How to Make Better Drinks

Food blogs of this world, we need to talk. I like you and I want to help you make better drinks. Your heart is in the right place, but some of you have no idea what you're doing. I'll only judge you a little bit, but if you take my advice, I promise, you can mix high-quality drinks.

As I've been engaging the drink-making blogosphere, I have noticed a lot of drinks that look like the following.

Generic Bad Home Drink

2 oz fruit-flavored liqueur (Such as Cointreau or, if we are unlucky, Malibu)

1 oz Minute Maid orange juice, from a carton

1 oz vodka

Mint leaves

Sprite

Muddle the mint in the liqueur until it is practically paste and then put everything into a shaker and strain into a cocktail glass, being sure to leave bits of ice floating on top of the drink. 

Top with sprite.

I would like to think that the myriad flaws in this drink are evident to all, but apparently that is not the case, so let us examine them, one by one.

1. The ratio of liqueur to base spirit is backwards and ridiculous. A proper drink should not be overly sweet, unless it is intended as a dessert. A high proportion of sugary ingredients can sometimes make sense — sometimes a strong counterpoint is needed against the bitter or sour component in a drink — but on the whole, it is appropriate to use an unsweetened spirit, such as whiskey or gin, as the foundation of a mixed drink.

2. There are particles of ice and fruit floating in it. An excellent drink should not be chunky in any way. True mixological perfection requires homogeneity of texture. Pieces of pulp or ice floating in the drink are like bits of un-integrated flour in your bechamel; they are jarring to the imbiber and indicative of carelessness on the part of the bartender. Fix it with a fine-mesh strainer, and you'll enjoy years of particulate-free drinking.

3. The level of dilution is an accident. High-proof spirits are unpleasant to drink on their own. Insufficiently diluted alcohol burns burns the throat and worse! it deadens the taste buds. If a drink is over-diluted, its flavors become watery and thin, but a drink which is under-diluted suffers nearly as much. The sip will deaden the drinker's perception of taste, and the flavors will seem muted.

Always pay attention to the amount of water that you are introducing into your drink. If your ice cubes are big, then they have a higher ratio of volume to surface area, and you will have to shake or stir longer in order to achieve the same amount of dilution that you would with smaller ice. Getting it right comes down largely to intuition, but you'll never develop that intuition if you are not aware that you need it.

I suggest counting your shakes, 30 times is usually about perfect. Though if your ice is a bunch of tiny, broken pieces, 10 might be enough.

4. And while we're on the subject of ice, the ice probably sucks. Clear ice is highly preferable to cloudy ice, both because it ‘s prettier and because it melts more slowly, allowing you to keep your drinks colder, longer, with less impact upon their dilution. Ice is cloudy because of mineral impurities and air trapped in the frozen water, so the key to clear ice is to eliminate those problems. Boiling the water before freezing it will deaerate it, and using distilled water will ensure negligible mineral content. Below is an example of an ice cube made from boiled water (on the left) and un-boiled water (on the right). I did not use distilled water, and as you can see, there is still some cloudiness, but the boiling creates a marked improvement.

5. The juice is not fresh. The quality of fresh juice above pasteurized juice is almost incommunicable. We shouldn’t call it pasteurized juice, we should call it boiled juice, to make it clearer what is happening. Boiling removes many of its more delicate flavor compounds, and changes the texture, invariably for the worse. Moreover, once juice has been freed from its prison inside of a fruit, it begins to break down and change flavor on its own. Pasteurized orange juice from a carton is only vaguely orangey sugar water compared to the bright, floral qualities of a freshly juiced orange. If you forget everything else I have told you, remember this: your drink is only as good as the worst thing you put in it.

6. The glass is not cold. If you strain your ice-cold drink into a room temperature glass, you are cheating yourself. The drink will immediately absorb heat from the glass, ruining its temperature. Always chill your glasses before pouring your drink into them.

7. You're topping a drink in a cocktail glass with soda. Stop it. Most sodas have too much sugar and artificial-tasting syrups. Worse, you’re probably not measuring the soda. "Top with sprite" has to be the worst mixing instruction ever, because if your drink, pre-top-off, has a volume of five ounces, then depending on the glass, you might end up adding anywhere from one to five ounces of soda, either doing nothing, or totally walloping the rest of the drink.

8. The herbs are over-muddled. We're not making pesto, and a muddler is not a mortar and pestle. All of the menthol in mint lives in little hair-like structures on the surface of the leaf. If you bruise the leaf of the mint, you are going to release bitter chlorophyll flavors into your drink, and it will taste grassy. The better way to handle mint is to place it on the palm of your hand and give it a few good smacks. In general, when muddling herbs or citrus peels, apply firm pressure but do not tear the flesh of the plant. Fruit, on the other hand, ought to be pulverized.

So let's see if we can take all of these ideas, and re-jigger the Generic Bad Drink above, into something a little more delicious.

How To Make Better Drinks

2 oz Fresh Peach Juice

1.5 oz Gin (Plymouth)

.25 oz Liquore Strega

.25 oz Simple Syrup

Dash of Peach Bitters (Fee's)

Shake over ice and double-strain, first through a hawthorne or julep strainer and then through a fine-mesh strainer, into a cocktail glass.

Garnish with a blackberry on a skewer.

The horrible pasteurized juice has been omitted in favor of a fresh seasonal juice. Vodka has been replaced with gin, and the sugar components have been dialed down to a small amount, to add sweetness to the drink without overpowering it.

The sprite, which added sweetness and carbonation, has been replaced with some simple syrup, to fill the same role without adding undesirable flavors and carbonation. For a liqueur, I used Liquore Strega, which is sweet, herbal, and slightly spicy, adding a note of intrigue to the otherwise maybe simple combination of peach and gin.

The deep purple of the blackberry garnish creates a pleasing contrast with the pale orange of the drink itself.