Cocktails with Tonic water
Tonic water is a carbonated soft drink flavoured with quinine, giving it a distinctive bitter taste.
Taste profile
Clean carbonation over a moderate sweetness, cut through by the dry, lingering bitterness of quinine.
How it's used
Lengthening and defining a drink at full volume, it is built over ice and stirred briefly to preserve fizz, poured to top a spirit and supply both carbonation and its signature bitterness.
Substitutes for Tonic water
No plain fizzy mixer substitutes cleanly, since the quinine bitterness is the point; the closest approximation is soda water dosed with a quinine-bearing tonic syrup, with sweetness rebalanced by sugar or syrup as needed.
Often confused with
Soda water is plain carbonated water, sometimes mineralised, with no quinine and no sweetness; tonic water contains quinine and is sweetened.
Bitter lemon is a quinine soft drink additionally flavoured with lemon juice and peel; tonic water carries the quinine bitterness without the lemon flavour.
