The Best Drinks to Order at a Bar If You Actually Want to Feel Good Tomorrow

The bar menu is not neutral territory. Some drinks are genuinely better choices than others when you care about how you feel the next morning — not because they contain less alcohol (that's the most obvious lever), but because of what's in them beyond the alcohol: sugar content, congeners, carbonation, and whether the mixer is working with your body or against it.

Most bar guides cover what's trendy or what tastes good. This one covers what's actually smart to drink if you want to go out, have a good time, and be functional the next day. That's a different kind of guide, and it requires a different kind of thinking.

The Foundation: What Makes a Drink Worse or Better

Before we get into specific orders, it helps to understand the variables that actually affect how you feel the next day:

Total alcohol consumed is obviously the biggest factor. There's no cocktail strategy that outsmarts consuming significantly more alcohol than your body can handle. Everything else in this guide is about optimizing within a given alcohol quantity, not licensing you to drink more.

Sugar content is the second biggest lever. High-sugar mixers — sour mix, simple syrup, commercial margarita mix, juice cocktails — compound the dehydration effect of alcohol by spiking blood sugar and then letting it crash, and they add calories with no nutritional benefit. As we covered in our hangover science guide, blood sugar disruption is one of the key mechanisms behind next-morning misery.

Congener content is the third factor. Darker spirits — bourbon, scotch, dark rum, brandy, aged tequila — contain significantly more congeners (fermentation byproducts) than clear spirits. Research published in the British Medical Journal showed bourbon produced significantly worse hangovers than vodka at equivalent alcohol doses. This doesn't mean you should never drink bourbon, but it's useful information when choosing between options.

Hydration during drinking is arguably where the most intervention is possible. Every bar serves water. Many bars now carry premium mixers that include electrolytes. And when you're drinking at home, using OFTN mix with its built-in electrolytes and B vitamins is the single easiest upgrade you can make to your drink routine.

The Best Orders at a Bar, Ranked

1. Vodka Soda with Citrus

This is the classic "smart bar order" and it holds up. Vodka is among the lowest-congener spirits available. Sparkling water is just water with bubbles — zero sugar, zero syrup, nothing working against you. A squeeze of fresh lemon or lime adds real citrus without the sugar of a juice mixer. The drink is boring in the wrong bar but genuinely good when made with quality vodka and proper citrus.

The downside: it can be boring, and bartenders at busy bars often use a lime squeeze that's been sitting out for hours. Ask for a fresh lime wedge you can squeeze yourself.

2. Blanco Tequila on the Rocks with Lime

Blanco (unaged) tequila is made from 100% blue agave, which produces a spirit with a lower congener load than aged tequilas. Good blanco tequila — Espolon, Olmeca Altos, El Tesoro — is genuinely pleasant sipped slowly over ice with a lime squeeze. No mixer, no sugar. If you're going to drink tequila, this is the cleanest format.

3. Gin and Soda (Not Tonic)

Gin gets unfairly lumped in with complicated cocktails. Ask for a quality gin over ice with sparkling water and a cucumber or lime garnish and you have a sophisticated, very low-sugar drink. Note the distinction between soda water and tonic: tonic water contains approximately 32g of sugar per 12oz, making a gin and tonic meaningfully higher in sugar than a gin and soda. If you like the bitterness of tonic, use a light tonic or ask for half tonic and half sparkling water.

4. Wine (Dry, Not Sweet)

Dry wine — Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Grigio, Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir — has 1–4g of residual sugar per glass, compared to 8–15g in sweet wines, dessert wines, and most sparkling wine cocktails. Red wine contains resveratrol and polyphenols that have anti-inflammatory properties in vitro (though the amounts in a glass of wine are modest). The main concern with red wine is sulfites, which some people are sensitive to, and tannins, which can cause headaches in sensitive individuals. If you tolerate red wine well, a dry red is one of the more defensible bar orders.

