It’s that time of year again in the English capital city – time for cocktail week. Having spent about 6 years living in England and a fair bit of time backpacking my way through it, one thing I always miss are the nights  out. You might have read about the recent World Cup day in London or the Cluedo Pub crawl of 2012. This year, as ever from 6th – 12th October is the London Cocktail Week! It’s time to party and try some of the world’s finest cocktails in bars in good old London town!

Cocktail Week in London!!

So to prepare for cocktail week, you’ll need to check out what bars in London you want to hit, what London hotels to book and more importantly – what cocktails to try…

Cocktail Week in London, England: A Bloody Mary

Here are my top 5 cocktails that will be available across London on London Cocktail Week 2014:

1. Bloody Mary
My old favourite. It has lots of ingredients and can consist of vodka, tomato juice, and usually other spices or flavorings such as Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco sauce, piri piri sauce, beef consommé or bouillon, horseradish, celery, olives, salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper, lemon juice, and celery salt.

2. Caiprinha
Brazil’s national cocktail is made using cachaça (a sugar cane hard liquor), sugar and fruit, most commonly lime. Cachaça is Brazil’s most common distilled alcoholic beverage. Both rum and cachaça are made from sugarcane-derived products. Specifically with cachaça, the alcohol results from the fermentation of sugarcane juice that is afterwards distilled.In a caiprinha you can have all sorts of fruit like kiwi, strawberry, lime etc. I tried them in Recife, Fortaleza and Sao Paulo.

A Brazilian Caiprinha

3. White Russian
Nothing to do with Lenin or Stalin, the White Russian is a sweet cocktail classically made with vodka, coffee liqueur (usually Kahlúa or Tia Maria), and cream served with ice in an Old Fashioned glass.

4. The Harvey Wallbanger
This one sounds worse than it is – crazy name! A “Harvey Wallbanger” appears in literature as early as 1971. The Harvey Wallbanger’s popularity is largely a result of the promotional efforts of George Bednar, a former American football player and also a Galliano sales manager based in California. The drink purportedly was named after a Manhattan Beach surfer who was a regular patron of Duke’s Blackwatch Bar on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood during the early 1950s.

Having a famous Singapore Sling.

5. Singapore Sling
Finally comes the epic Singapore Sling. It is a South-East Asian cocktail. This long drink was developed sometime before 1915 by Ngiam Tong Boon, a Hainanese bartender working at the Long Bar in Raffles Hotel Singapore. It was initially called the gin sling – a sling was originally an American drink composed of spirit and water, sweetened and flavored.

So get yourself to the bright lights of London in October to sample the delights of the Cocktail Week in one of the biggest party cities on the globe!