Jake O'Brien Murphy doesn’t hold back when it comes to his feelings around certain flavour combinations. Here are his 10 least favourite concoctions to have crossed the bar.

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Perfect Manhattan

Nonsense. Do people actually order this? Herein lies the conundrum of free will. Instead of enjoying perfectly delightful things like Clover Clubs and fellatio, people insist on ordering Perfect Manhattans and shopping in WH Smith. Dry vermouth and rye whiskey get the very worst out of each other. It’s the diametric opposite of alchemy. It’s turning gold into lead. Dryer than dry. Chalky, caustic muckiness. Enough to strip the lips off a duck.

Naked & Famous

I hold my hands up. This one comes down to personal taste. When I tell people I don’t like a Naked & Famous, they raise their eyebrows as if I’ve missed the point. There’s too much going on to get to the point. Unless it’s deliberately meant to be a nontoxic approximation of formaldehyde.

I read that the Naked & Famous is the love child in the marriage between a Last Word and a Paper Plane. It’s the grizzly divorce. It is suffocatingly herbaceous, petrochemically smoggy, profoundly unbalanced and inadequately integrated. It’s one of those ‘bartender’s drinks’ and never has there been a more clear example of the eternal maxim ‘interesting doesn’t mean delicious’. However, I will concede, never in the history of mixed drinks has anyone gotten so close to the flavour of burnt pubes.

Alamagoozlum

An eight-ingredient drink, seemingly picked on the whim of a vengeful witch living under a bridge. If I wanted to ruin my palate this desperately, I’d save the money and microwave my tongue. Makes the Naked & Famous seem like a can of Lilt.

Blood & Sand

No wonder people get funny about mixing scotch whisky. A drink that goes down about as well as D10. Ordered by the kind of people who still use the word ‘Rhodesia’. The drink lacks any observable balance and craves acidity. There’s no ratio on heaven nor earth that works. If fresh orange juice is used, it does mitigate some of the vulgarity, but it still tastes like someone mixed paracetamol with marmalade.

Algonquin

Pineapple juice deserves better.

Arsenic & Old Lace

Gin, white vermouth, absinthe and violette. Shaken. A fucking travesty. Like lapping at Miss Havisham’s tears.

Flips

Flips are OK, my issue is that they promise to be so much more. Either that’s down to a limitation of the form or a limitation in our willingness to innovate on the form. One whole egg, dark spirit and inevitably crème de cacao. Otherwise known as an uncooked chocolate omelette.

The only real choice comes at the crossroads of grated nutmeg or grated dark chocolate. That promise, by the way, is indulgence. Creamy, velvety satisfaction. In this, the Flip falls far short of the mark compared to its motorcycle riding cousin from two towns over, Eggnog.

Aviation

A despicable concoction. Liquidised potpourri, paradoxically made worse the better the ingredients get. Similarly to the Blood & Sand, there is no just-out-of-reach, Goldilocks iteration that can save it. The kind of thing I imagine my Nan’s vanity table would taste like, if it was small enough to swallow.

Parmesan Espresso

Martini Call me weird, but I don’t really want to drink cheese. Nevertheless, I’ve tried the Parmesan Espresso Martini and it left me feeling unclean. Like walking into a men’s bathroom that was entirely carpeted. More a product of rage bait than innovation. The less said about it the better. However, I would like to find the person who started this trend and subtract the time I spent brushing my tongue from the rest of their natural lifespan.

Negroni

In the last few years, it’s become trendy to say you don’t like Negronis. Representing the kind of risk-free irreverence this industry loves. I think they’re perfectly fine. Even if they are a little unbalanced. Which is my main gripe. As soon as you even think about revising the Negroni, you attract the ire of the roughly eight hundred million Italian bartenders working in central London.

Admittedly, that uniformity is comforting. But, in the past decade, we’ve seen the Negroni grow in ubiquity. It is everywhere and Negronis are getting worse for it. They’re too big. Too warm. Too expensive. The equal parts format is Negroni’s greatest strength and its biggest weakness.