Whenever I’m attempting to fashion a new cocktail for a client or a menu, I make myself stop and consider: Is this objectively better than a beer? Because if not, then why am I bothering, what is the pretense here? If I were similarly to hold my inchoate fabrication up to the Gin & Tonic, I would possibly never make another new drink, because objectively there may be nothing better in the cocktail lexicon. Who, but by hubris and affectation, would pretend they could best the plainsong perfection of uplift that is the ubiquitous Gin & Tonic? I’m somewhat saddened, even, as a bartender of 36 years now, to admit that all along it may have been The Perfect Drink.

(Hark, the Martini hordes gather at the ramparts; even now I hear the clash of their sabres... But an aquarium of gin, efficient as it is in assuring a certain and swiftly targeted end—and though certainly refreshing, initially—does not absolve one of the day’s cares in the same graceful, cleansing-of-all-sins manner. Argue, rinse, repeat.)

Were you put to the proverbial desert island test, what cocktail might best assuage your febrile thirst, act as evergreen balm to your tropical slings and stings; your perennial Negroni or your ride-or-die nightly Manhattan, with its cherry and vermouth, or even your tight, tropically appropriate Daiquiri, with its eventually cloying freight of sugar and acid? Hardly. Most everything in the lexicon would become a heavy chore in short order, and necessity and usage would force one to strip away all comers save for the most economically rejuvenating—the workaday one to which we always repair. This, we all know, has ever been the Gin & Tonic, so comfortingly familiar it simply goes by its acronym at this point, the faithful G&T, the very hound at one’s feet.

In an era that hungrily sieves out the most dubious backstories for authenticity and connection to past relevancies, the G&T claims a deeper, more resonant history than most any other cocktail we can conjure, as fraught as that history may be. A medicine more than anything else in its inception, the drink came about through various iterations in the expanding British Empire, a tool the British used to send its colonizing forces out. The initial foray was creating a “tonic,” a liquid vehicle for the antimalarial quinine. Adding in lime or lemon gave the tonic the additional antiscorbutic effect of citrus in warding off scurvy. A bitter, sour dose then required only sugar—and the daily ration of rum—for sailors to embrace the prophylactic. No mixologist needed. Gin was closer at hand for those stationed by the British East India Company, and so the momentous change was made.

Its freighted history is mind-bending; one intuits it without even truly knowing it: pith helmets and sweaty linen in India in the 19th century, dipso literati on Cape Cod in the 20th, endlessly adrift on waves of G&Ts, cavorting with the Kennedys across the dunes of Wellfleet. The drink’s chirpy aroma calls up Cheever, Updike, both Amises, but particularly Kingsley.

Among cranky old English bartenders, Nick Strangeway might be considered a barnacle on the far end of the spectrum. He’s spent his considerable career divining new flavors, wild-sourcing unusual ingredients and pushing novelty to the hilt in his fabrications. Currently the overseer of the beverage program at the venerably hip Groucho Club in London, he opined of the unsinkable G&T: “I think it is the perfect aperitif—an elegant, clarified Gin Collins, if you think about it. If some pretentious bartender were to scoff and present you something as better, they’re just being noncy. Modern bartenders, they don’t like anything that’s too simple–and I’m guilty of this as well—but is there anything you can really improve upon Schweppes and Tanqueray?”

As the hoary phrase about pizza goes, that even a bad one is good, so it is with the G&T. Part of the drink’s Episcopalian beauty is that even the most plebeian version, the tossed-together, workaday drink in a stubby highball you might get at a bowling alley or a catered wedding, is still likely the best drink you can get in that earthbound environment, is still entirely refreshing, hits all its marks. Its ur-ubiquity, far from being a drawback, is in fact further proof of its protean perfection. The bracing, herbaceous framework of gin, like a dousing of cold rain, galvanized by the bitter stricture of quinine, and the tempering lift of barely sweetened carbonation and that final saving slash of fresh citrus, clear and severe. Bubbly, with only a glancing nod to fruit, it perfectly balances Anglican austerity with island promise in the simplest package.

Of course, as with all libations, there are greater and lesser iterations of the G&T. The Spanish have made a well-chronicled religion out of this one drink. There are bars there devoted solely to the Gin & Tonic—or gintonic as it's known there—obviously swapping up endless variations of the drink’s two principals, but also sloshing improbabilities like pink peppercorns and fronds of rosemary or huge wedges of pomelo into huge Streisand-esque wine glasses brimming with arcane flora, all yet the same phylum of this one drink. Bless them; this is as hilarious as it is unnecessary, which only adds to how wonderful it is. Still, for all the kooky charm and tulip-craze frenzy of the Iberian versions, I must admit that I don’t require a peacock feather and ambergris tincture in my G&T. This is a lily that needs little gilding.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t better or worse ways to fashion this compendium. As with all drinks, it pays to be mindful of certain preferred goals. The relative sweetness or dryness of the tonic you use, the strength and specific botanicals of the gin employed, the volumetric displacement of the amount of ice as it affects the ratio of the whole—all have important outcomes.

My father, who was Italian but harbored an oddly reverent Anglophilia for a man who never set foot on the Sceptr’d Isle, fashioned what remains for me the acme of this drink. He did so by juicing limes and, setting the juice aside, julienning the spent hulls to then macerate them in the gin, using the spirit’s solvent properties to draw the all-important citrus oil from the peels, before carefully adding ice and chilled tonic. It’s a thing so fine it redefines this foursquare reviver. Technique is everything; frippery is, well, frippery.