I Drank Every Cocktail

The International Bartenders Association, or IBA, maintains a list of official cocktails, ones they deem to be “the most requested recipes” at bars all around the world. It’s the closest thing the bartending industry has to a canonical list of cocktails, akin to the American Kennel Club’s registry of dog breeds or a jazz musician’s Real Book of standards. The IBA official cocktail list is the kind of list that has its own Sporcle quiz and its own Wikipedia article—an “IBA official cocktail” label even christens the top of each cocktail’s own Wikipedia infobox: As of 2025, there are 102 IBA official cocktails, and as of July 12, 2025, I’ve had every one of them. The journey has taken me to some interesting places, and now that it’s done, I have a little story to tell for each cocktail. I’m not gonna tell you all 102 stories, but I do want to debrief the experience. Drinking all 102 cocktails turned out to be unexpectedly tricky, and for reasons you’ll soon understand, I might be one of…