Bagool

Thanks for the responses, a lot of disagreement, and that's great! That is a great way to find out whether or not the bartender is good at creating flavor combinations, although my intention was to make some sort of semi-scientific comparison. Its easy to compared places when you get the same drink, but as you say that might be too reductive, and counterproductive for finding the best cocktail bar. There's a lot of great tips here, pretty much exactly what I had in mind going into it, some drinks that has a lot of steps and some room for variation. Accomplishing both my two important criteria of letting the bartender show off, and having a drink that can be compared between bars! A Daiquiri seems to be straight up my alley, is there enough room for variation for me to ask the bartender for a twist on it to be able to give them some leeway to show their skills with a Daiquiri?

Hi, me and a few of my friends are planning a cocktail bar-crawl to find out which cocktail bar is the best in our city! This crawl was inspired by a trip to Berlin where we went to Stagger Lee because we heard they had great cocktails, after getting multiple recommendations for rum drinks and enjoying them all a lot I'd agree that it is indeed a very good cocktail bar, and now I want to find one in my home city that I can enjoy more regularly! To make a fair comparison we figure that ordering the same drink at each place makes the most sense. The analogue being our hamburger run, where one of our friends stuck with only bun, meat, and cheese. The question then becomes, what non-signature drink is a good benchmark for different types of spirits? Do you guys have any imput on what rum, gin, and/or whiskey drinks have to best potential to let a bartender show off their skills?