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Five Cocktails That Define Right Now

A mix of the familiar (spicy Margarita) and farther flung (prickly pear sour), here are the drinks that capture the current zeitgeist.

What defines the current cocktail zeitgeist? After poring over dozens of drink lists from top bars across the country, we identified the ingredients that appear with the greatest frequency, and we then asked bartenders to explain why and how to use each. Prickly pear is represented by Navy Strength’s Del Estroibo, the avocado boom by Better Luck Tomorrow’s Avocado Margarita, and the expanding fruit map by Patagonian crab apple, which turns up in the Walking Papers at Cure. The always-craveable spicy-plus-agave template shows no signs of stopping with Grand Army’s Johnny Blaze, while cocktail mashups continue their takeover in drinks like Dante NYC’s Cosmojito.