The 11 Best Fall Whiskey Cocktails to Mix Up This Season

Brooklyn

In the world of Manhattan variations, the Brooklyn is one of the best. The problem is that a key ingredient to make an authentic Brooklyn cocktail, Amer Picon, is illegal in the United States. So despite this drink being perhaps better than its older brother, the Manhattan, you’re much less likely to encounter it in the wild. However we tinkered endlessly to a substitute for this French liqueur and has found one in using Amaro Ramozzotti and a couple dashes of orange bitters to go with the rye whiskey, dry vermouth, and maraschino liqueur.

Add all ingredients to a chilled mixing glass. Add ice and stir briskly for 10 seconds (if using small ice) to 25 seconds (if using big ice). Strain into a chilled coupe or cocktail glass, and garnish with a maraschino cherry.

Lion’s Tail

This classic from 1937 is the perfect autumnal whiskey drink, with half its soul in summer and the other half in winter. On one hand, it’s made refreshing with lime juice, and is totally suited for backyard barbecue sipping. On the other, the recipe incorporates a small but significant amount of allspice liqueur, which gives it an avalanche of textured spice that finds it a home by the fire. The Lion’s Tail is a transitional drink that tastes like if a Jamaican jerk chicken and a Whiskey Sour couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker. Add ice and shake hard for eight to 10 seconds. Strain off the ice into a cocktail or coupe glass. Garnish with a lime peel, a lime wheel, or nothing at all. 

Sazerac

This quintessential New Orleans cocktail, the Sazerac, has a beautiful spice character from the rye whiskey, compared to an Old Fashioned that would use the sweeter bourbon. To merely dismiss the Sazerac as yet another Old Fashioned variation is to miss its charms. The Peychaud’s Bitters, all cherry and anise as opposed to Angostura Bitters’ cinnamon and clove, combines with the herbal pop of absinthe and the spicy backbone of the rye to create something wholly new. Served as it is without ice, the herbaceousness transforms as it warms, evolving contemplatively in your glass.

Take a rocks glass and either chill it in the freezer or with ice water. While it gets cold, in a separate mixing glass, combine liquid ingredients and stir for 10 seconds (if using very small ice) to 30 seconds (if using bigger cubes). Grab your now cold rocks glass, coat the inside with absinthe and empty the excess, then strain the cocktail into the absinthe-rinsed glass. Express a lemon peel over the top and then discard, serving the cocktail without garnish.

Mulled Apple Cider

The Hot Mulled Apple Cider cocktail is the most labor-intensive on this list, but even in this august company, it might be the tastiest. It’s also pure fall: Apples are at their very best right now, and we insist that juicing them, mulling the juice with spices and spiking it with Irish whiskey “warms you from the inside in a way you otherwise can only get by watching videos of soldiers coming home to their dogs.” It seems like everyone on the internet has a Mulled Apple Cider recipe and a lot of them get the main points wrong, so check out the instructions here, and then do yourself a favor and make it.

Designed for an 8 oz. mug—scale up as needed

Pour whiskey and cider into a pre-heated mug, leaving a little less than one inch of room from the rim. Gently pour half-whipped unsweetened cream so it layers on top. Garnish with a pinch of ground cinnamon.

Revolver

In 2004 in San Francisco, everyone who was doing “mixology” was leaning into the region’s year-round availability of fresh produce, so the city’s cocktails were full of things like satsuma mandarins and fennel bulbs and garnished with fistfuls of lemon balm. Jon Santer, with his Revolver, went a different way. This dark and broody Old Fashioned variation is, we claim, “among the best cocktails in the neo-classic pantheon,” and comes with a bonus kick of caffeine to help with the shift back to standard time, for when you go to Happy Hour and it’s already pitch black outside.

Add all ingredients to a rocks glass over a large piece of ice and stir. Garnish with a flamed orange peel or a regular orange peel.

Greenpoint

“Manhattan (the place) may be inimitable,” we write, “but Manhattan (the cocktail) gets imitated all the time.” This is where the Greenpoint comes from, an excellent neo-classic riff on a Manhattan that was invented at Milk & Honey in New York, and comprises the classic build of Manhattan—rye, sweet vermouth, and bitters—into which has been spliced the inimitable French herbal liqueur, Yellow Chartreuse. The Chartreuse charms the cocktail, giving it a bright herbaceousness and seductive spice, “playful and fascinating,” we say, “the liqueur’s full battery of gifts echoing into a long, ambrosial finish.”

