Stinger

Novice

The Stinger is cognac wearing menthol aftershave: brandy and white crème de menthe, stirred or famously shaken, and for the first half of the twentieth century the definitive nightcap of American high society. It rose through the Edwardian clubs, survived Prohibition suspiciously well, mint being excellent camouflage, and became the drink of choice for the dinner-jacket decades, ordered by everyone from admirals to Cary Grant’s scriptwriters. It is a two-ingredient drink with one decision: the ratio. The classic pour ran as sweet as equal parts; the modern reading given here runs drier at three to one, cognac in charge and the mint reduced to a cold silver thread. White crème de menthe is not negotiable, since the green version turns the glass to mouthwash by way of the eyes. Fashion mocked it, then missed it, then quietly brought it back: a properly dry Stinger after dinner remains one of the great digestifs, the mint doing genuine after-dinner work and the cognac doing the rest. It asks ninety seconds and repays them in silk.

StirredClassicAfter-DinnerDigestifSpirit-ForwardHigh-ABVShaken

Glassware: Rocks Glass

Garnish: Fresh Mint Sprig optional

Ingredients

Serves

Cognac

50ml

Three-quarters of the glass and fully in charge: a VS or VSOP with lively fruit for the mint to cool. The drink is cognac wearing menthol, not the reverse.

White Creme de Menthe

20ml

The silver thread: white, never green, or the drink becomes a swimming pool. Twenty millilitres keeps it a nightcap rather than a dessert.

Instructions

Add the cognac and crème de menthe to a mixing glass with ice.

Stir for 20 seconds, or shake if you take the old-school view: this is the one stirred-family drink where shaking has a pedigree.

Strain into a rocks glass over crushed ice.

Garnish with the mint sprig if using.

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

Expert Tip

Dryness is the modern secret: three parts cognac to one of crème de menthe. The equal-parts antique is a period piece best visited rather than lived in, and it drinks like frost-bitten dessert. White crème de menthe, never green. They are the same liqueur in different jackets, and the jacket matters entirely: white keeps the drink a pale gold silk, green makes it look like a swimming pool. Every classic spec specifies white. Shake or stir as you prefer, which is unusual for an all-spirit drink. The old American habit was to shake, and the aeration genuinely softens the menthol; stirring gives a clearer, silkier glass. Both have pedigree here, so choose by the texture you want rather than by rule.

Flavour Profile

CognacMintCoolSilky

The Origin

The Stinger surfaces around the turn of the twentieth century in New York’s club land and never really left the establishment: it was the after-dinner order of the yacht-and-boardroom classes for fifty years, appearing in every canonical bar book and half the films of the era. Prohibition barely slowed it, mint covering a multitude of cellar sins, and the Second World War’s officers carried it around the world.

The Ratio

Everything about the drink lives in the proportion. Vintage specs ran to equal parts and drank like frost-bitten dessert; the twentieth century dried it steadily, and the modern three-to-one keeps the menthol as an accent through the cognac’s fruit. Tune it to the hour: drier as the evening ages.

White, Never Green

The two crèmes de menthe are the same liqueur in different jackets, and the jacket matters entirely here.

White is clear, so a Stinger made with it arrives a pale gold, the colour of the cognac with a faint chill to it. Green is dyed, and at twenty millilitres against fifty of brandy it turns the glass an unmistakable pool-water shade that no amount of good cognac recovers.

The flavour is identical, which is the awkward part: the drink tastes the same and looks like a novelty. For anything served in a coupe, and particularly for a drink whose entire proposition is elegance, that is a decisive difference. For a Stinger, the rule is one word long.

How to Serve It

Over crushed ice in a rocks glass is the classic American service, up in a coupe the drier European one, and the shake, unusually for an all-spirit drink, is traditional: the aeration softens the menthe. Serve it last thing, in place of dessert rather than after it, and note the family resemblance next door: the Rusty Nail plays the same two-bottle game with honey where this plays it with mint.

Why It Went Away

Very few drinks fell as far as this one. It was the after-dinner order of American high society for fifty years, appearing in every canonical bar book and half the films of the era, and by the 1980s it was a punchline.

