Mixing Drinks: Standards of Quality
Mixing Drinks: Standards of Quality
Do you want to know how you make a good cocktail? Do you want to know the arcane secrets that quality drinks hinge on? Well, I'm going to lay them out for you right here. You may be disappointed to learn that they don't involve any ancient tomes, voodoo rituals, or blood sacrifices, but the tradeoff is worth it: these standards are simple enough that any home bartender or or cocktail bar can follow them.Ā
1) Use passable ingredients. Notice that I didnāt say quality; I said passable. This means rum and whiskey that, if you take a sip, taste like rum or whiskey rather than acetone or motor oil. It means fresh fruit juices, from fruit you can buy fresh. Ā It means syrups that donāt resemble cough medicine. When people talk about āfreshnessā and āqualityā it could sound like theyāre making lofty demands. After all, it's one step from "fresh" to "organic," and soon enough we could all be eating cruelty-free seaweed and free range rice cakes. Whatās important isnāt using the best ingredients you can find. If it were we'd be making cocktails out of thousand-dollar scotch. What's important is the opposite: setting a bottom line of quality, anything below which is unacceptable.
2) Make sure your ingredients are in good condition. Yes, you have a bit of leeway: a lemon does not have to be picked fresh from the tree, and gin does not have to be mixed before it leaves the distillery. Even so, it's a fact of life that some things you eat go bad. Vermouth starts to oxidize once itās opened, especially if itās not refrigerated. Citrus juice also oxidizes over time once itās been squeezed. If something tastes off, or has been taken over by a mysterious growth, it may be time to replace it. This isnāt about reaching some zenith of freshness, itās just having the sense not to make a cake with spoiled milk.
3) Use a balanced recipe. āBalanceā sounds like a high fallutin concept, but I assure you, you needn't break out the scales just to make a cocktail. Anyone whoās so much as tasted lemonade understands what a balanced drink is. Lemonade is made from water, sugar, and lemon, but if it tastes too watery, too sweet, or too sour, itās not good. In fact, it may be what some of us experts describe as "bad." Thereās a middle range where the flavors mix instead of one dominating the others. It might take a little experimenting to find that midrange, but whether a recipe looks balanced is intuitive. Making an eight ounce glass of lemonade made with six ounces of sugar is obviously a bad recipe. And a four ounce Margarita made with three ounces of syrup should be just as obviously bad, even if youāve never had a Margarita in your life.
4) Measure your ingredients. Cocktails are small. Many are only 3 or 4 ounces, so small variations can have big effects. Surprising as it may seem, it can be difficult to keep ingredients balanced when you don't actually know how much of each ingredient you're using. I know in the professional world there are bartenders who have been working for 20 years and are whizzes with their speedpourers, who have no need for jiggers, measuring spoons, or graduated cylinders to make well balanced drinks. Yet for every one of them, there are two dozen people who don't have the gift of that much experience, like me, and probably like you, who would be sloppy and imprecise without some basic measuring equipment. You can learn to eyeball by measuring, but you canāt learn to measure by eyeballing.
5) Use good technique when preparing your drink. "Techniqueā here isnāt something that needs to be mastered with years of practice. Technique is stirring a drink with all clear ingredients so you donāt make a Manhattan with a thick, foamy head, and doing so long enough that the drink doesn't come out warm. Technique shaking vigorously for 10 seconds instead of plopping a shaker up and down 3 times. Technique is not letting your ice spend minutes melting in the shaker before you use it. These arenāt examples, this is the gamut: beyond knowing how to shake, stir, and strain, there isnāt much you need to remember, unless you're making a drink that requires you to set things on fire. And if you do plan on setting things on fire, maybe having some melted ice on hand is a good idea after all.
6) Twist your twists. Iāll be honest, most garnishes arenāt essential. All an olive adds to a Martini is proof that you're not drinking water, and all a cherry adds to a Manhattan is proof that you're not drinking rust. But if you use a citrus peel/twist, squeeze it to spray the citrus oils onto the drink. Oddly enough, the name "twist" actually comes from an English word that means "to twist." If you haven't twisted it, then technically it's just a peel. Or, as I prefer to call it, a waste.Ā
This little listicle isnāt about snobbery, itās not about being demanding, and itās not about being fancy. As complicated as the mixology scene can get, making a good drink, at home or in a bar, is simple as long as you're careful and know what you're doing. Personally, I find it disappointing that outside of boutique specialty bars that make their own bitters, thoroughly well made cocktails are hard to find. It would be nice if good cocktails werenāt reserved for the kind of trendy cocktail bars that get written up in Esquire. Perhaps we're coming closer to a day when "good cocktails" will be synonymous with "cocktails." Until then, my fellow boozeologists, I think itās fair to demand more across the board when āmoreā involves such little added work for such greater results, especially for drinks made in our own kitchens. And once we've reached that point, maybe we won't need to go out for a drink at all.
