Party Starters: the World's Best Punches and Crowd Pleasers

Punch — communal, scalable, forgiving — is the original cocktail. Long before the individual drink concept existed, guests at European and colonial parties were ladling from a shared bowl of arrack, citrus, sugar, water, and spice. The modern party drink inherits that tradition: something that can be made in volume, that improves with standing, and that creates community rather than individual performance. These ten party-ready drinks span continents and eras, from a 17th-century punch tradition to the Moscow Mule's 1940s origins, but all share the essential quality of making any gathering better.