The perfect cocktail is a sensory experience, capable of recalling an anniversary at The Ritz-Carlton or a balmy afternoon in Bangkok. Although many of today’s cocktails originated in the 1800s, mixologists around the world continue to put a unique spin on these creations, taking inspiration from craft liquors, local ingredients and the bar atmosphere.

At the New York Bar inside the Park Hyatt Tokyo, for example, four signature cocktails take their cues from the enormous paintings of New York landmarks hanging throughout the bar.

The Radio City cocktail at Park Hyatt Tokyo’s New York Bar © Park Hyatt Tokyo

“The red hues of the Radio City [cocktail] are inspired by the music hall’s spotlights,” says the bar’s assistant manager, Utaro Izaki. “Our Yankee Stadium is a beer cocktail — what baseball game would be complete without it? — paired with apple juice, of course, and a touch of lemongrass to match the outfield.”

Not that cocktails need to be unusual in order to be memorable. With a contemporary emphasis on fresh herbs and fruit juices, sometimes an old standby is the star of the cocktail menu.

I will never forget the mojito I had at a family-run restaurant in Nyaung Shwe, Myanmar, muddled with mint leaves and limes from a garden next to the kitchen. Through the open window, the sound of strange incantations mingled with the smell of rain, creating a memory forever connected to the taste of Mandalay Rum.

A Red Snapper at The St. Regis New York’s King Cole Bar © St. Regis

SOME SAY THE Bloody Mary originated at Harry’s New York Bar, where Hemingway and his friends hung out in Paris. Others attribute its invention to comedian and actor George Jessel, while still others suggest a waitress named Mary at Chicago’s Bucket of Blood Club inspired it.

No matter who conceived combining vodka and tomato juice, everyone agrees it was popularized by French bartender Fernand Petiot, who began spicing the Red Snapper (he deemed the name “Bloody Mary” too distasteful) when he took over the King Cole Bar in New York’s St. Regis Hotel in 1934.

“I cover the bottom of the shaker with four large dashes of salt, two dashes of black pepper, two dashes of cayenne pepper and a layer of Worcestershire sauce; I then add a dash of lemon juice and some cracked ice,” he told The New Yorker.

Nowadays, St. Regis hotels worldwide tap into regional influences when putting their twist on the Bloody Mary, replacing the vodka with Tsingtao beer in Beijing or tequila and chili in Texas. But the King Cole Bar continues the tradition of serving Petiot’s signature Red Snapper.

ONE MIGHT EXPECT America’s best Manhattan to be made in the Big Apple; instead, it’s served in Detroit. Bartender Travis Fourmont of Roast restaurant at The Westin Book Cadillac hotel took home the title at this year’s Woodford Reserve Master of the Manhattan contest for his version of the classic cocktail, the Midnight Manhattan.

Midnight Manhattan at The Westin Book Cadillac in Detroit © The Westin

Like the original Manhattan (which was supposedly invented at a banquet held for Winston Churchill’s mother at New York City’s Manhattan Club), Fourmont’s concoction includes American whiskey and house-made bitters, but the similarities end there. Where a traditional Manhattan uses sweet vermouth, Fourmont substitutes a mixture of Italian Amaro, Campari and cherry liqueur.

“Now that whiskey is so good, you want it to be whiskey forward,” he told the Detroit Free Press. “You want to taste the whiskey.”

The award-winning creation, which uses two ounces of Woodford Reserve’s small-batch Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, is achieving notoriety at the bar at Roast. Too bad for New Yorkers, it’s a 500-mile trip to try the country’s tastiest Manhattan.

MARGARET, MARJORIE, RITA: A number of women have claimed to inspire America’s favorite tequila-based cocktail — and a number of bartenders claim to have invented it. Among the Margarita’s purported origins are an Acapulco cocktail party hosted by American socialite Margaret Sames; a bar south of Tijuana where a showgirl named Marjorie King frequently drank; and the Agua Caliente Race Track, where Rita Hayworth performed.

Whether or not it was born in Mexico — where tequila is not typically mixed — by the 1950s it was ubiquitous in America’s bars and Mexican-style restaurants.

“She’s from Mexico, Señores, and she is lovely to look at, exciting and provocative,” wrote Esquire magazine in 1953 about the combination of tequila, triple sec and lime juice.

Fast-forward 60 years and the Margarita has taken the world by storm, achieving infamy with its own holiday (National Margarita Day, Feb. 22) and incarnations as varied as its creation myths. Devotees can drink a $100 Margarita made with edible gold flakes and blood orange “caviar” at L.A.’s Red O Restaurant or order a Margie mixed with popcorn-infused tequila at Chef Brian Malarkey’s San Diego outpost, Gingham.

E.B. WHITE CALLED IT “the elixir of quietude.” Journalist H.L. Mencken dubbed it “the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet.” Its proportions of gin and vermouth may have evolved, but the almighty Martini has never gone out of style.

