What to Mix With Whiskey: The 9 Best Mixers, Besides Coke

Fifteen years behind a bar and the question never changed. Someone buys a bottle of bourbon as a gift. Then they stand in their kitchen wondering what to do with it.

Coke works. Nobody needs an article for that. The rest of the list, in the order I’d actually pour them — and if you’d rather match drinks to the exact bottles you own, the tool does that faster than I can.

Ginger ale first

Whiskey and ginger is the drink I made most in my life. Not the fanciest. The most.

Ginger has bite, whiskey has bite, and the two bites line up instead of fighting. Two parts ginger ale to one part whiskey over ice. Rye makes it spicier. Bourbon makes it rounder. If you want to see how far the idea stretches, the 32 Down throws rum and bitters into the same glass and still lands on its feet.

Ginger beer instead of ginger ale gets you a whiskey mule. Sharper, less sweet. Better, honestly.

Lemon, if you own a shaker

Whiskey sour. Two ounces whiskey, one ounce lemon juice, three quarters of an ounce of simple syrup. Shake it hard.

That ratio is the skeleton of half the drinks that matter. Learn it once and you can stop reading recipes. Bars cheat with sweet and sour mix — fine in volume, worse in your kitchen, where fresh lemon costs you forty seconds.

Sweet vermouth, if you’re feeling serious

That’s a Manhattan. Two to one, plus bitters. It’s the best drink on this page and it isn’t close. The catch is your vermouth has to be alive — an open bottle dies in about a month on the shelf, and a dead Manhattan is how people decide they hate them.

The rest of the bench

Apple cider. Fall drink. Warm it if you want. Bourbon loves apple, which is why the Applefancy exists.

Iced tea. Half whiskey-ginger, half sweet tea gets ordered as a John Daly variant all summer. Unsweetened tea, bourbon, lemon. Adjust nothing.

Orange juice. Divisive. I’m for it, with cheap blended whiskey only. A good single malt in orange juice is a crime against both.

Lemonade. Lynchburg Lemonade territory. Works because it’s really a sour wearing shorts.

Coffee. Irish coffee is a real cocktail with a real spec: hot coffee, whiskey, sugar, cream floated on top. Skip the aerosol can.

Beer. A shot and a beer is a boilermaker and technically a mixed drink. I said what I said.

The two to stop using

Milk, unless you’re building an actual cream-based drink with a recipe. And energy drinks — whiskey deserves better, and that whole category belongs to vodka anyway.

Which whiskey for mixing

Don’t mix the expensive bottle. Mixing whiskey should be 80 to 90 proof, under thirty dollars, and something you’d drink neat without joy. Bourbon for sweet mixers. Rye for ginger and vermouth. Scotch mostly wants soda water or nothing — the smoky ones bully every mixer in this list.

Blended Canadian whisky is the utility infielder here. It disappears politely into anything, which is either a compliment or an insult depending on the night.

Start with the ginger ale. It’s first for a reason, and the bottle will tell you where to go next.

Last modified on August 30, 2026