I Drank Every Cocktail
The International Bartenders Association, or IBA, maintains a list of official cocktails, ones they deem to be “the most requested recipes” at bars all around the world. It’s the closest thing the bartending industry has to a canonical list of cocktails, akin to the American Kennel Club’s registry of dog breeds or a jazz musician’s Real Book of standards.
The IBA official cocktail list is the kind of list that has its own Sporcle quiz and its own Wikipedia article—an “IBA official cocktail” label even christens the top of each cocktail’s own Wikipedia infobox:
As of 2025, there are 102 IBA official cocktails, and as of July 12, 2025, I’ve had every one of them.
The journey has taken me to some interesting places, and now that it’s done, I have a little story to tell for each cocktail. I’m not gonna tell you all 102 stories, but I do want to debrief the experience. Drinking all 102 cocktails turned out to be unexpectedly tricky, and for reasons you’ll soon understand, I might be one of the first people in the world to do it.
⚠ Drink responsibly! This endeavor involved drinking a lot of alcohol, but I did it over the course of a few years. It’s rare that I have more than a drink or two in one night (and never have I ever blacked out from drinking). I do not recommend speedrunning the IBA official cocktail list. It’s important to know your limits, be conscious about how much you’re drinking, and drink a lot of water. If you’re struggling with an alcohol addiction, you should probably stop reading this post and talk to someone (if you’re outside of the US, you can find a helpline here).
How it started
I’m something of a list keeper. But it can be hard to decide when to start keeping track of things. So sometimes, I pick an arbitrary starting point that feels vaguely fateful, and I keep a list from that point on. For albums, it was the day I got my AirPods Pro delivered. For restaurants, it was the day I moved to New York City. For cocktails, it was the day I turned 21.
I started a note in Obsidian called Legal Cocktails, enumerating each type of classic cocktail I had consumed since I came of age. A dry martini at 5801 to usher in my birthday. A sex on the beach on an intern dinner cruise a couple weeks later.
Over the next couple years, Legal Cocktails grew to about 50 different drinks. Throughout my senior year at Illinois, my more epicurean friends Aidan and Christian would host a series of little get-togethers where they’d mix us drinks in their apartments, ranging from more pedestrian picks like the daiquiri and negroni to deeper cuts like the hanky panky and a half-decent Ramos gin fizz Christian made from melted butter.
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