As early as the 1860s, bar patrons at San Francisco’s Occidental Hotel were drinking a combination of gin and dry vermouth named after the nearby town of Martinez. But it wasn’t until Prohibition and the proliferation of bathtub gin that the simple blend of spirits flourished. As the quality of gin improved, the amount of vermouth shrank. (Winston Churchill is said to have simply whispered the word “vermouth” to a glass of gin).

The Martini’s greatest publicist, novelist Ian Fleming, was inspired by the drinks at Dukes Hotel in London, a tiny traditional bar that is still said to serve one of the world’s best Martinis. Bar manager Alessandro Palazzi selects a dry amber vermouth from Sacred, a London micro distillery, to give a flavor similar to Bond’s preferred Kina Lillet. Lemons from Italy’s Amalfi Coast and a cold, crisp pour complete the classic cocktail. Whether it’s served shaken or stirred, well, that part’s up to you.

“IT IS THE VERY DREAM of drinks, the vision of sweet quaffings,” begins bartender Chris McMillian, quoting from an ode to the Mint Julep written by journalist J. Soule Smith. Whenever McMillian — who tends bar at the Davenport Lounge inside The Ritz-Carlton New Orleans — mixes the bourbon beverage, he recites this 1890s elegy.

Only a drink of Southern origins could inspire such rhapsodizing, and the Mint Julep has roots in Virginia barrooms dating back to the 18th century. But the cocktail’s biggest break came in 1938, when it was selected as the official beverage of the annual Kentucky Derby. Nowadays, almost 120,000 Early Times Mint Juleps are served over the two-day racing period each year.

For bourbon imbibers who don’t have tickets to the race, Louisville’s Proof on Main offers the next best thing: Mint Juleps made with one of more than 50 of Kentucky’s finest artisanal bourbons, some bottled exclusively for the Main Street bar.

As J. Soule Smith put it, “Sip it and say there is no solace for the soul, no tonic for the body like old Bourbon whiskey.”

ORIGINALLY DUBBED “El Draque” after English sea captain Sir Francis Drake, the 19th-century cocktail combined mint, lime and sugar with a rough liquor distilled by slaves in Cuban sugarcane fields. With the introduction of refined rum came a new name for the popular cocktail: Mojito — possibly a reference to mojo, a widely used Cuban seasoning made from lime.

Perhaps the drink’s biggest proponent was Ernest Hemingway, who patronized La Bodeguita del Medio, a Havana grocery store-turned-restaurant popular with mid-century artists and intellectuals. “My mojito in La Bodeguita, My daiquiri in La Floridita,” he wrote on the bar’s wall — an inscription that can still be seen today.

A number of La Bodeguita replicas have opened everywhere from Australia to Macedonia, but the best bars continue to take their inspiration from freshly muddled mint and superior rum. Miami’s Tap Tap restaurant, which is widely considered to serve the city’s best mojito, makes a break from tradition with Rhum Barbancourt 5-Star Haitian rum. But most importantly, Tap Tap’s bartenders aren’t in any hurry; the Haitian restaurant eschews pre-made mixtures for the old-fashioned mortar and pestle.

LONG BEFORE THE MARTINI became king of the cocktail bar, nostalgic patrons of America’s speakeasies were asking for “old-fashioned” whiskey cocktails. A proliferation of absinthe and other liqueurs in the late 1800s led purists to long for the days when a cocktail was, as a newspaper editor put it in 1806, “a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters.”

The Old-Fashioned concoction enjoyed a heyday around the turn of the century, but sometime after Prohibition, bartenders began tossing fruit into the mix. Turn on an episode of Mad Men and you’ll see Don Draper drinking his period-appropriate Old-Fashioned with a muddled cherry and a heavy dose of club soda.

These days artisanal cocktail slingers such as Prime Meats in Brooklyn stick to a simple list of ingredients while mixing things up with inventive basics like house-made Bartlett pear bitters. JBird Cocktails on the Upper East Side devotes an entire menu page to the drink, including a Honey-Nut Old-Fashioned that features roasted peanut-infused bourbon. For now, at least, the Old-Fashioned’s return to style has also meant a return to dignity.

JUST BECAUSE IT’S ONE of the few cocktails with a definitive origin story doesn’t mean the Pisco Sour’s invention isn’t in dispute. Cocktail historians agree that the frothy combination of Peruvian pisco (a type of brandy distilled from young wine), lime juice, syrup, egg white and bitters came about at Morris’ Bar in Lima during the 1920s. But neighboring Chile soon claimed the spirit as its own, setting off a decades-long dispute that includes dueling national holidays to celebrate the Pisco Sour.

Pisco Sour © Ildipapp | Dreamstime.com

Regardless of the beverage’s back story, it’s enjoying a renewed popularity among young professionals in Lima’s contemporary bars and restaurants. Trendy drinking holes like Huaringas Bar put a modern spin on the Pisco Sour with flavors like golden berry and passion fruit.

