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This elegant, floral, blush-tinged cocktail is a great way to use up a bunch of grapes. Muddle fresh red grapes with pisco—a brandy actually made from grapes—shake with ice, and strain before topping with champagne and a lemon twist. What to buy: Pisco is a brandy distilled from South American white Muscat grapes. It can be found at well-stocked liquor stores or online.

A classic summer cooler, a lime rickey can be mixed up with gin or bourbon or, for a virgin rickey (like this one), with fruit syrup. Either rendition is equally bubbly, limey, and thirst-quenching.

I first tried a version of this cocktail at Audrey Saunders’s Pegu Club in Manhattan. A sip later, I was hooked. If you are a Manhattan Cocktail drinker and want to change things up a bit, try this recipe. Angostura, traditionally used in a Manhattan, is replaced with cynar. What to buy: Cynar is an Italian bitter apéritif made from about 13 herbs and plants, the most predominant of which is artichoke. It can be purchased at most liquor stores or online.

This Prohibition-era cocktail is equal parts herbaceous Chartreuse, gin, sweet maraschino liqueur, and sour lime juice. It’s complex, balanced, and totally satisfying. What to buy: Maraschino liqueur is a relatively dry liqueur with a subtle bitter-almond flavor; it can be found at any well-stocked liquor store.

The 2010 Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker, about an Army bomb squad unit in Iraq, calls for a drink that sparks the palate and detonates the senses. We present … the Exploding Sidecar.

This is a supersimple cocktail that happens to be supertasty. In fact it’s so simple that it’s hard to screw up even after tossing back a few.

CHOW.com asked chefs from a handful of our favorite restaurants to create better versions of seasonal lattes, with quality ingredients. Here’s former Spot Dessert Bar chef Pichet Ong’s interpretation. It’s a cross between a pudding and an eggnog latte, with condensed milk foam and a hint of passion fruit.

Our classic Irish coffee recipe comes from Dutch Kills, an equally classic bar in Long Island City, New York. The warm, revivifying cocktail was said to be popularized in the 1940s by Joseph Sheridan, a chef in the port city of Foynes, Ireland. In 1952, Irish Coffee was introduced to San Francisco by the Buena Vista Cafe. Sheridan’s recipe was written with the effortless poetry of the Irish: “Cream—rich as an Irish brogue; coffee—strong as a friendly hand; sugar—sweet as the tongue of a rogue.

A classic French home-style soup that can be ready in under an hour. To make this dairy-free, use olive oil (or margarine) instead of the butter.

This is a classic, refreshing sparkler made with sloe gin, regular gin, and lemon juice, shaken and topped off with club soda. What to buy: Sloe gin is a red liqueur made from gin infused with sloes (also called blackthorn), a relative of plums.