In these pages, you’ll find 150 recipes—the classics are all here, from the Gimlet to the Old-Fashioned, alongside the best examples of riffs on them, sourced from some of the greatest bartenders of our time. Though there are successful blueprints, you’ll notice through these variations that there are no hard-and-fast rules. The truth is, drinks are made to be tinkered with.

At the most basic level, the classic recipes are composed of modular building blocks: spirit, perhaps citrus, a little sugar, a dash of bitters. All this means that a drink originally based in whiskey can be completely transformed when made with a core of applejack as long as the rest of the cocktail is appropriately adjusted to remain balanced.