Raspberry cocktails are everywhere. You just have to look—or make them yourself.

In last week’s newsletter, I made the case for using more raspberries in cocktails. They’re tangy, zippy, inexpensive, easy to procure, and simple to incorporate. Just shake, or smush, a raspberry into your drink!

This week, I want to take a look at two more raspberry cocktails that will help you level up your raspberry cocktail game. Once again, we’ll look at an old drink and a newer drink.

The first is a low-ABV, fortified wine, lemonade-esque cocktail from the 1890s that makes a great summer sip. It’s a sort of cobbler variant that has a bit of a connection to the julep family. It shows how sophisticated, old-school bartenders used raspberries to brighten their cocktails in the decades before Prohibition.

The second is a somewhat more complex—but still home-bar-friendly—brandy sour from the great New York bar PDT (Please Don’t Tell). It’s a drink that shows how a modern mixologist used a raspberry product to sweeten a cocktail with some other unusual ingredients. This one is delightfully dry and tangy, which should please the folks who think my sours are sometimes a bit too sweet.

These are advanced raspberry cocktails—drinks that show how you can go beyond the “just add raspberries” method of raspberry-izing your cocktails.

They’re berry sophisticated—and also berry, berry delicious.

No Cynar this week—but there is delicious port and a clever use of the always great, always versatile Cocchi Americano.

Leisure Suit Berry

The first drink on our list is technically a “just add raspberries” drink.

But unlike last week’s cocktails, which use raspberries as a modifier on top of an existing drink structure (the whiskey sour, the Mezcal Negroni), this cocktail integrates the raspberries much more fully into the cocktail’s flavor schema.