The cause was mostly the crème de menthe. The liqueur got sweeter, cheaper and greener through the middle of the century, and a category that had become associated with dyed sugar syrup dragged the drink down with it. The vintage equal-parts ratio did not help either, since a modern palate finds it cloying rather than refreshing.

Both problems are fixable and both have been fixed. Good white crème de menthe is widely available again, and the ratio has dried out to three to one. What is left is a genuinely excellent digestif that most people have never tasted properly made.

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

Why must it be white crème de menthe?

Same flavour, entirely different drink to look at. White keeps the Stinger an elegant pale gold, the colour of the cognac underneath, where green dyes it into obvious novelty territory. Every classic spec specifies white, and for a drink built on elegance that matters.

Is the Stinger shaken or stirred?

Both have pedigree, unusually for a drink with no juice in it. The old American habit was to shake it, and the aeration softens the menthol noticeably; stirring gives a silkier and clearer glass. Choose by the texture you want rather than by rule.

What is the right ratio?

Three parts cognac to one part crème de menthe is the modern balance: minty rather than sweet, with the brandy clearly in charge. The antique equal-parts version is worth tasting once as a piece of history and then retiring immediately.

Master the Techniques

How to Shake a Cocktail Like a Pro

Stirring vs Shaking: When to Use Each Technique

French Connection

The French Connection is the 1970s in a rocks glass: cognac and amaretto over ice, named for the 1971 film that owned the decade’s idea of cool, and built for the era’s low-effort, high-lapel glamour. Nobody claims a precise inventor. The drink simply appeared wherever the two bottles stood together, which by the mid-seventies was very nearly everywhere. It is the gentlest possible introduction to cognac. The amaretto’s almond sweetness rounds the brandy’s edges without hiding its fruit, and the whole thing assembles in the glass in under a minute. The French half supplies structure and the Italian half charm, which is broadly the film’s plot as well. The craft revival largely ignored it, which is its own kind of recommendation. The French Connection needs no rescue, no bitters and no garnish. All it asks for is two decent bottles and one proper piece of ice, which is a shorter list than almost anything else worth drinking.

Rusty Nail

The Rusty Nail is two Scotches talking to each other: whisky neat, and whisky that went to finishing school as Drambuie, honey and herbs smoothing the same spirit into a liqueur. Versions of the pairing drifted around under various names from the 1930s, but the drink found its identity in mid-century New York, where the 21 Club poured it for the Rat Pack era and the name finally stuck somewhere around 1963. It is the definitive two-bottle cocktail: no citrus, no bitters, no technique beyond ice and a stir, which made it the house drink of an era that liked its glamour unfussy. The whole recipe is a ratio, and the ratio is a conversation. Heavy on the Drambuie it is a honeyed after-dinner drink; dried out toward four-to-one it becomes a Scotch drinker’s Scotch drink with a Highland accent. Fashion abandoned it along with the rest of the liqueur-led canon, and the cocktail revival quietly took it back: a drink this simple lives and dies on the quality of its two bottles, and the bottles got better. Made with a Scotch you would drink neat, it remains what it always was: the easiest serious drink in the cabinet.

Sidecar

The Sidecar is one of the great drinks of the years after the First World War, and its paternity has never been settled. It appears in 1922 in both Harry MacElhone’s ABC of Mixing Cocktails and Robert Vermeire’s Cocktails: How to Mix Them, with each author crediting someone else: MacElhone named Pat MacGarry at Buck’s Club in London, while Vermeire named MacElhone himself at Harry’s New York Bar in Paris. The dispute is unlikely ever to be resolved. The structure is a sour built on cognac, with Cointreau as the sweetening modifier and fresh lemon as the acid. The cognac brings dried fruit and oak warmth, the Cointreau brings clean orange and the sweetness that answers the lemon, and the lemon keeps the whole thing from turning heavy. It is also among the most ratio-sensitive drinks in the classical canon, which is the argument against the sugar rim some versions carry: the balance here is calibrated without one.