This Cocktail Is Made With 26 Different Spirits

A cocktail made with 26 ingredients somehow tastes completely unlike a Long Island Iced Tea. This isn't your classic four-ingredient Old Fashioned, or even a daring eight-ingredient Zombie. In this version of a 26-ingredient cocktail (maybe the only version), every spirit, bitter, and digestif must start with a different letter of the alphabet. Twenty-six ingredients, 26 letters. It's called the A-Z cocktail. Get it?

This gimmick—an impressive one, to be sure—was thought up by Bompas & Parr, a London culinary design studio that has also brought breathable alcohol and collagen gin into existence. It is debuting at the W New York – Times Square on February 4, available at the bar and in little bottles in some room mini-bars.

"It would be all too easy to randomly combine a minibar's worth of ingredients and make something undrinkable. The challenge here was to create something beyond novelty for its own sake and end up with a balanced drink," says Harry Parr, co-founder of Bompas & Parr and the cocktail's creator.

The A-Z cocktail, modeled after a traditional rum punch recipe, is like the high-brow mixologist version of taking an extra large McDonald's soft drink cup and filling it up with a healthy push of each soda available, from Dr. Pepper to Hi-C. It tastes similar to liquified Ricola cough drops, herbal and honeyed. Mostly, it's syrupy sweet. But over lots of rocks, it's kind of nice, like drinking root beer after school, but with 45 percent ABV.