Add all the ingredients to a mixing glass with ice and stir for about 10 to 15 seconds (if using small ice) or about 20 to 30 seconds (if using big ice). Take heed: This drink benefits from a slight bit more dilution than a standard Manhattan. Once perfect, strain off the ice into a chilled coupe or cocktail glass, and garnish with a lemon peel.

Boulevardier

Of the 10 million or so variations on the Negroni the Boulevardier is probably the oldest and almost certainly the best. A mixture of bourbon, Campari, and sweet vermouth, the Boulevardier replaces the prickly gin with the broad oaky shoulders of a good American whiskey, bringing a welcome touch of vanilla to Campari’s orange. It’s branchy herbaceousness, ample fruit, and bittersweet character fit into the season perfectly, equally at home in both warm and cold weather, and either before or after dinner,

Add ingredients to a rocks glass with ice. Stir for 10 seconds if the ice is small, 30 seconds if one big cube and somewhere between if ice is somewhere between. Garnish with an orange peel.

Morning Glory Fizz

When we first wrote about the Morning Glory Fizz, we acknowledge right at the top that “there is nothing—nothing whatsoever—about scotch whiskey that suggests it might be nice to have for breakfast.” Nonetheless, this excellent and unlikely cocktail was, astoundingly and as the name suggests, conceived to be enjoyed in the morning. It does so by bridging the gap between the dark intensity of scotch whiskey and the breezy vibes of a bubbly cooler, which also makes it perfect for the ambivalence of fall, for when it’s too warm for a jacket but too cold without one.

Add all ingredients, except for the soda water, to a cocktail tin. Seal tightly and “dry” shake, without ice, for five to eight seconds, in order to whip the egg white. Add ice, reseal and shake well for 10 to 12 seconds. Strain off the ice into a tall glass without ice, add the soda, garnish with a lemon peel or orange peel.

American Trilogy

In hindsight, the American Trilogy is so obvious, it’s as if you asked for an fall-themed Old Fashioned from ChatGPT. When it was invented, though, in or around 2006 in New York, it was a revolution—at the time, no one was making split-based cocktails, so when Richard Boccato and Michael McIlroy combined apple brandy and rye whiskey into a single cocktail, it spread around the world. It’s not just novelty. Rye and apple brandy are fast friends—the apple brandy adding an autumnal echo to rye’s grainy persistence.

Add all ingredients to a rocks glass with the biggest piece (or pieces) of ice you have. Stir five to 10 seconds (if you have small ice) or 15 to 20 seconds (if you have big ice). Garnish with an orange peel. Enjoy.

Blood and Sand

These days, if you hear about this scotch classic at all, you probably hear it maligned. It’s the cocktail bartenders love to hate: “Too sweet!” you’ll hear, as if that’s some kind of insurmountable problem. But reduce the quantity of the sweet ingredients and add a splash of citrus, and it becomes suddenly clear why the Blood and Sand has lasted in the canon for almost 100 years. To avoid it is really to miss out: “The Blood and Sand is one of those cocktails that synergizes magically into something completely new” we say, with flavors that “lock together so tightly you can’t find the seams.”

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice and shake hard for 12 to 15 seconds. Strain up into a coupe or cocktail glass and garnish with an orange peel.

Monte Carlo

Some products—not many, but some—just work in cocktails. And that’s the case with Bénédictine, the herbal French liqueur that gives the Monte Carlo its warming fall spice. The Monte Carlo is among the simplest drinks on this list or any other, but the complexity and charm of the Bénédictine, replete with honey, cinnamon, vanilla, cardamom, nutmeg, saffron and so much else, makes it a crowd pleaser. That the liqueur sports a 513 year “history” that’s almost certainly made-up is immaterial. What really matters is how it defines this outstanding drink.

Stir on ice in a rocks glass, the bigger the ice, the better. Garnish with a lemon peel. Sip slowly, and enjoy.