First served for a visiting cardinal in Rome in 1950 (hence the name), the original Cardinale combined gin, white wine and Campari. Today, the wine is often swapped out for dry vermouth, which makes it “more austere and bone-dry,” according to bartender Naren Young, whose own version calls on Contratto Bitter. Another variation on the lesser-known aperitivo drink, meanwhile, is tall and sparkling thanks to Campari Soda, an Italian RTD.

Let’s get this out of the way: The theory that Native peoples have some biological weakness to alcohol has been soundly debunked. Historically, that theory has functioned as a convenient blame-shifter, used as “proof” that Natives simply can’t hold their liquor, and that “the problems Natives face have nothing to do with settler violence,” says Michael D. Wise, author of Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History. “Alcohol is this deus ex machina force that absolves American settlers.” 

Although for millennia, Indigenous peoples brewed fermented drinks and ingested mind-altering substances, particularly in ceremony, it was European settlers and their descendants who industrialized alcohol, bringing beer to the Americas, introducing Vitis vinifera for wine and eventually distilling spirits. By the late 1800s, the federal governments of the United States and Canada had forced hundreds of thousands of Native people off their ancestral homelands, disrupted their food sovereignty and herded them onto reservations. Most Indigenous people today live in urban and suburban environments, but those who remain in tribal communities (about 20 percent in the United States and 40 percent in Canada) contend with a slew of alcohol-abuse risk factors, including remoteness, lack of resources, stigma and poverty. “Environments in which Native people live expose them to PTSD-qualifying events (death, threatened death, actual or threatened serious injury, or actual or threatened sexual violence) far more frequently than the environments of their non-Indian counterparts,” says Spero Manson, director of the Centers for American Indian & Alaska Native Health at Colorado School of Public Health. “We’re talking 60-70 percent of individuals living in tribal communities being exposed to serious trauma.”

In Indigenous restaurants, alcohol is not neutral, so some chefs serve it with caveats. “We don’t mix alcohol with medicine,” says Inez Cook of First Nations restaurant Salmon n’ Bannock in Vancouver, British Columbia. She reserves traditionally medicinal ingredients like sweetgrass and sage for mocktails. In cocktails, she showcases hard-to-come-by Indigenous ingredients, including soopolallie, or soap berries. When she can source soopolallie, she whips it into a foam to garnish a blend of orange juice, sparkling water, vodka and “Bella Coola tea” prepared with berries, rosehips, hibiscus and maple.

For Cree chef Shane Chartrand, dinners at his restaurant Paperbirch in Alberta, Canada, aren’t ceremonial. “There’s no smudging or land acknowledgement or anything,” he says. “This is just the culinary arts. It’s just dinner.” Because of that, though he’s sober himself, he feels comfortable offering local mead, beer and wine. He also acknowledges the demand for alcoholic beverages. “I can only be as Indigenous as the world allows me to be at a dinner where people are paying $120,” he says. Choctaw chef David Skinner of Ishtia in Kemah, Texas, concurs: “We don’t add alcohol to any of the food,” says, “but if you’re spending a couple hundred dollars and three hours of your life in a restaurant, you’re going to want a glass of wine or a cocktail.” 

It’s true that they are going to want it. But they also might act suspicious about it: Although Natives in the food and beverage space are expected to supply booze, doing so subjects them to stereotypes. As Chiricahua Apache Nde and Rarámuri brewer and distiller Roxanne Fernandez Tiburolobo told Punch in 2021, “I’ve had people that I brewed with be like, ‘Oh, you’re native? I didn’t know you people could have alcohol.’”

Génépy is not as sweet as yellow Chartreuse, nor as domineering as green, and it adds a cooling complexity to everything from Margaritas to Whiskey Sours to White Negronis. In the Petrichor, Nikki Irvine uses génépy to translate the earthy smell after to rain into a drink, while Toby Maloney describes the Swiss Kiss, which marries gin, génépy and lemon juice and a float of absinthe, as being “as cool and sophisticated as a Swiss diplomat at a party of spies.”

At San Francisco’s ABV, bar staff are known to drink ice-cold génépy topped with a few dashes of Angostura bitters. There, Ryan Fitzgerald blended it into the High Altitude Highball, made with Japanese whisky, namely Hakushu, with génépy and soda water. “Both Hakushu and génépy come from mountain areas—and both are influenced by the region they come from,” he says. 

Finally, the alpine ingredient works well alongside comforting, cozy flavors like coffee and cacao.  “One of my favorite uses for génépy is as a sweetener for heavy cream,” says Troy Sidle, former bartender at New York’s Pouring Ribbons. In the Strong Start, he shakes the two ingredients together with a pinch of salt for a frothy, aromatic topper to the rum-spiked coffee. Ryan Maybee, on the other hand, brings cream and coffee cordial together with the liqueur, crème de cacao and absinthe for the Génépy Suisse. The extra wintry drink channels an elevated, adult mocha. “The sweeter qualities of the cacao and coffee blend beautifully with absinthe, and work equally well with génépy,” he says.

