This version starts with a coconut cream and cashew base that produces a genuinely luxurious result, spiced with nutmeg that has been freshly grated.

Proper mulled wine is a specific thing: a red wine with enough body to carry warm spices, heated gently to just below a simmer, sweetened with restraint, and served in a thick-walled glass while still steaming.

The Old Fashioned is the most honest cocktail there is — spirit, sweetener, bitters, nothing to hide behind. With mezcal instead of bourbon, it becomes something altogether more autumnal.

Fresh-pressed cider — cloudy, unfiltered, pressed from whole apples — mulled with warm spices until the kitchen smells unmistakably like the season turning.

Late-summer peaches — the ones that have been sitting in the sun long enough to go soft at the shoulder, the ones that drip when you bite into them — make the finest tea you’ll ever drink.

Lemon verbena paired with cucumber and good tonic water. A spritz that is botanical and completely unlike anything you'd order at a bar.

The result is something more interesting and more thirst-quenching than juice. An agua fresca is calibrated to hydrate as much as to please.

The elderflower lemonade here is built on a cold-infused syrup that preserves the delicate floral quality of the fresh flowers far better than heat extraction would.

Rhubarb is the quintessential April ingredient — tart, fibrous, deeply pink, and available before almost anything else in the spring garden or at the farmers market.

Fresh spring nettle contains significant amounts of iron, calcium, magnesium, potassium, and vitamins A, C, and K.

The hot toddy is one of those drinks that has been overly rusticated when in fact it is one of the most warming drinks on a cold February night.

Somewhere between a recipe and a ritual, this is less about the drink itself and more about what it signals: the day is done. The kitchen light is low. You have done enough.