Best Valentine’s Day Cocktails Recipes

Love is in the air. And so are Valentine’s Day-inspired cocktails. There are many ways to adapt some of your favorite recipes so they’re more suited to Valentine’s Day; the most obvious way is to incorporate some ingredients that add an amorous tinge of pink or red to your drink.

Lots of delicious alcohols and mixers can help you achieve your ideal level of redness, the most common alcohols would be Campari, Rosé Prosecco or sparkling wine, Luxardo Sangue Morlacco, many forms of hibiscus, pomegranate, and cherry liqueur, and of course red wine (red Lambrusco adds sparkle and a little sweetness).  For mixers, there’s also a wide palette to choose from, including, but not limited to, cherry juice, cranberry juice, blood orange juice, pomegranate juice, and tomato juice.

Here are three charismatic cocktail recipes to get your creative juices flowing for Valentine’s Day. Each recipe serves 2.

The Crush

This recipe is a Valentine’s Day adaptation of one of our most romantic cocktails, the Wedding Vow. If you’re not ready to commit to making that drink, this one should work for you. No strings attached.

In a shaker with ice combine:

4 oz. Batch 22 Classic Gold

2 oz. Cherry Juice or Luxardo Sangue Morlacco (or 1 oz. of each)

4 tbsp. Rose Cordial Syrup or Violette liqueur

2 Maraschino cherries

2-4 oz. Prosecco or sparkling wine

Gently muddle each cherry in a champagne flute or champagne glass of your choosing. Strain the liquid into each glass and top with prosecco.

Mon Cherry

In all our recipe development work, we found that cherries and Batch 22 Classic Gold aquavit play very well together, and we wanted to craft a cocktail that would really satisfy the cherry lover. Turns out, we think it’ll also just satisfy the lover. Not too sweet, this drink has layers of flavor and just a touch of sparkle.

Ingredients

Shake over ice:

4 oz. Batch 22 Classic Gold

4 oz. tart cherry juice

2 tbsp. fresh lime juice

2 tbsp. simple syrup

Strain into large coupes or martini glasses

To the glasses, add:

1/4 cup ginger beer (half to each glass)

1/4 cup tonic (half to each glass)

Morello cherries in syrup for garnish

Queen of Hearts

Originally called Killer Queen, this cocktail—created by Robin Wolf, who runs the bar at The Hatch Rotisserie & Bar in Paso Robles, California, is a delicate, floral, and aromatic elixir that just makes your heart beat faster. We adapted a few of the ingredients especially for Valentine’s Day (we use hibiscus liqueur instead of Benedictine, for example), and we added Batch 22 to the mix (the original recipe calls only for gin). For us, this cocktail was love at first sip.

Ingredients

2 oz. Batch 22 Classic Gold

2 oz. aromatic gin

1.5 oz Lillet Blanc

.5 oz. Hibiscus liqueur (we like Fruitlab from Greenbar Distillery)

8 dashes rose bitters

Garnish: lemon wheels

Add the Batch, gin, Lillet Blanc, Hibiscus liqueur, and bitters into a large mixing glass with ice and stir until well-chilled.

Strain into two coupe glasses. Garnish with lemon.