First employed in the famous Benton’s Old-Fashioned at PDT in 2007, fat-washing has evolved to encompass a whole wave of spirit-infusion techniques. At its simplest, fat-washing requires melting a fat—say, coconut oil or animal fat—infusing it into a spirit, freezing the mixture, then straining out the solids for a bolder, fuller-bodied flavor. Try the technique with coconut oil, chile oil and even peanut butter.

Without alcohol, it’s still a challenge to address the lack of texture, mouthfeel, brightness or the familiar warmth that’s expected, but amaro has an advantage over other spirits “because you are still able to achieve the familiar flavors coming from macerating traditional amaro ingredients like herbs, botanicals and citrus,” says Robby Dow, owner of Bespoke, an Italian-inspired, all-day café and cocktail bar in Wilmington, North Carolina. For those who don’t drink, Dow says, these spirits present “a very special opportunity for inclusion while still providing a quality product that tastes great.” 

In addition to being enjoyed neat or in N/A drinks, nonalcoholic amari are making their way into spirited drinks, too. “Most people drinking nonalcoholic drinks aren’t necessarily sober; they’re simply looking for alternatives to integrate into their drinking habits,” says Michael Toscano, East Coast Regional Director for The Pathfinder, maker of a bartender beloved N/A product. 

Given the dynamic nature of bittersweet, herbal liqueurs, I’m guilty of stretching open my well-worn bitter umbrella to encompass a wide range when it comes to what makes an amaro, an amaro. But in this case, I’m spotlighting some of my personal picks that would slot well into anywhere a digestif might. Read on to learn more about five nonalcoholic amaro expressions that have my full attention.

This cocktail first appeared in print in 1929 in Frank Shay’s Drawn from the Wood. It featured gin, Bacardi rum and Cointreau. By the next year, it had traveled across the Atlantic with two crucial changes—swapping out gin in favor of Cognac and the addition of lemon juice—that pushed it into Sidecar territory. The Savoy Cocktail Book inclusion ensured the Between the Sheets’ legacy, and it’s the source from which Gannon first came across the drink 20 years ago. 

Gannon has been tweaking his recipe for the Between the Sheets for the past two decades. He recalls adding a significant measure of lemon and introducing simple syrup (a common practice at the time), approaching it almost like an equal-parts drink. He continued to work on it when he spent eight years working at Cure in New Orleans, where it appeared on the “Cocktails We Love” section of the menu. There, he used El Dorado 3 for the rum and Pierre Ferrand for the Cognac.

Over the years, his tastes have shifted, and so has the nature of bar programs. At Lonnie’s, Gannon relies on a much smaller backbar, so he prioritizes versatile ingredients that can work across the classics and original drinks.

A beginner bartender’s dream, the Refajo is so simple to assemble that it almost feels too basic to be called a cocktail at all. An ice-cold mixture of light beer and soda, the Refajo is a summertime staple that is far from unique to Colombia. But over the past few decades, the shandy has become so ubiquitous in the drinking culture across the South American country that it has shifted from an object to a verb, à la Google.

“Refajo has been popular in Colombia for at least the past 30 or 40 years,” says Luis R. Vidal, an anthropologist at the Colegio Mayor de Antioquia in Medellín who studies the intersection of food, drinks and culture. It is a clever hangover cure, an ingenious way to extend the beer supply, and a cooling accompaniment for a hot day, all at once. “But more than anything, Refajo is a social drink at its core, one that we associate with large gatherings, celebrations, and spending time together,” says Vidal.

The classic recipe is nothing more than equal parts light beer and Colombiana, an almost cloyingly sweet soda that smacks of citrus and bubblegum and is frequently compared to cream soda, for the North American palate, or Inca Kola, for those who know their way around the South American beverage scene. However, the Refajo isn’t without its regional variations; on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, for example, it is frequently made with a local favorite, Kola Román.

The simplicity of the Refajo gives it legs, and with them the at-home bartender runs. Riffs can involve adding a splash of orange juice, slices of fruit for garnish, a dash of aguardiente for a true kick, or adjusting the beer-to-soda ratio to balance for sweetness.

According to Dale DeGroff, godfather of the modern cocktail revival, the French Martini was “one of the sparks that got the cocktail-as-Martini craze started.” A fruit-forward combination of vodka, pineapple juice and Chambord, the French Martini dates back to 1996 when DeGroff himself debuted the drink at restaurateur Keith McNally’s Pravda, in New York City. It wasn’t until the following year, however, when it hit the menu at McNally’s buzzy Balthazar, that the drink really took off. Though it may be less viral than its siblings, the French Martini, too, is making a comeback.