The WoW Style

New Year’s Eve is one of the biggest party nights of the year and this annual occasion is ideal for serving exquisite and impressive drinks. While straight Champagne is a traditional way to celebrate, it’s also fantastic to mix in any of the Champagne cocktails available. However, if you don’t want to drink sparkling drinks all night, here are a few more “yearly” cocktails that fit the night perfectly as you’re ringing in the new year and wishing everyone all the joy and prosperity you wish for yourself. New Year drinks recipes make every party go with a fizz and a bang. New Year is the day when nearly a quarter of all parties held in the world happen. The best thing for any host to do whilst organizing a party is to ensure that there is an abundant supply of cocktails to keep the guests amused and fully loaded.

New Year’s Eve Cocktails Recipes

Countdown Cocktail

Serves 1

Ingredients:

• 1 ½ part Pinnacle® Peachberry Cobbler Vodka
• 1 bar spoon of blueberry preserves room temperature
• ¼ part fresh lemon juice
• 1 ½ parts brut champagne

Directions:

1. Add all ingredients except champagne in a cocktail shaker without ice and stir until liquefied.
2. Add ice, shake and strain into a flute or martini glass and then top with champagne.
3. Garnish with a raspberry.

Elit Midnight Millionaire

Happy New Year

Take a Champagne Cocktail, forget the sugar, add some ruby port and a bit of orange juice and you have a Happy New Year. This is quite a delightful Champagne cocktail with a little more depth than most and I really like it with Sandeman’s 10 year old port with fresh orange juice and Korbel brandy as the base. This is an outstanding New Year’s Eve cocktail, or one for any of those extra special occasions when you really want to knock the socks off your guests.

Leap Year

Depending on how you calculate it, the Leap Year cocktail either turned 86 this year — or is just embarking on its 20s. We know this because the exact date this drink was invented is documented in the Savoy Cocktail Book, bartender Harry Craddock’s popular mixing manual, first published in 1930. This blend of gin, orange liqueur, lemon, and sweet vermouth was born on Leap Day, 1928.

Craddock, an American who decamped to London and helmed the bar at the famous Savoy Hotel during Prohibition, noted in his entry about the Leap Year cocktail recipe that the drink was “said to have been responsible for more [marriage] proposals than any other cocktail that has ever been mixed.” That’s quite a claim, although it’s hard to know from Craddock’s blurb whether all that Leap Year-fueled question-popping resulted in engagements.

Serves 1

2 ounces London Dry gin
3/4 ounce orange liqueur
1/2 ounces sweet vermouth (try with Punt e Mes)
About 1/8 ounce lemon juice

Add ingredients to a mixing glass. Fill the glass with ice cubes and stir for about 30 seconds. Strain contents into a chilled cocktail glass.

Recipe Notes

• Many versions of this recipe call for shaking, which makes sense given there is a non-spirituous ingredient. But there’s so little lemon juice, I find shaking unnecessary. You just want the faintest hint of citrus — the squeeze of a wedge or a bar spoon’s worth.
• Made with Punt e Mes, a sweet vermouth made with bitter chinchona bark, this version of the Leap Year is punchy and sweet up front, and then finishes with flavors of bitter herbs and orange peel.

Midnight Martini

I will usually pull the Midnight Martini out for Halloween, but it’s just as fitting for New Year’s Eve. The coffee profile helps out with the look of midnight and if you choose to go with both the liqueur and a vodka like Van Gogh’s Espresso you will be up well past midnight, which isn’t such a bad way to bring in the New Year.

Serves 1

Midori Melon Ball Drop

The Melon Ball is a delicious, fruity vodka shooter. It is flavored with a melon liqueur (Midori is a good choice) and pineapple juice. In the expansive choice of shooters, this is one of the better tasting that has a hard vodka base but is a little more mellow than some of the others. You can also take this recipe and strain it into a cocktail glass or build it into a tall mixed drink.

Serves 1

Ingredients:

• 1/4 oz Melon Liqueur
• 1/2 oz Vodka
• 1/4 oz Pineapple Juice
  

Directions:

1. Pour everything in a glass
2. Mix well
3. Pour into a shot glass
4. Shoot em up

Millennium Cocktail

Cognac Cocktails: The “Millennium 2000″ Featured Cognac Otard V.S.O.P. And Pommery Brut Champagne.

• 2 cl Mandarine Napoléon
• 1 cl Cognac Otard V.S.O.P.
• 10 cl Pommery Brut Champagner

Resolution Martini

The Resolution Martini is a simple and elegant way to toast the New Year. Really, you cannot get much more simple than gin, apricot brandy and lemon juice for a finished drink with a perfect balance of dry, sweet and sour. Consider it one last indulgence before you take on those resolutions, which you’re sure to keep this year.

Serves 1

The Clean Slate

This is a fun cocktail that won the New Year’s Cocktail Contest in 2013. It uses amaretto vodka, elderflower and cherry liqueurs with a special apple-cinnamon syrup and it is a topped off with a little Champagne. The gold rim adds that extra sparkle needed for a great New Year’s party.

Serves 1

Twentieth Century Cocktail

We may be well into the twenty first century but that doesn’t mean we can’t partake in a Twentieth Century Cocktail. This is one of those classics from the beginning of the 1900’s and its mix of gin, Lillet Blanc and creme de cacao is quite intriguing and great for any celebration.

Serves 1