over the surface and drop it in.

Source: the IBA (Official IBA specification; method ours). Last checked 13 August 2026.

Expert Tip

Never stir it. The cube dissolving gradually is the whole recipe, and one stir spends the effect in a second and leaves you with sweetened champagne. Build it and hand it over. Use a proper cube rather than loose sugar. Granulated dissolves instantly and there is no mechanism left, which is why the sugar cube survives in this one drink long after it was abolished everywhere else in bartending. Buy a champagne you would drink on its own. There is almost nothing between you and the wine here: a cube, two dashes and a small measure of brandy. This is the page where the good bottle genuinely justifies its price, and a thin champagne has nowhere to hide.

Flavour Profile

ChampagneBittersCognacCitrusDry

Where It Comes From

The drink appears in Jerry Thomas's How to Mix Drinks of 1862, the first cocktail book published anywhere, already in its essential form: sugar, bitters and champagne.

That makes it one of the oldest recipes still poured regularly and comfortably the oldest sparkling one. It also makes it a cocktail in the strict 1806 sense, which specified spirit, sugar, water and bitters and excluded everything else. Champagne stands in for the water, which is either a technicality or a very good joke depending on your mood.

The cognac came later and became standard through the Paris bars of the interwar years. Casablanca fixed the order in the public imagination in 1942, and it has never really left.

The Working Cube

Dropped whole into a flute, a sugar cube does not dissolve quickly. It sits at the base and gives way slowly over ten minutes or so, and while it does, the dissolving sugar provides nucleation points for carbon dioxide, so a steady stream of bubbles rises from it continuously.

That does two things. It looks extraordinary, which is most of why the drink survives. And it means the sugar and the bitters soaked into it release gradually rather than all at once, so the drink genuinely changes as you drink it: dry and sharp at the start, rounder and spicier at the end.

No other cocktail does this. It is the reason the sugar cube persists here in an era where every other recipe has moved to syrup.

The Cognac Question

The 1862 original has no brandy in it. The official specification carries ten millilitres, and both are poured under the same name.

The difference is more than strength. Without cognac the drink is sharper and more obviously an aperitif: champagne, spice and a rising sweetness. With it there is a layer of oak and dried fruit underneath, and it becomes something to raise rather than something to sip before dinner. Ten millilitres is deliberately restrained, because the wine is the point and a heavier pour starts arguing with it.

Which Champagne

Almost every other sparkling cocktail buries the wine. A Bellini is mostly peach, a French 75 is mostly gin and lemon, a mimosa is mostly orange juice. Here the additions amount to a cube, two dashes and ten millilitres of brandy.

That means the wine is what you are drinking, and a thin, sharp, industrial champagne has nowhere to hide. Brut rather than demi-sec, because there is sugar arriving from the cube already.

A good crémant works perfectly well and costs a fraction as much. What does not work is prosecco: it is softer and fruitier, and against Angostura it reads slightly confected.

How to Serve It

Built in a chilled flute in under a minute: cube soaked and dropped, cognac, champagne poured slowly down the side, lemon twist expressed over the top.

Served while the cube is still working, which is the whole point. It is ceremony at built-drink effort, and it is the right answer for a toast that deserves more than a plain pour.

The Spirit

Cognac

Grape brandy from the Cognac region of western France, twice distilled in copper pot stills and aged in French oak. Ugni Blanc does nearly all the work, a thin acidic wine that makes poor drinking and excellent spirit, and the age classifications on the label are legally defined minimums.

Learn more

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I really need a sugar cube?

Yes. The cube dissolving slowly is the drink's entire mechanism: it sweetens progressively and streams bubbles for ten minutes. Loose sugar dissolves at once and you lose both the effect and the reason for building it this way.

Is the cognac traditional?

It is a later addition that became standard. The 1862 original is sugar, bitters and champagne alone. Both versions are correct: with cognac it is an occasion drink, without it a sharper aperitif that shows the wine better.

What champagne should I use?

A brut you would happily drink on its own. There is almost nothing between you and the wine here, so a thin bottle has nowhere to hide. A good crémant works well; prosecco reads slightly confected against Angostura.

Why should I not stir it?

Because stirring dissolves the cube at once and spends the whole effect. The drink is designed to change as you go, starting dry and finishing richer, and that only happens if the cube is left alone to work.

French 75

The French 75 was created at Harry's New York Bar in Paris in 1915 and named after the French 75mm field gun, the defining artillery piece of the First World War on the Western Front. The naming was not incidental: the drink was designed to hit with the force of the weapon, pairing gin and Champagne behind a presentation considerably more elegant than its strength suggests. The structure sits between the Tom Collins and the Champagne Cocktail. A gin sour of gin, fresh lemon juice and sugar syrup is shaken, strained into a flute or coupe, and topped with Champagne rather than soda water. The wine's yeast character, fruit and effervescence interact with the gin and citrus in a way soda cannot. The gin versus cognac debate has run since the drink appeared in print. The gin version is the historically consistent original and the one documented here; the cognac version, richer and more fruit-forward, is a legitimate variation.

Seelbach

The Seelbach has the best origin story in the modern canon, twice over. As first told: a pre-Prohibition house cocktail of Louisville’s grand Seelbach Hotel, lost when the Volstead Act closed the bar, and rediscovered in 1995 by restaurant director Adam Seger in an old ledger. Bourbon, orange liqueur, champagne and a frankly outrageous fourteen dashes of bitters. As finally told: in 2016 Seger confessed to Robert Simonson of the New York Times that he had invented the whole thing, recipe and provenance alike, because a grand hotel deserved a signature drink and nobody buys a new one. The hoax had by then spent two decades in respectable cocktail books, and the confession did something remarkable, which was nothing at all. The drink stayed on the lists. It stayed because it is genuinely good, and because the bitters are a genuine idea: seven dashes each of Angostura and Peychaud’s turn a bourbon champagne cocktail into something spiced, rosy and completely distinctive.

Death in the Afternoon

Death in the Afternoon was created by Ernest Hemingway and submitted to a 1935 celebrity cocktail collection called So Red the Nose, in which notable figures contributed original recipes with their own commentary. Hemingway's instructions were characteristically direct: pour one jigger of absinthe into a Champagne glass, add iced Champagne until it attains the proper opalescent milkiness, and drink three to five of them slowly. It is a two-ingredient cocktail with no technique beyond a careful pour. The absinthe louches as the Champagne makes contact, turning from clear to cloudy as the anise oils come out of solution. That transformation is not incidental: it signals the point at which the two ingredients have integrated, and the drink should be consumed from that moment rather than left to sit. The balance is the only variable that matters. Too much absinthe and the drink is medicinal; too little and the Champagne overwhelms the anise entirely. Hemingway's ratio produces a glass where both are audible without either one dominating.