First and foremost, making cocktails is about fun. It is about enjoyment, both the personal satisfaction of creation and the shared social experience of imbibing. There really is no wrong way to go about it, as long as you are having fun and enjoying yourself, that is the most important.
The pressure cooker of service in esteemed bars requires the best, most consistent product in as little time as possible. Getting top-quality drinks into the hands of thirsty patrons is the goal of every bartender (proud and competent ones, anyway). The methods, practices, and insights espoused in the following pages are gathered from years of professional experience with speed and accuracy in mind. Your experience at home isn’t about speed and quality, but comfort and enjoyment.
All of this preamble is to absolve you of the requirement to follow all of these perceived rules. Rather, these are meant to be best-practice options for you to adopt in order to improve your skill level and thus your cocktail game. The methodologies set forth will focus on the quality and not the speed of creating a professional cocktail, although future posts will detail how to optimize efficiency for multiple builds at once.
There are three main steps to cocktail creation:
Building (preparing and measuring ingredients to proportions)
Integrating (mixing ingredients together)
Presenting (final touches)
Building a cocktail starts with the ingredients and their proportions. Just as cooking has Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat as a basic formula, the cocktail world has Spirit, Sweet, Sour, and Bitter as a fundamental blueprint to create balance. Individual cocktail builds add or subtract from these building blocks, some add supplemental ingredients like herbs (Mojito), and some eschew a category like sour completely (Old Fashioned).
All of the tried and true cocktail builds have been created with balance and deliberate, proportional measuring. The ratio of sweet to sour has to be just so, and for the spirit to give you its full effect there must be enough to consciously remind you of what you’re drinking, but not too much to be overwhelming. Free-pouring from the bottle is encouraged for a highball cocktail (whiskey and coke, gin and tonic, etc) but making a Manhattan, French 75, or Penicillin without a jigger is a recipe for disaster. Too much spirit and you drink fire; too much lemon juice and all you taste is tartness; too much simple syrup and you’re left with a sticky film covering your mouth.
Mixing a cocktail accomplishes three main goals: integrating the ingredients into a cohesive singular entity, cooling the liquids to an appropriate temperature, and diluting (adding water to) the cocktail to make it immediately pleasant to drink.
There are several ways to bring together a cocktail, and each way has unique techniques to give you method-specific results. Free-pouring is the most used, and is perfectly fine in certain instances. Shaking is the archetype of the professional bartender, tins flashing with a rhythmic beat that catches the attention of everyone in the room. Stirring, while less ostentatious than shaking, is just as important to deliver the right texture to all of your spirit-forward cocktails. Muddling has been misinterpreted to mean smashing the hell out of stuff at the bottom of a glass, which leads to bitterness and off-flavors. If done with a gentle hand and deliberate intent, your mojitos will be sweet, fresh, and you won’t have to pick little bits of mint out of your teeth hours later. Lastly, Swizzling a cocktail is a very specific method, usually reserved for tiki drinks.
Presentation is all about the details that are easily overlooked; seemingly small steps that can elevate your cocktail by degrees into a masterpiece. Even with the right proportions and proper techniques to combine them, a Martini tastes different if served in a highball glass. Sure, some of that is a mental trick, but there is a reason a Martini has its own specific glass.
You drink with your eyes first, and here the devil is in the details. Prepping a glass, proper straining into appropriate glassware, and just the right amount of space between the top of the liquid to the rim of the glass (washline) play a role in the finished product and how one feels when enjoying a drink. Not to mention the final touch of garnishing; which citrus to use, how to peel and express a twist, or which flowers are deadly (j/k who uses deadly flowers on drinks?).
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