5. Mezcal Neat or On the Rocks

Mezcal occupies a similar position to blanco tequila in terms of congener profile — it's an agave spirit without significant barrel aging in many expressions. The smoky character of mezcal means most people sip it more slowly, which naturally moderates consumption pace. This is a useful psychological effect: a drink you sip contemplatively is one you drink less of per hour.

6. Champagne or Dry Sparkling Wine

A glass of dry champagne or prosecco is typically 80–100 calories and 1–3g of sugar. The carbonation causes alcohol to absorb slightly faster (the bubbles accelerate gastric motility), so you'll feel the first glass more quickly — which means you may drink less total over the course of the evening. Dry sparkling wine is a sophisticated, genuinely elegant bar order that doesn't require any explanation or modification.

Orders to Avoid (or Modify)

Margaritas from a bar gun or premix: Commercial margarita mix contains 30–40g of sugar per drink. A bar margarita made properly — fresh lime juice, good tequila, a touch of orange liqueur — is fine. A margarita made from a premixed bottle is essentially a sugar bomb with tequila in it. Ask how the bar makes theirs before ordering.

Long Island Iced Tea: Five spirits, sour mix, and cola. This is one of the worst cocktails from a next-morning perspective — high alcohol, high sugar, multiple congener sources, and a volume that encourages drinking it too quickly. A single Long Island Iced Tea can contain the equivalent of 3–4 standard drinks.

Frozen/blended cocktails: Usually made with sweetened premix and large amounts of sugar to balance the ice dilution. The "tropical" category (pina colada, frozen daiquiri, frozen margarita) typically runs 400–600 calories and 40–60g of sugar per drink.

Sugary shots: Flavored vodka shots, Jell-O shots, anything with a creamy mixer. High sugar, often consumed quickly, and usually accompanied by other drinks. The social pressure to do shots is real; it's worth having a plan for how you'll handle it before the situation arises (soda water with lime looks identical to vodka soda in a shot glass from a distance).

Any cocktail with "sweet and sour mix" or "margarita mix." Ask for fresh lime instead. Most bars will accommodate this; it makes a meaningfully better drink and removes the sugar dump.

The Conversation Worth Having with Your Bartender

Good bartenders want to make you a good drink. Telling them what you're trying to achieve — "something refreshing and not too sweet" or "I want to pace myself tonight, what would you make?" — usually gets you a much better result than pointing at a menu item that might be made with garbage premix. Specific asks that work at most bars:

• "Fresh lime only, no sour mix"
• "Can you do that with soda water instead of tonic?"
• "Half pour of the liqueur" (for triple sec in a margarita)
• "A taller glass with more ice and water" (lower ABV per sip, slower drinking pace)
• "What's your cleanest, lowest-sugar cocktail?"

The Water Habit That Actually Works

Drinking one glass of water between every alcoholic drink is advice you've heard a thousand times. Here's why people don't do it even though they know they should: standing at a bar with a glass of water in your hand feels social-signal-wrong. You look like you're not drinking, which in many social contexts feels awkward.

The solution is to not make it visible. Ask for your water in a rocks glass with ice and a lime wedge. It looks exactly like a vodka soda. No one will know, no one will comment, and you'll arrive home significantly better hydrated than if you'd skipped it. This single habit, consistently practiced, makes a measurable difference in next-morning outcomes.

When You're Drinking at Home

The bar situation involves tradeoffs and limitations — you can't control what premixes they use or what quality the citrus is. At home, you have complete control. This is where using a thoughtfully formulated cocktail mix like OFTN makes the most sense. Our mixes include electrolytes and B vitamins by design, so every drink you make at home is also doing something for your hydration. Combined with a commitment to lower-sugar recipes and smarter pacing, this makes home cocktail nights significantly better than bar nights for how you feel the next day.

The low sugar cocktail recipe guide and our full recipe library have everything you need. And the hangover science article covers the deeper biology of why these choices matter.

Celebrate now. Feel good tomorrow.