The Understated Essentials Of Making Great Cocktails

So you want to make great cocktails, but your online searches have lead you to believe that you need to spend tons of money on good equipment, great ingredients, and comprehensive recipe books. Well, I’ll put the punchline up front: none of that is true. That’s not to say that bartenders are foolish for such a big deal out of making a drink — to the contrary, that level of dedication to the craft pays off in dividends. But if you’re someone who is looking to fix some cocktails for yourself and your friends, stumbling from forum to forum trying to manage the firehose of information that is the Internet — this post is for you. I’m not going to teach you any recipes here — my goal in this post is to get you to a rock-solid understand of the principles of mixology, because all you really need to make a great cocktail is some basic technique, a trust in your sense of taste, and a willingness to experiment.

Cocktails Are About Balancing Flavor

Let’s start with the basics. Alcohol just isn’t palatable to most people. That’s why you’re making a cocktail in the first place instead of just downing shots of vodka. Alcohol is pretty bitter, and it’s a deep sort of bitterness that you can feel in your throat all the way down to your stomach. It’s great to appreciate that taste in whiskeys, wines, etc., but sometimes it’s nice to make a drink that will go down easily and still get you a little buzzed. So fundamentally that’s the purpose of cocktails: to balance out the bitterness of alcohol and make it taste good.

So how do you balance out the bitterness? Turns out, usually you do this with sweetness and sourness. You already know this. You might be one of the many that put sugar to mellow out that bitter coffee. If you’ve drank carbonated water, you know how bitter that is. But sodas like Coca-Cola are delicious, precisely because that bitterness is balanced out with sugar (sweetness) and citric acid (sourness), among other ingredients. There’s other ways to balance out bitterness too. You can combine coffee with milk (creaminess), and you can do the same with alcohol. But combining alcohol with sweet and sour flavors is more common, and that’s where we’ll start today.

A Starting Point: Vodka, Sugar, and Lime

Well, what’s the simplest cocktail you can make? You’re home from work, you’re tired — why bother with something complicated when you can have something delicious ready in 5 minutes? Take some vodka, or whiskey, or gin, or whatever you have handy — and squeeze in some citrus. Lime or lemon, either one works great. Squeeze in a bit, and then taste it. Keep going until it tastes alright. Then add in some sugar. You can add white sugar or brown sugar, your choice. Keep tasting, keep going. If you add too much, just put in more alcohol. Maybe you need to go back and add more citrus. Keep doing this until you hit the sweet spot where you can drink the alcohol easily. Once you reach this point, congratulations — you’ve made your first cocktail. After doing this a few times, you’ll have great intuition for how much citrus and sugar you need. It’s not too fancy, but it’s great to have a starting point you know you can always go back to in case you don’t feel like putting a lot of work into making yourself a nice drink. And a really valuable piece of advice — add ice, and lots of it. Ice goes an unexpectedly long way into making cocktails taste good.

But now that you’ve made this, you’ve opened up a whole lot of possibilities. What we’re going to do now is substitute ingredients. But this is a practical guide to making cocktails, so I’m not going to make you go out and buy anything new. Practical cooking (and also cocktail-making!) is about using just the ingredients you have at home to confidently make yourself whatever you want to eat or drink. So let’s think. Suppose we didn’t have sugar — what could we use?

Substituting Ingredients: Experimenting Intelligently

Well, we just need a source of sweetness — honey would work. It’s a deeper sort of sweetness than sugar. Instead of feeling that sweet flavor in your mouth, you feel it all around in your oral and nasal passages. That could contrast nicely for drinks where you have a deep taste of sourness (like if you added a citrus peel to your drink!), but it can also be strong for other kinds of drinks. You’ll have to mix it and find out. Experimentation is key here, but it’s important to experiment intelligently. If you’re not sure whether an ingredient will work, pour a little bit of your drink into a small side container, and mix a tiny bit of the new ingredient in there. That will allow you to try new things, but still be able to go back to what you had earlier in case it doesn’t work out.

Back to sweetness. What else could work? If you open your fridge, you might have juice, like orange juice or apple juice. These also add sourness, so you might have to add a little extra sugar to it anyway. But they also add a great fruity flavor. A more unconventional option might be oat milk or almond milk. Again, you might have to balance out the bitterness in these with more sugar. On the other hand, they also add a brand new kind of flavor: nuttiness! It will be up to you to experiment.

Thinking Outside The Box with Herbs and Chasers

You can go through the same process to substitute sourness. What else is sour? You could use grapefruit juice, cranberry juice, or even more experimental ingredients like tamarind or apple cider vinegar. But let’s think outside the box for a moment. Balancing doesn’t just mean combining one liquid with another so flavors cancel out and you’re left with a perfect, flavorfully rich sort of drink. What if we added whole grapes to our drink? The flavor of the grape would slowly diffuse into the drink over time, bringing the drink closer to that balanced deliciousness. But the drinker could also choose to eat the grapes, which would be an experience in and of itself. The sourish drink, and then a flavor punch of sweetness from the whole grape — that would be incredible! Or, separate out the sourness from everything else into a follow-up drink — a chaser! When you take a shot of whiskey, it’s uncomfortable, it burns and it’s bitter — but you get to experience the raw taste of the alcohol without any disguise, and it makes the pickle juice that follows it all the more relieving. Or the salt and lime that you take after a shot of tequila. What other sorts of chasers can you invent? Maybe you can swap out pickle juice for kimchi juice. Maybe you can chase a glass of hot whiskey with ice-cold, sweetened oat milk. Hmm!

After you’ve balanced your drink, you can think about incorporating other flavors. Cinnamon tends to accentuate sweetness. Matcha is bitter and tends to go well with sweet things, too — try it with whiskey! You can also add freshness — mint, basil, jalapeños, maybe even radishes. Almond or hazelnut syrups can add nuttiness. Your drink, your rules is the bottom line here.

Presentation Doesn’t Have To Be Complicated

Finally, it’s worth thinking about presentation. It doesn’t have to be too complicated. You can choose the kind of glass you want — tall glass? Short glass? Moscow mules are traditionally served in copper glasses. You can pick crushed ice or cubed ice. Color is probably one of the most important things in presentation, however. If you make a red drink, you can add a mint leaf on top to contrast the color. Sometimes, if your drink has a thicker liquid in it like milk or cherry syrup, you can choose not to stir it to create a color gradient. Presentation can have an extraordinary influence on taste, so it’s worth getting creative here and think about how you can make your drink look as delicious and interesting as it tastes.

Conclusion

So there you have it. Again, I haven’t gone through any recipes, I’ve just gone through the basic principles and walked you through some examples so you can have a starting point as you experiment with cocktails. With this understanding, you should be able to mix drinks more confidently, and, over time, build good intuition for what will taste good together and what won’t.