Negronis
12 recipes
This Field Manual holds 12 recipes in the negroni family. The build is equal parts: a spirit, a bitter liqueur and a sweet vermouth, stirred over ice with an orange peel. Every drink on this page is that ratio with one part swapped.
Swap the gin for whiskey and it is a boulevardier, for prosecco and it is a sbagliato. The Campari is the part people argue about: swap it for a gentler bitter and the drink stops fighting back, which is usually what someone means when they say they do not like negronis. Go the other way, towards a more bitter amaro, and the vermouth has to come up with it or the drink turns austere.
Base Spirit
Boulevardier
The Boulevardier was created by Erskine Gwynne, an American expatriate writer in 1920s Paris who published a monthly magazine of the same name for the city’s American community.
Cardinale
The Cardinale is a Negroni with the sweet vermouth taken out and the Campari cut back, which makes it drier, paler and considerably more austere than the drink it descends from.
Comte de Sureau
The Comte de Sureau is a Negroni that has been rebalanced rather than merely re-flavoured. Elderflower liqueur takes sweet vermouth's place, and the Campari drops to a quarter
Left Hand
The Left Hand is a Boulevardier with three dashes of chocolate bitters in it, which sounds like a footnote until you taste one. Cacao is dry rather than sweet, and it sits exactly
Mezcal Negroni
The Mezcal Negroni is what happens when Italy’s bitterest institution meets Oaxaca’s smokiest: the equal-parts Negroni template with mezcal standing where the gin stood, smoke
Milano-Torino
The Milano-Torino is the aperitivo’s book of genesis: Campari of Milan and sweet vermouth of Turin, equal parts over ice, poured at Campari’s own Caffè Camparino from the 1860s
Negroni
The Negroni is the most ordered classic cocktail in the world and the drink that defined the contemporary revival. It is also one of the simplest: equal parts gin, Campari and
Negroni Sbagliato
In 1972, mid-rush at Bar Basso in Milan, Mirko Stocchetto reached for the gin to build a Negroni and came up holding prosecco. Sbagliato means mistaken, and the mistake was good
Old Pal
The Old Pal is rye, Campari and dry vermouth in a Boulevardier's shape with the sweet vermouth swapped out. That single change does considerably more than it sounds like it
Right Hand
The Right Hand is the rum half of a matched pair. Michael McIlroy built it on the frame Sam Ross had used for the Left Hand, bourbon with Campari, sweet vermouth and chocolate
Rosita
The Rosita is the tequila Negroni the revival nearly walked past. The spec surfaces in the American bar guides of the 1970s and owes its modern life to Gary Regan, who put it back
White Negroni
The White Negroni came out of an improvisation. Wayne Collins, a British bartender demonstrating at VinExpo in Bordeaux in 2001, was asked to work with French products and did not