Maiden's Prayer

More than almost anywhere else, because the liqueur is half the drink. Cheap bottles show up immediately as flat sugar and artificial orange. Cointreau or Combier are the standard picks; if a budget bottle is all you have, use 20 ml of it and 10 ml more gin.

It's how the 1920s books wrote it, and it makes a rich drink. Modern palates often find it too much. Take the liqueur to 20 ml against 40 ml of gin and you keep the orange with a drier finish, which is how most bars pour it now. Below 15 ml it stops being this drink.

Worth the five seconds here. Orange juice throws more pulp than lemon does, and in a drink served up with no ice that sediment settles into a gritty layer at the bottom of the coupe. Pour it through a tea strainer on the way in and the whole thing reads cleaner.

Close to one, yes, especially if you also even up the gin and liqueur. Orange juice is what softens this version and gives it that faint blush. Take it away and you're back to something sharper and more austere, with the lemon fully exposed.

A classic Maiden's Prayer calls for 30 ml (1 oz) Gin, 30 ml (1 oz) Triple sec / Cointreau, 15 ml (0.5 oz) Orange juice, 15 ml (0.5 oz) Fresh lemon juice. That single-serve spec scales cleanly — the recipe above converts it to oz and multiplies it for 2–4 drinks.

A standard Maiden's Prayer is roughly 26% ABV once mixed (before ice melt softens it further). That makes it spirit-forward — closer to a Martini than to a beer, so sip it slowly.

A Maiden's Prayer is shaken — the rule of thumb is to shake anything with citrus juice. About 13 seconds with plenty of ice chills and dilutes it correctly.