70s Cocktails: Harvey Wallbangers, Tequila Sunrises and a Disco-Era Party Bar
Look through the drinks people ordered in the 70s and the same few bottles keep turning up: orange juice, Galliano, amaretto, crème de cacao and a carton of cream, with tequila arriving halfway through the decade and never really leaving. It was a sweet and slightly silly era for cocktails, and that makes it a lovely one to throw a party around, ideally with someone’s old fondue pot bubbling in the corner.
This is the bar we set up for ours. Every drink is a real recipe from the CocktailBuilder database, and the pours are what we use at home. A few of these were invented well before the 70s, and we’ve said so where it matters; they belong here because the decade is when everybody seemed to be drinking them.
The tall yellow bottle
If one bottle stands for the decade, it is Galliano, the vanilla-and-anise liqueur in that ridiculous tall flute that never fits on a shelf. Its fame rests mostly on one drink. In the early 70s Galliano ran ads starring a cartoon surfer named Harvey, and the Harvey Wallbanger went from a bar oddity to something people ordered by name across the country.
It’s a screwdriver with a hat on. We pour an ounce and a half of vodka and four of orange juice over ice, then float half an ounce of Galliano on top so the first sip is all vanilla. The version we link adds a little lemon juice and orange bitters, which keeps the sweetness in check. Swap the vodka for tequila and you have a Freddy Fudpucker, the Wallbanger’s louder cousin, and the name alone earns it a spot on the card.
Galliano also went into dessert. The Golden Cadillac shakes it with crème de cacao and cream into something pale gold and soft, like melted ice cream with a little spice running through it. If the bottle is still mostly full afterward, our Galliano cocktails page has plenty more uses for it.
Sunrise, sunset
The Tequila Sunrise is the photograph everyone has in their head: orange at the top, red pooling at the bottom, a glass that looks like the end of a beach day. The orange-juice-and-grenadine version came out of a bar in Sausalito in the early 70s, got carried around on the Rolling Stones’ 1972 tour, and the Eagles put the name on a song a year later. After that it was everywhere.
We build it in a tall glass with two ounces of tequila and four of orange juice, then pour half an ounce of grenadine slowly down the inside. It sinks on its own, so there’s nothing to stir. The Tequila Sunset swaps grenadine for blackberry brandy, which settles darker and tastes less like candy.
Amaretto with everything
Amaretto had its big American moment in the 70s, and the drinks it went into were mostly two ingredients long. The Godfather is Scotch and amaretto on the rocks, and its name is usually tied to the 1972 film. We like it at two parts Scotch to one of amaretto, because an even split turns it into marzipan. Trade the Scotch for vodka and you get the Godmother; trade it for Cognac and it’s the French Connection, which shares its name with the other big crime movie of those years.
The Amaretto Sour is the one guests remember from their parents’ parties, almond and sour mix with a cherry on top. Fresh lemon makes it far better than the bottled mix ever did, and nobody at our table missed the neon.
The Scotch-and-Drambuie set
Not everyone at a 70s party wanted something sweet and bright. The Rusty Nail was already a fixture by the time the decade started, Scotch and Drambuie over ice with a lemon twist, and it fits the wood-paneled side of the room. Two ounces of Scotch to three-quarters of Drambuie is our pour. The honey and heather in the liqueur warm everything up without hiding the whisky.
After dinner, with cream
Dessert drinks were practically a course of their own at a 70s dinner party, and most of them were older recipes that the decade simply made creamier.
The Grasshopper goes back to New Orleans, long before anyone wore platform shoes, but the version in our database is the blender-era one, green crème de menthe and white crème de cacao spun with vanilla ice cream. It comes out mint green and thick enough for a spoon. The Pink Squirrel is its almond-scented cousin, crème de noyaux and crème de cacao with cream, and it really is pink.
The Brandy Alexander is the grown-up of the group: brandy, dark crème de cacao and half-and-half, shaken hard, and we dust the top with nutmeg. John Lennon and Harry Nilsson famously spent part of 1974 in Los Angeles working their way through them. We serve ours small, in a coupe, because it’s richer than it looks.
For the guests who’d rather skip the shaker, a White Russian is vodka, Kahlúa and cream over ice, built in the glass in under a minute.
Pineapple and the end of the decade
The Piña Colada comes from 1950s Puerto Rico, but it closed out the 70s in style when Rupert Holmes released his song about it in 1979. Ours is light rum, pineapple juice and Coco López blended with ice, and we’ve written up the full method, ratios included, in our piña colada recipe.
And then there’s the drink with the most 70s name of all. The Slow Comfortable Screw Against the Wall combines sloe gin, vodka, whiskey and orange juice under a float of Galliano, which makes it a Wallbanger with two more bottles in it. It tastes better than it sounds, though not by much, and it gets the biggest laugh when we read the card aloud.
Setting up the bar
We keep the shopping short. For a party of ten, this covers almost everything above:
- Vodka, tequila and a decent blended Scotch
- Galliano, amaretto and Drambuie
- Green crème de menthe and white crème de cacao
- Plenty of orange juice, a bottle of grenadine, and a pint of vanilla ice cream
The blender does the Grasshoppers and Piña Coladas, the pitcher holds the Wallbanger base without the Galliano, and the float goes on glass by glass. When the clock rolls past midnight and someone asks for a Fuzzy Navel, they’ve drifted into the next decade, which our 80s cocktails post covers in full.
Last modified on November 8, 2026