San Franciscans have been imbibing their own incarnation of the cocktail since the 19th century, when trading ships from Peru introduced the potent pisco. Called Pisco Punch, the mixture of pineapple, pisco, lime juice, sugar and acacia gum can still be consumed at bars like Comstock Saloon, where the concoction includes a secret tincture of herbs and artisanal Encanto Pisco.

LEGEND HAS IT the Sidecar was named after the mode of transportation of an American Army captain who was driven to drink (literally) at a Paris bistro during World War I. Whether or not the etymology is true, the cocktail of cognac, Cointreau and lemon juice was likely composed at one of two Paris institutions: the Ritz Hotel or Harry’s New York Bar.

Nearly a century after the Sidecar’s heyday, it’s all but absent from the menus of Paris’ most popular cocktail bars. A version of the drink priced at more than $1,600 — featuring cognac from the mid-18th century — was being served at the Ritz Hotel’s Hemingway Bar until the establishment shut its doors for extensive renovations last year.

Fortunately, cocktail connoisseurs with a hankering for one of Hemingway’s and Fitzgerald’s favorite drinks can still find the Sidecar on the menu of eight classic cocktails at Harry’s New York Bar. And across the pond, the concoction has made a comeback among New York City mixologists like Audrey Saunders, who includes a Tantric Sidecar made with Calvados, pineapple juice and green chartreuse on the menu of Soho’s legendary Pegu Club.

THE SINGAPORE SLING may not be the world’s most distinguished drink, but it certainly knows how to have fun. Invented around 1915 by a bartender named Ngiam Tong Boon at the Raffles Hotel Singapore, the original recipe more closely resembled a Daisy than a classic “sling” of liquor, sugar, lemon and water. Ngiam’s cocktail called for gin, Cherry Heering, Benedictine and fresh Sarawak pineapple juice — a combination that British writer Charles Baker called “a delicious, slow-acting, insidious thing.”

Over the next few decades, the Singapore Sling’s ingredients were slowly stripped away until the foamy mixture once enjoyed by Somerset Maugham consisted of little more than gin, bottled sweet and sour, and grenadine. But with the resurgence of fresh fruit juices came even more additions to the mix: The Raffles recipe today includes Cointreau, grenadine, lemon juice and bitters.

While Raffles’ Long Bar remains a nostalgic place to knock back a few, cocktail connoisseurs nowadays descend on Orgo, the Singapore bar of renowned Japanese mixologist Tomoyuki Kitazoe. Kitazoe uses only cut-to-order fruits and fresh, organic ingredients (with the exception of the gin) for a Sling best sipped on sultry afternoons.

ASK FOR A TEQUILA SUNRISE and you’ll end up with one of two very different drinks. The original, created at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel in the late 1930s or early 1940s, consists of tequila, crème de cassis, lime juice and soda water. As the story goes, bartender Gene Sulit invented the custom cocktail for a longtime guest who loved soaking up the Phoenix sunshine poolside.

But the Tequila Sunrise as most people know it today — tequila, orange juice and grenadine — originated three decades later at a Sausalito restaurant popular with rock and rollers, the Trident. Apparently the Rolling Stones enjoyed the new libation at Trident’s kickoff party for their 1972 tour; they proceeded to introduce the cocktail across the country.

These days the Art Deco-style Arizona Biltmore serves both — as well as a third, the Tropical Tequila Sunrise, featuring fresh pineapple juice and Pama Pomegranate liqueur. Mixologists around Phoenix have also put their spin on the colorful classic: At award-winning pizza joint The Parlor, the Jalisco Sunrise combines spicy Serrano-infused Corzo Tequila with pink grapefruit, cilantro and lime.

“HAVE YOU SEEN Tom Collins?” asked many a practical joker in 1874. “He’s at the bar around the corner spreading lies about you!” Sightings of the libelous Tom were reported in newspapers across America that summer. And while the unsavory character remained elusive, neighborhood bars began serving a liquid version of the sought-after Mr. Collins: gin, lemon juice, gum syrup and soda water.

No one knows exactly where Tom Collins came from. In 1891, a British physician suggested a fellow Brit by the name of John Collins created the drink, but American cocktail connoisseurs were doubtful. “The essentially American character of [this and other drinks] is obvious,” wrote H.L. Mencken. “The English, in naming their drinks, commonly display a far more limited imagination.”

In any case, the English have proved among the most faithful to the cocktail’s original recipe (which suffered from the introduction of pre-mixed sweet-and-sour). LAB, the London Academy of Bartending’s lounge, devotes an entire page to the Collins family, including Lychee Collins, with vanilla sugar and lychee purée, and Honey and Fig Collins, featuring homemade honey water and fig liqueur.