What Your Cocktail of Choice Says About Who You Are

These days, our likes are used to determine our dating partners, direct millions of advertising dollars into our Facebook feeds, and perhaps most important, show off just how cool we are. When it comes to cocktails, what you order when you belly up to the bar says a lot about who you are as a human being, for better and worse.

We’re not psychics, but we’ve done enough drinking to know what ordering up a vodka Red Bull means about your personality. Never since the Myers-Briggs has there been a more accurate way to distill a person into just a few words. 

Cosmopolitan (above) 
You’re a suburbanite who still thinks Sex and the City should guide both your fashion and romantic choices, and that’s totally OK. No one cares that you’re ordering a drink that is older than your oldest child. They just want to be sure that the platinum American Express clears. That’s also true for the date you’ll take home this evening.


Old Fashioned
You are Don Draper, only an actual human being with not-so-great credit. You might not have the unlimited budget and liquor tolerance of everyone’s favorite misogynistic mid-century relic, but your suits look almost identical and your collection of Miles Davis records is impressive. So you have the drinking tastes of your great-great-grandfather, so what? This is what men drank when men were still manly, dammit.


Vodka Red Bull
Honey, you are a damn mess. Never mind that you are mixing uppers and downers — a classic rookie mistake — you’re also paying good, hard-earned money for a glass of something that tastes like it has already been regurgitated. Only after those three chipped teeth and an encounter with a handsome (and handsy — where’s your wallet?) stranger will you realize that you’re not a college student any more and start ordering a vodka soda like a real adult.


Ramos Gin Fizz
This is a drink that looks like a dick, so of course it is a metaphor. You are a high-maintenance pain in the ass, and are determined to let everyone around you know it. It’s all cool, though, because you tip well and also make a point that everyone knows that, too. After the bartender spends five minutes shaking your precious cocktail, you are inevitably going to tell him all about the time you tried to make a Ramos at home yourself and it was totally perfect.


Fernet & Soda
You are a bartender, because no one else in Dallas is drinking this vile stuff of their own volition without some sort of tough-guy agenda. Bartenders like to one-up each other with shots of the bitter liqueur, and the guy who is sipping it with soda is definitely trying to look tough in front of his fellow drink-slingers, even though he secretly, desperately wants to order a lemon drop.


Gin & Tonic
You are a grown-up who enjoys grown-up things, like the tingly bite of bubbly quinine water and a lengthy wait at the DMV. You’ve been able to afford better gin since 1998, but still stick with Tanqueray because it’s what you used to steal from your parents in 1976, which is exactly how you feel about your furniture, music, cars and just about everything else in your life.


Fireball and Anything
You are probably going to jail later tonight, but that doesn’t matter. It’s just another stamp on your proverbial Lew Sterrett passport, and sooner or later those guards are really going to start appreciating those jokes you cribbed from Donald Trump at the rally. No doubt, you have lots of unexplained scars and even more that come complete with a “really fucking cool” story, bro.


Margarita, Rocks, Salt.
You fancy yourself independent and cultured, but you’ve never had any Mex that hadn’t been fully Tex-ed, and you’ve never actually been south of Red Oak.  
Hemingway Daiquiri
You have totally missed out on the fact that superior daiquiris are frozen and served by scantily clad young women out of a drive-thru window because you’re too cultured to consider any drink that contains Red No. 5. You read in a book somewhere that Ernest Hemingway enjoyed the combination of rum, maraschino and lime juice and decided it was the perfect signature cocktail for you because of that novel you’ve been working on for the past 10 years. 


Mimosa
You are a Real Housewife of Bravo TV, only the Dallas version hasn’t been made yet and you’re really, really upset about it. You haven’t asked the waiter whether the bubbly is from Cali or France, because you don’t care as long as it's bottomless. You will shriek loudly at debatably funny things from Pinterest or photos of your friend’s 10th new baby, causing all the hungover brunchers around you to cringe and whimper.