Basic Cocktail Chart
Cocktail categorization
I think it is difficult to summarize drinks like that.
Podcast recommendation
These guys here once tried to do a categorization in a German podcast:
I’m trying to quickly translate their shownotes and major content.
Major categories
If you look at it systematically, you basically have four major categories:
- Old Fashioned (base spirit + bitter + sweet)
- Sour Drink (base spirit + sour + sweet)
- Cream Drink
- Sweetened Spirit
Further breakdown
Then they tried to break it down further and ended up with:
- Sour – Spirit, Acid, Sugar
- Fizz – Sour plus Soda
- Collins – Building a Fizz on ice, with extra Fizz
- Smash – Sour plus muddled Herbs
- Highball – Spirit plus Filler
- Punch – Forefather of Sours. Juices, but also wine are of importance
- Batida – Fresh fruit and Cachaça
- Old Fashioned – Spirit, sugar, bitter, ice; nothing else
- High-proof wine drinks: Manhattan and the like
- Low-proof wine drinks: Wine as basis, potentially spirit as modifier, bitters, includes Champagne Cocktails and Cobblers
- Bitter Drinks – Everything with Bitters as basis
- Cream drinks - as long as there is cream in it
- Eggnogs/Flips – Spirit, egg, potentially cream and milk
- Coladas – Cream de Coconut, cream, juices and spirits
- Juleps – dark spirit, sugar, mint, eventually bitters
- Savory drinks – vegetable juice, salt, spices, eventually egg
- Toddy – base spirit, sugar, water, spices - eventually warm/hot
As you can see, it already gets pretty difficult here and there is quite some overlap between the categories.
Dimensions of categorization
They also figured out that the following dimensions may be used as a means of categorisation:
- Base spirit
- Daytime/season
- Occasion (Digestif, Aperitif)
- Glas size (Longdrink, Shortdrink, Shot)
- Alcoholic content
- Noticeable additives (spices, soda)
- Preparation (Pousse-Café, molecular, frozen)
- Systematic categorization (Tiki, epochs)
- Base structure (Drink types as described above)
Have not seen something like this as a nice infographic though.
Further complications
Even further down, the overlap gets crazy when you have variations and blends of different classics. It also moves the focus away from the point and character of the drinks. A fizz and a collins look identical if you only look at ingredients. A Daiquiri has a very different character (fresh, light, fruity) from a rum sour (potentially heavy, aged rum, lemon instead of lime) even if you can interpret them identically if you only look at the basic recipe. A Mojito is very different from a Tom Collins even if they share many ingredients.