Felicitations! You have made it through Dry January, which calls for a drink. Oh, you weren’t doing Dry January? Well, never mind – have a drink all the same. It’s Wet February, the month where inhibitions are lost and resolutions trashed. And given the unhinged nature of the world at the moment, you could be forgiven for wanting to zone out for a while. To this end, I’ve been collecting the cocktail recipes that have the most booze in them: the mind-scramblers, the painkillers, the reverse epilators (they put hairs on your chest).

However, when assessing a cocktail’s strength, it’s worth bearing in mind the Long Island Iced Tea rule. Long Island Iced Tea was a popular disco drink of the 1990s, ideally sipped in Reebok Classics to a soundtrack of Oxide & Neutrino. It was pretty tasty, in a prelapsarian way – imagine if iced tea was synthesised in Doctor Octopus’s laboratory – but what really made it popular was the list of alcohols involved. Vodka, gin, tequila, light rum, triple sec, seriously…?

But the mistake here is to confuse variety with quantity. It’s no biggie having four types of white liquor when you’re only using a teaspoon of each and your principal flavour is industrial sour mix. What you have then is just an over-complicated rum and Coke – far weaker than your Golden Age cocktails such as the manhattan or obituary.

It follows that the “strongest” way of drinking spirits is neat, with no dilution whatsoever – perhaps straight from the freezer. You can make a martini this way, if you desire: frozen gin, the merest dash of vermouth, a little olive brine. If you do so with Tanqueray No 10 – as is Mr Alessandro Palazzi's preference at Duke’s Bar in London – you have cocktail with an alcohol content of about 50 per cent. (A typical cocktail comes in around the 20-25 per cent mark.)

Remember: the essential alchemy of the cocktail is to make the thing more than the sum of its parts, and to add that crucial element of surprise. Here are three that let you know in no uncertain terms you are drinking strong booze – but do so with a little finesse.

Cool name huh? Purgatory because that’s precisely where it situates you, halfway between heaven and hell. It was invented in 2007 by Mr Ted Kilgore of the now-defunct Monarch restaurant in St Louis, Missouri, and it’s a spin on an 1895 concoction known as the Widow’s Kiss. It contains three high-proof liquors – Rittenhouse Rye 100 Proof (50 per cent ABV), Chartreuse (55 per cent ABV), Bénédictine (40 per cent ABV) – and the majesty comes from a collision of super-strong herbal flavours.

• 50ml rye whiskey (ideally Rittenhouse Rye 100 Proof)
• 15ml Green Chartreuse
• 15ml Bénédictine DOM

Stir all the ingredients in a mixing jug for about 30 seconds with copious ice (the larger the cubes the better).

Strain into a frozen martini coupe and garnish with a lemon zest twist.

Los Angeles is currently undergoing a revival of the Tiki scene that took root here from the 1930s through to the 1960s, pioneered by Mr Don the Beachcomber. His zombie cocktail – once reviled as “undoubtedly the most over-advertised, over-emphasised, over-exalted and foolishly feared drink” by the cocktail purist Mr David Embury – is now the test of a decent bartender. Rightly so. The drink is complicated and ridiculously strong. It contains a phenomenal amount of rum (much of it 151 proof Demerara) but its potency is stealthily disguised by the fruity-spicy sweetness. I had the best I’ve ever tasted recently at The Tasting Kitchen on Abbot Kinney in Venice – but this is my own domestic version, based on the original 1934 recipe. It is a holiday (and a hangover) in a glass.

• 45ml gold rum (Puerto Rico)
• 45ml dark rum (Jamaica)
• 30ml overproof dark rum (Demerara)
• 20ml lime juice
• 10ml grapefruit juice
• 5ml sugar syrup (2:1)
• 5ml grenadine
• 15ml falernum
• Dash Angostura bitters
• Dash absinthe
• Pinch cinnamon

Blend all the ingredients with 175ml crushed ice for about five seconds ­– a NutriBullet does the job nicely.

Pour unstrained into a capacious and silly-looking glass and garnish with a mint sprig.

The recipe actually called for 15ml “Don’s Mix #2”, which was two parts grapefruit juice to one part cinnamon-infused sugar syrup, but this way you don’t need to worry about making that separately.

The long-forgotten cousin of the sazerac, the formidable absinthe-scented New Orleans classic, this orange infused variation has latterly been revived to intoxicating effect at 28 Hong Kong Street in Singapore. The essential difference between the two drinks is that here, you may use orange curacao as opposed to sugar by way of sweetener, which means that the sole non-alcoholic ingredient now also contains alcohol. My version is a hybrid of the two.

• 30ml rye or bourbon
• 30ml brandy
• 5ml orange liqueur
• Dash Angostura bitters
• Dash Peychaud’s bitters
• Dash absinthe

The simple way to do this is to stir all the ingredients with a large lump of ice and a lemon zest twist.

Then strain into an austere old-fashioned glass with no ice and no garnish.