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Cocktails 101

The Art of Mixing

The stuff you’re doing right and the stuff you didn’t even know you could be wrong about

First and foremost, making cocktails is about fun. It is about enjoyment, both the personal creation of making 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:

Combining (building)

Integrating (mixing)

Presenting (final touches)

 

Building a cocktail starts with the ingredients and their proportions. Just as cooking has Salt Fat Acid Heat as a basic formula, the cocktail world has Spirit Sweet Sour 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 the appropriate temperature, and diluting (adding water) the cocktail to make it immediately pleasant to drink. 

 

There are several ways to bring together a cocktail. 

 

Presentation is the last and often overlooked step. You drink with your eyes first. If a cocktail looks pretty and care was taken to insure