The other day, I had a White Lady, followed by a Love Thrill and a Hanky Panky. They made a great team. All three were supplied to me by Federico, at the Savoy Hotel, in London. Enter the lobby, make a left, trot up the stairs, and you come to the American Bar, a longtime shrine at which many parched pilgrims have sought relief. The suave and bearded Federico is one of the high priests who, clad in white jackets, serve behind the bar, and I watched in reverence as he aerated the egg white that would soften the blow of my White Lady. I took a sip. It was like being kicked by a cloud.

The White Lady was not invented at the Savoy, and a spritz of mystery surrounds its birth. Credit is often given to Harry MacElhone, the resident genius at Harry’s New York Bar, in Paris, who is said to have devised the mixture for—or with the scholarly assistance of—F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. But it was Harry Craddock, the head barman at the Savoy from 1926 to 1938, who refined the recipe. Legend also insists that he buried a White Lady, presumably coffined in its shaker, inside a wall of the Savoy, like a time capsule. (Future archeologists will, one hopes, unearth the capsule and declare it to be some form of chalice, once used in a sacred rite. They will not be wrong.) The final flourish, the story goes, was then applied by one of Craddock’s successors, Peter Dorelli, who added the egg white, thus conjuring the creamy top note that a good White Lady deserves.

The Love Thrill and the Hanky Panky, on the other hand, were indeed born at the Savoy. The first incorporates, among its other charms, fig liqueur and, according to the menu, banana. I had visions of little yellow bergs drifting mushily around and bumping against the edge of the glass, but no; all that rose from it was a suspicion of the bananaesque. The Hanky Panky is a more serious proposition. It was devised by Craddock’s predecessor, the formidable Ada Coleman, who reigned over the American Bar from 1903 to 1926, at a time when women, as customers, were not allowed in the bar. She came up with the Hanky Panky for a favorite client, who, pleading fatigue, demanded a concoction “with a bit of punch in it.” (He meant a hit, not something festive and fruity in a bowl.) This was duly delivered, and the result, featuring a cameo role by Fernet Branca, has a rich brown tinge, hinting at the medicinal. Nothing is more cunning than a drink that gulls you into the false, short-lived, but delicious belief that it might be good for you.

After my Hanky Panky, and having briefly sampled an Alaska, whose golden radiance is caused by yellow chartreuse, I called it a night. Not that my work was done. I had come to the Savoy on a mission: a single-minded quest, with many paths. Yet I hadn’t even had the basic courtesy to order a dry Martini. And I really ought to have stayed for a Tom Collins, a Window into Paradise, a gimlet, a rickey, and a Sun Sun Sun, before slapping myself back to life with a Corpse Reviver No. 2. I could even have risked an Electric Lover, although that contains glitter, and, as a rule, I try not to be arrested for sparkling in a built-up area. So, what links the White Lady, the Martini, and all these other delights? Well, if I’d had the nerve, I would have requested this:

A fiery Lake that sets the Brain in Flame, burns up the Entrails, and scorches every Part within; and at the same time a Lethe of Oblivion, in which the Wretch immers’d drowns his most pinching Cares.

Those are the words of a guy named Bernard Mandeville, writing in 1714, and sounding stressed, but I didn’t want to eat into Federico’s evening by quoting them in full. Instead, I just asked for gin.

Not that long ago, gin was for squares. Maybe your parents drank it, and your grandparents before them. Gin: the very word was plain and unexciting. How uncool was it to opt for gin, confining yourself to one drab syllable, when the whisky-loving dude beside you at the bar was still deciding among Bruichladdich, Craigellachie, and Smoky Goat?

If you did pick gin, chances were that it came in a dry Martini. A noble thing, which has lent succor to millions of drinkers, it is mainly a coalition of gin and vermouth, although minor parties are sometimes invited to join and, as with all coalitions, the balance of power is fiercely contested. The dryness increases in inverse proportion to the amount of vermouth. Luis Buñuel suggested holding the bottle of vermouth in a shaft of sunlight, so that it would irradiate the gin without touching it: a wicked twist on the doctrine of the Incarnation. Drier still, if spiked with apocrypha, is Noël Coward’s definition: “A perfect martini should be made by filling a glass with gin, then waving it in the general direction of Italy.” And yet, for decades, the fact of the Martini somehow clouded the choice of gin, if you could call it a choice at all. Tanqueray. Beefeater. Bombay Sapphire. Gordon’s. That, more often than not, was it.

Similar limits applied to the gin-and-tonic. This was, by custom, a drink that spoke more unfathomably to the deeps of the British soul than to that of other races. From the outset, it was laced with memories, or myths, of imperial rule; what Schweppes first sold in 1870 was not just tonic water but “Indian Tonic Water,” and today, though besieged by an army of Fever-Tree tonics, it still holds considerable sway. The water is tonic because it contains quinine, which is anti-malarial—a lifesaver, if you happen to be invading or infesting a marshy foreign land. That is why, a century after Schweppes’s innovation, to quaff a gin-and-tonic on a summer’s day, in the well-to-do shires of England, was no less nostalgic than refreshing. Up went the hospitable cry “Ice and a slice?” and down sank the hearts of the younger generation, who observed their elders clutching a bottle of Gordon’s as if it were a Teddy bear, and decided that gin was ancient history. Its compound of the hearty and the sprightly was an embarrassment. Its bite was gone. Never again could it become the latest thing.

And now look. Gin is on the rise and on the loose. It has gone forth and multiplied. Forget rising sea levels; given the sudden ascendancy of gin, the polar gin caps must be melting fast. Torn between a Tommyrotter and a Cathouse Pink? Can’t tell the difference between a Spirit Hound and an Ugly Dog? No problem. There are now gins of every shade, for every social occasion, and from every time zone. The contagion is global, and I have stumbled across gins from Japan, Australia, Italy, and Colombia. Finland brings us the uncompromising Bog Gin. I have yet to taste Dragash, which emanates from a mountainous region of Kosovo, but, if it proves to be anything but wolfish, I shall be disappointed. Visitors to Thailand, or lovers of ginseng, will surely enjoy a nip of Iron Balls.