The Art of Designing Signature Cocktails

What is a signature cocktail?

Signature cocktails are tailor-made drinks created to be unique to a brand, bar, special event, or even a specific bartender. From the name to the aesthetic and the flavour profile, they serve as an all-encompassing representation of what they were designed to embody—instantly recognisable as a true signature.

Fumbled beginnings

With so many criteria to hit in order to create something special, you're not always going to land a smash hit on the first attempt. We’ve made cocktails for bars where everything came together in minutes—from the first draft to the name to the taste test. But this is the exception to the rule.

Most of the time, there’s a lot of back and forth: testing ideas on your colleagues, revisiting ratios, and accepting that sometimes the “perfect idea” on paper refuses to work once it reaches the shaker.

But the beauty of cocktails—especially the more experimental ones—is that you can keep them in the notebook. More often than not, the right opportunity will come along later to refine an abandoned idea into something that finally fits the occasion.

Trust your process

Bartenders all have different approaches to their craft. Xochilt (Co-Founder of Wolfsbane Symposium) has an innate ability to know which ingredients will work together: she forms the idea first, irons out the creases during the taste test, and names the cocktail at the end.

I, on the other hand, tend to work from a name or concept first and move on from there. Once I know how I want the cocktail to look, it naturally narrows the spectrum of flavour combinations, allowing me to work within those parameters.

A Case in Study

While working at TiER in Neukölln, I’d been toying with the idea of making a cocktail using sugar snap peas. As I said, I like to start with a name—and when I pitched “The Taste of Pea”, the reactions from my colleagues were… mixed. So I moved on quickly.

With Tier being the German word for “animal”, the name evolved from “pea cocktail” to “peacock tails”, eventually settling on The PeaCocktail. This gave me a solid starting point for the colour palette, the garnish, and the overall aesthetic.

All of the elements

With the name and visual direction set, I began putting the components together.

I paired the peas with sage, knowing I could candy or salt-fry sage leaves to create a garnish resembling a peacock’s tail while pairing beautifully with the drink.

For the base spirit, I chose gin to complement the sugar snap pea infusion. Keeping colour and balance in mind, I added a dash of green Chartreuse for depth without overpowering the main flavours. Lemon juice cut through the richness, and to give the cocktail a silky texture, I chose Ayran, a salted yoghurt drink from Turkey. It added a creamy body and just enough salinity to lift the peas and sage.

For glassware, I originally started with a coupe, but ultimately moved to a Nick & Nora, which better resembled a peacock’s elegant silhouette. Its slightly narrower bowl also helps concentrate aroma, enhancing the experience.

The PeaCocktail

In the end, creating a signature cocktail is about trusting your own process—whether it starts with a flavour, a feeling, or a name. Some concepts arrive fully formed, others need time in the notebook before they find their moment. But every great drink carries a little piece of the process that shaped it: the false starts, the unexpected pairings, the visual cues, the happy accidents. The PeaCocktail is just one example of how a simple spark can grow into something distinctive, memorable, and unmistakably unique.