Huey Long, the 1930s Louisiana political demagogue, drank gin fizzes. Dressed in a white suit, his hair combed into a mop of curls, he held forth on the egg-white-and-cream body that a proficient barman should achieve. Long would have loved Kimball House, a former train depot where the Ramos Gin Fizz—conceived in 1888 by Henrico C. Ramos at the Imperial Cabinet Saloon in New Orleans—reaches its platonic ideal.

To understand the labor that goes into a proper cocktail, order a pony of lager as an aperitif and watch bartender David Chapman or Jason Harris work Boston shakers like castanets. Thirty minutes, a quick rest in the freezer, and a few more flourishes later, the drink arrives, a white velvet froth pluming over the highball lip into a high fade and the aroma wafting like a camellia in spring bloom.

Not all cocktails need to pack alcohol wallops. Suppressors, a term that gained purchase in Atlanta in the early years of this decade, describes an emergent category of low-proof drinks, built on fortified wines and bitters instead of whiskeys and gins.

The jolt here arrives on the shoulders of Angostura, that omnipresent bottle of bitters sheathed in an oversize white wrapper. One and a half ounces doesn’t sound like a lot, until you consider that most recipes call for dashes. Shaken with cream and egg white, served in this elegant shotgun bar perched at the rear of a garage, this pale mauve conceit is a replenishing quaff that buoys instead of bombs.

As bartenders moved away from bottled mixes and canned juices, the term bar chef briefly gained traction among food and beverage writers. But that fey phrase, which implied that bartenders were merely aspirational chefs without the poofy hats, never suited.

Today, bartenders take pride in their profession and their title. At Edmund’s Oast, Jayce McConnell does more than pair drinks with food. He crafts drinks that conjure foods, including those pineapple-marinated and cilantro-confettied pork tacos, born of Lebanese immigration to Mexico, now translated by seemingly every taqueria in the South.

This is my family drink. To be exact, this is a drink named after my family dog, who was named for Lurleen Wallace, the wife of the Alabama politician George Wallace and the first woman to govern that state. Bitter like Wallace politics, sweet like the love of a mutt, the Lurleen straddles the sour-sweet divide and offers a lesson in becoming a regular.

In conversation with the tenders at Snackbar, where Chef Vishwesh Bhatt serves drinking food like peanut-tossed fried okra chaat, I told them that I liked my whiskey cocktails sour. Blair, my wife, showed phone pictures of our pup. A drink appeared. Soon it earned a place on the bar’s roster. Such are the fruits of claiming a stool at your local.

Served in a stately decanter, jutting from an ice bucket like a bottle of fine champagne, this is a drawing-room cocktail for four mixed for a generation that wouldn’t know a drawing room from a restroom. Like many of the best drinks poured today, Bottled in Bond is based on a classic. Reworking the Manhattan, Julep proprietor Alba Huerta has built a luxurious drink with a boozy undertow.

Every detail is engineered to provide pleasure, including the ice, from a local supplier who freezes water gradually to yield blocks that are denser and slower to melt. The overall process sounds like a comedy skit, showcasing the pretentious lengths to which twenty-first-century Southerners go to rationalize their buzzes. Until you take a sip, follow with a bourbon-marinated cherry, and realize what happens when true craft is applied to a craft cocktail.

Proper Sazeracs, those anise-scented rye bombs, were once hard to find outside of New Orleans. Just as po’boys still taste best in the city of their birth, Sazeracs depended on the latitude of their makers. That changed after Hurricane Katrina, as New Orleans bartenders dispersed through the nation, and the craft cocktail movement inspired new-generation tenders.

The Sazerac at the restaurant Filament, set in a retrofitted machine shop, showcases postmodern exuberance. Glasses get a chilling swirl of liquid nitrogen, followed by an atomizer spritz of Herbsaint. The strong stuff arrives batched in a stumpy bottle. It’s a foolproof execution, elevated by theatrical swagger, ready for adaptation in any latitude where thirsty people gather.

This velveteen sipper, cranked from the sort of daiquiri machine employed by lowest-common-denominator French Quarter drunk depots, tastes like a milk shake that went on a holiday bender. Churned to a linen foam, the slurry also recalls the gentle milk punches that have long been standard morning beverages at family holiday gatherings in the home of proprietor Dickie Brennan.

That dichotomy best describes drinking hereabouts, where low and high culture clash and complement. Consumed in the mirrored front barroom at Bourbon House, while revelers parade the Quarter, such a drink rationalizes a splendid afternoon, marked by two refills, a flute of fries, and the creep of slanting sunshine across the arched windows that face Bourbon Street and frame the scrum.

The Jerry Thomas Speakeasy, accessed by a dark and dank cobblestoned street not far from the Piazza Navona, is a Roman homage to the nineteenth-century lion of the American cocktail, the man who literally wrote the book that has become a bible to modern-day drinkers of juleps, smashes, and shrubs.

