Make Hangover Cures More Fun

It's sometime not long before noon, and the house is trashed. There are glasses and party horns and streamers littering nearly every surface. There's an unidentified sticky stain on the rug. And, to be sure, your skull feels like a lead brick. No one likes to talk about the day after, but make no mistake: the sun never shines brighter than it does on the morning after a party. You've got to clean up, get the trash out, and the dishes done, but first you've got to get that hangover in check.

Not to worry: the dribbles at the bottom of the cognac bottle, and the last of the chilled, uncorked champagne ought to fix you right up. Back when party-goers rang in the last century, journalist Edward Spencer Mott called champagne "the most valuable restorative known to science." The following cocktails aim to be exactly that: potions of liquid resurrection. Just rinse out a lipstick-stained champagne flute, and think of it like a pharmacy vial.

The St. Bernard is true hair-of-the-dog, bounding to the rescue as an affectionate combination of the classic champagne cocktail spiced with Peychaud's bitters; and an absinthe fountain, where the absinthe is replaced with brandy. A play on the Barbotage cocktail — a French elixir specially designed to handle exactly this kind of morning-after, whose name means either "bubbly" or "spinal anesthesia" (really) — The Resolution adds a hit of cherry to help the medicine go down. Finally, The Dick Clark is a more sophisticated tonic, heavy on nature's most powerful curatives: ginger for your roiling belly and pomegranate for the antioxidants and vitamin B. While these boozy remedies will likely do the trick on your hangover, they're also perfect ways to get you into trouble in the first place. Your guests will love them at your New Year's Eve soirée.