Vodka • Dry

Black Russian

Though its cream-spiked counterpart usually hogs the spotlight, the Black Russian was the original vodka-and-Kahlua concoction, created in the late 1940s at the start of the Cold War. Gustave Tops, a bartender at the Hotel Metropole bar in Brussels created the vodka-based cocktail for his patron Perle Mesta, the American ambassador to Luxembourg. While meant to allude to the dark times following World War II, the drink ultimately inspired a slew of easygoing classics, from the White Russian to the Mudslide, which leads us to suspect that those drinks might be double agents. They’re happy—too happy.