Jasmine

Gin, Cointreau, Campari, and lemon in equal proportions — Harrington's 1990s Emeryville creation (published 1998), Campari balanced by Cointreau and lemon.

The Jasmine was created by Paul Harrington in the early 1990s while he was bartending in Emeryville, California — a small city adjacent to Oakland on the east shore of San Francisco Bay that was home to a number of significant restaurants and bars during the Bay Area's pre-dot-com culinary boom. Harrington was among the earliest American bartenders to articulate the philosophy that would become the craft cocktail movement's intellectual foundation: that quality fresh ingredients, proper technique, and genuine engagement with cocktail history were the foundations of good bartending, as opposed to the sweetened-mix-dominated bar culture that prevailed in most American establishments. His formula — gin, Cointreau, Campari, and fresh lemon juice in equal proportions — is remarkable for making Campari, a bitter liqueur that many drinkers find assertively bitter in large quantities, accessible and balanced through the Cointreau's orange sweetness and the lemon's citric acid. The drink appeared in Harrington's 1998 book Cocktail: The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century, co-written with Paul Moorman, which became one of the early reference documents of the American cocktail revival. The Jasmine has since become a standard teaching tool for demonstrating how bitter liqueurs can be incorporated into accessible cocktails through proper balance.