Recently moved from Commercial Street to Hackney, Matt Whiley’s monument to sustainability through cocktails showcases the same sharpness of mind that won his cocktails at Peg and Patriot and The Whistling Shop serious acclaim. Divided into five categories based on the landscape of the British Isles, each category holds three drinks and one snack, available as a flight, if desired. Names are in the Every Cloud school; descriptions more Mr Lyan, but the unifying factor is sustainable creativity.

Max and Noel Venning have recently joined a Mayfair supergroup, but their original bar on Kingsland Road is the essential visit. A weekly-changing menu lists nine cocktails, split into threes. Three sheets, specifically. The flagship order is the ‘French 75,’ packing verjus for acidity and moscato for sweetness into a carbonated, batched iteration of the classic cocktail, served tableside from a champagne bottle. Here, it’s more a case of iterating classics than redrawing blueprints, but that doesn’t make the serves any less compelling.

When Remy Savage was head bartender at Artesian, one of the best cocktail bars in the city, the menu was a double helix so playful it was practically a toy, and its cocktails were only allowed two ingredients. His new venture with Paul Lougrat and Maria Kontorravdis takes some of this playfulness — it’s a bar called Yellow Triangle, Red Square, Blue Circle, after all — and some of that constraint — 20 bottles turned into 15 - 16 cocktails, all of whose recipes will be put to Instagram for judgement — and alights in Dalston with one of the most compelling offers the city has seen in a very long time.

“Calvados. Cidre. Cocktails,” reads Coupette’s website. And although the first two Cs are definitely well represented (there’s also cheese, charcuterie and beaucoup des croque monsieurs), it’s in the last category that Coupette really shines. The brains behind it is Chris Moore, formerly of The Savoy’s Beaufort Bar, and his know-how really shows — the champagne piña colada has been deservedly lauded, but the truffled white negroni is just as much of an icon in the making. The French theme is stylishly executed: less string of onions, more bar topped with a patchwork of old centimes. Chapeau, Coupette.

Two bars in one. Elementary is an all day, walk-in only offering with a simple drinks list and relaxed environment at the front of the space. Tayēr is the experimental bar, more akin to a restaurant — open only in the evenings. Both bars are seasonally influenced and have surprising and fun additions to their drinks. A rhubarb highball is a highlight.

Maxim Schulte’s contribution to Santiago Lastra’s Michelin-starred Mexican debut Kol is a clever cocktail menu which takes a duo of ingredients key to Lastra’s menu and fashions them into two different cocktails from a roster of classic serves. So corn and sea buckthorn are translated into a sea buckthorn French 75 and a corn Old Fashioned, while fig leaf and gooseberry are switched into a short clean batanga based on fig leaf mezcal on the one hand, and a floral mai tai on the other.

Old Compton Street has long been Soho’s naughtiest thoroughfare and, in Swift, it now has two world-class cocktail bars for the price of one. Upstairs is a sleek white space, ideal for an after-work/pre-theatre round of oysters and martinis. Downstairs is a cosy speakeasy-style basement you might slither into for the night. Swift is a joint venture between Bobby Hiddleston & Mia Johannson, who have form at London cocktail institution Callooh Callay and New York’s seminal Dead Rabbit, and Nightjar founders Edmund Weil and Rosie Stimpson. An ideal meeting of minds.

Rules (opened 1798!) lays claim to be London’s oldest restaurant; consequently its panelled dining rooms are replete with well-heeled tourists busying themselves with the excellent game pie. Less well known is the delightfully old-school bar upstairs, a refuge from Covent Garden and perhaps the most authentically Jeeves-ian cocktail service you’ll find in London: Among the ‘rules’: “No homemade infusions. No assortments of muddled berries. No ‘cocktail speak’. Don’t try to be clever…” Bravo.

The Connaught Bar is assuredly the classiest venue in town. Walking into its shiny black art deco interior (designed by the redoubtable David Collins) is like entering a more elegant realm, where everything shines and shimmers. Felicitously, that’s precisely the effect of Agostino Perrone’s unsurpassed Connaught Martinis, served from a trolley with bespoke bitters and Italian charm. Spendy but worth it.

The American Bar, established 1889, was the first proper cocktail bar in London, the quintessential melting pot of actors, playwrights, debutantes, composers, royalty and Americans feeling Prohibition. It’s where Ada Coleman invented the Hanky-Panky, Harry Craddock concocted the Corpse Reviver #2, and Erik Lorincz, first mixed his classic Green Park (gin, lemon, basil, genius). Ask to sit at the bar, use the first edition Savoy Cocktail Book as your menu and admire the bartenders’ clipped efficiency.

The re-vamped, new version of Dandelyan Bar by Ryan Chetiyawardana. A menu based on seven ingredients, with three cocktails exploring each flavour. Or, make a cocktail choice by the cocktail map- an easy guide that also allows guests to make decisions based on their favourite glassware. Like its predecessor, this bar is rather glamorous.