A Between the Sheet cocktail in a coupe glass.

Between the Sheets

Another pre-Prohibition classic that includes Rum, Cognac, Cointreau, and Lemon Juice, you may see a lot of a Sidecar in this drink, and you wouldn't be wrong. This recipe, however, adds White Rum and some slightly different ingredient ratios to create a very different flavour profile. But if a Sidecar is your thing, a Between the Sheets should also be to your taste as well.

We're specifying Cointreau in this recipe rather than a generic Triple Sec, as, just like the Sidecar, the more robust flavour of the Cointreau goes better with the Cognac, and now especially, the bolder flavours of the Rum. If all you have is Triple Sec though, you'll do fine so long as your other ingredients are good ones!

Total Time 4

Servings 1 cocktail

Ingredients

30 mL Cognac
30 mL White Rum
30 mL Cointreau or any Triple Sec
10 mL Lemon Juice
Garnish with a Lemon or Orange peel

Instructions

Add Cognac, White Rum, Cointreau, and Lemon Juice to a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake everything until it's very cold.
Strain everything into a Coupe glass.
Express the oils from your Orange peel over your drink, get rid of it or use it for presentation.
Serve and enjoy.

Notes

As this cocktail is more than 100 years old, its story is largely lost in time. It's thought that the Between the Sheets, however, comes from Harry's New York Bar in Paris. Beyond that, there's not much story to it! These famous bars of the 1920's had a lot going on, and not everything needs a story anyway.

To that end, there have been some variations on the standard recipes over the year, so you may see other recipes out there. If there's a flavour that you want to push or would prefer is more in the background, feel free to play with it a little bit.

Our Review of the Between the Sheets Cocktail

Will the Between the Sheets Cocktail truly get you between the sheets? Maybe it will encourage you to get a little bit frisky, if you’re lucky.

It’s true that the Between the Sheets packs a bit of a punch. Sure, Cointreau isn’t too strong, but you have a full measure of both Cognac and white rum. There are strong cocktails out there, but the Between the Sheets is far from being a low alcohol cocktail.

But the most important thing about any cocktail recipe is: does it taste good? And it sure does! I really like cocktail recipes that use two different types of base spirit. Rum is good. Cognac is good. And they intermingle quite well in a cocktail like this. A nice basic white rum has some sweetness but also some harshness to it. Meanwhile, a good Cognac is smooth an complex. You could almost make a cocktail with just these two ingredients. Of course adding the Cointreau and lemon juice just adds more!

But I’m not sure where exactly to “classify” this cocktail. It’s one of those really old cocktail recipes that go too far back to really know or understand the influence behind them. I’m a firm believer that nothing suddenly appears out of isolation. The Between the Sheets needed to come from somewhere. But it’s too old to know. I’d really love to know because I love learning about cocktails, where they’re from, and what inspired them. But oh well.

What I do know is that the Between the Sheets is a cocktail well worth making. It’s far from being lost in time; plenty of people still know it, but it’s also unknown enough to be exotic.

Break out that bottle of Cognac you never use and make one of these. You can thank me later.

8.5/10

Review by Emily

If you’re looking for a few more cocktail recipes, we’ll point you in the right direction

Below we’ve linked to some of the site sections that we think you’ll be interested. If we’ve gotten our assessment terribly wrong, feel free to browse the site or just use our cocktail builder to see what you can make with what you have.

All Rum cocktail recipes: as the name would suggest, this is where we keep all of our Rum cocktail recipes, and there are plenty to keep you busy for awhile.

All White Rum cocktail recipes: if you’d rather just keep it to White Rum, that’s OK too. At least it narrows things down a little bit for you.

Top 10 Rum cocktail recipes: if you want to narrow things down even further, we’ve got the ten best Rum cocktail recipes (in our opinion at least).