Watercolor Cocktail Recipe Cards

The Old Fashioned, Negroni, Whiskey Sour, Mai Tai, Long Island Iced Tea, Tom Collins, Tequila Sunrise, Caipirinha, French 75, Paloma, Sidecar and Amaretto Sour each get a printable recipe card of their own.

The cards

Each card is portrait and mostly white. At the top a single glass appears in a loose watercolor style inside a pale circle: an orange-garnished rocks glass for the Old Fashioned, a champagne flute for the French 75, a sugar-rimmed coupe for the Sidecar, a tall glass shading from orange to red for the Tequila Sunrise. Below it the drink’s name is set in wide-spaced capitals, then the ingredients and a short paragraph of instructions. There’s no photo and no dark background, and most of each page is left white.

The recipes

Amounts are in ounces, with fractions like ¾ oz and 1½ oz, plus dashes, sugar cubes and “to top” for soda, cola or champagne. Egg white is marked optional on the Whiskey Sour and Amaretto Sour. The methods say whether to shake, stir, build or muddle, and how to garnish. The spirits range across bourbon or rye, gin, vodka, white and dark rum, tequila, cachaça, cognac and amaretto.

Printing

Both PDFs hold the same 12 cards. One is shaped 2:3 for a 4 x 6 card, the other 5:7 for a 5 x 7 card. Set the paper size in your printer dialog and choose “Fit to page” to get the exact card size. At 4 x 6 inches each card works out to about 430 pixels per inch, and at 5 x 7 about 345, so the small text stays crisp. Heavy matte cardstock gives them enough stiffness to stand in a small easel or a card holder on a bar cart.