Absent a sign, fronted by an owl-shaped brass knocker, adorned with peacock wallpaper, and enlivened by jazz, Jerry Thomas is not wholly a period piece. Order a mint julep and it comes laced with Pino Mugo, an Italian liqueur made with pinecone resin, crowned with sprigs of sugar-dusted mint, and served in a pewter cup bejeweled with ice and wrapped in a red napkin. That first stout sip will remind you that Southern whiskeys and Italian liqueurs marry well and travel far.

Know the ratio and you know the drink. Traditionally built with equal parts gin, sweet vermouth, and Campari, the Negroni traces to early-twentieth-century Italy. Stirred with overproof dark rum instead of gin, the Hardest Walk is a heady subversion of the norm, filigreed with the Italian drinking bitter Gran Classico.

That last ingredient is key. Born in the 1860s in Turin, Italy, Gran Classico is only recently available again in the American market. A more complex variation on Campari, it’s a great example of what happens when dedicated and knowledgeable proprietors like Neal Bodenheimer and Kirk Steinopal root through the world pantry to stock a bar with lost elaborations of excellence.

Codified, some say, at the Pendennis Club in Louisville, the old-fashioned at its simplest is made with nothing more than bourbon, sugar, and bitters. While the vanguard trend today is generally toward simplicity, some bartenders are so expert that they should be trusted with folderol.

Derek Brown is one of those tenders. In his capable hands, this new-fashioned drink relies on honey for sweetener, salt for savoriness, and aquavit for, well, oddity. It works. (So does the sherry-based Sazerac riff he calls a Shazerac.) Practicing feats of cocktail legerdemain, Brown convinces drinkers to take a chance on his uncommon palate.

A beach drink, absent the beach and without the fruit, this frozen quaff is a reminder that, in this age of craft spirits and wild-foraged garnishes, we sometimes want cocktails that are merely good to drink, not necessarily good to think.

Developed by Steva Casey and spiraled from a slushie machine that looks as if it were liberated from a 7-Eleven, the Rocket Booster is a playful drink, served in a playful space crossed by ductwork painted to resemble black-and-white Saturn rocket boosters developed in Huntsville. Tang, which NASA stocked for John Glenn’s 1962 Mercury flight, renders the drink dusky and raspy. Owing to that orange hue, it’s also goofy, which is just what a beach drink requires, even when served far from the water.

At Ticonderoga Club, the phone quacks instead of rings, plastic bats hang from the ceiling, lyre-playing squirrels fleck the red bathroom wallpaper, and the best seat in the house is a lone white leather captain’s chair, perched at the pole of the bar.

A nautical subtheme informs the drinks, too. Created by Paul Calvert, this colonial-punch­-inspired cocktail nods to a childhood on the water, which he shares with his Ticonderoga colleague Greg Best. The inclusion of Madeira, a wine that oxidizes and improves as it crosses the Atlantic in transit from the archipelago of the same name, amplifies the oceangoing refrain.

Tonic begins with quinine, derived from cinchona bark, cut from the South American fever tree (so called because it has been used to treat malaria). That is to say: Tonic is not merely that bland fizzy water you buy in a squat foam-wrapped bottle.

The modern rebound of tonic most likely began when Brooks Reitz, proprietor of the Southern-based Jack Rudy Cocktail Co., began bottling his own potion in 2011. Swampy with lime and muddy with funk, the Hive tonic—a protean version of the Rudy, developed by Reitz when he worked for the 21c hotel group—reminds drinkers that highballs can be bracing, even challenging.

A couple of decades back, Southern cuisine withstood a molecular gastronomy phase. Chefs spun cotton candy from ham fat and wedded proteins with something called meat glue. Cocktails recently survived a similar moment, when bartenders trapped smoke beneath cloches and grinned smugly. Now comes a return to sanity, as the best practitioners refocus on classics and their variations.

Tucked in a warehouse and decorated with thrift-store swag, Bastion dials in the new lean aesthetic. Instead of a catalogue of splendors, the tenders here have curated broad categories. Best is the Buck, made with a bright ginger syrup, mixed with vodka, rum, or gin. Call for the gin and you get a kicking cousin to the Moscow Mule, a beast of pleasure, not burden.

Botanicals are hip. Just ask a lonely vodka drinker. After decades of decline, gins have blossomed on the scene. So have aromatic liqueurs, made from various flora to smell like something a monk might have foraged from a rain-forest understory.

Green Chartreuse—made from 130 botanicals, crafted since 1737 by real live French monks—gives this sprightly drink a verdant cast and taste. Enjoyed on a hotel rooftop overlooking a booming downtown, this study in green plays well with a bowl of guacamole, sparkling like jade in the late-day sun.