OPINION
LIQUID INTELLIGENCE Cocktail making tips from the top, with Zoe Burgess
ice will change the requirements. My advice to you is to pay attention to your environment and ingredients and taste each drink you make to teach your palate. Stirring is a very accurate method of combining, diluting and chilling ingredients in a cocktail tin. This method makes dilution easily monitorable as it gives us the flexibility to stop stirring and taste the drink before we strain it. We can then judge if we’ve hit the dilution sweet spot or if we need a few more stirs to get us there. This is important when making a spirit-focused cocktail such as a Martini, Old Fashioned or Manhattan as our
Dilution is a balancing act and something you can only learn through the practice of making and tasting cocktails.
Stirred Dry Gin Martini 50ml gin 10ml dry vermouth Olive or lemon disc to garnish Method: Fill a cocktail tin with cubed ice. Add the gin and dry vermouth to the tin and stir. Double-strain into your selected glass, garnish with an olive or lemon disc that’s had its oils expressed over the surface of the liquid and serve.
Shaken Margarita 50ml tequila blanco 25ml triple sec 25ml lime juice Lime wedge to garnish Method: Fill a cocktail shaker with cubed ice. Add the tequila blanco, triple sec and lime juice to the shaker then seal and shake. Doublestrain into a saltrimmed rocks glass, garnish with a lime wedge and serve.
focus here is the flavour profile of the main spirit; we need to retain the aromatic quality of the gin or bourbon while we evolve this to create a new overall cocktail flavour profile. Visually, stirring produces a transparent liquid with great clarity – an important consideration as part of the fun of cocktails is how pleasing they are on the eye. Personally, nothing beats the look of a crystal-clear Martini in a beautiful glass. Shaking is a more aggressive method that’s carried out in a sealed cocktail shaker. It also combines, dilutes and chills but here we have the additional effect of adding texture to the liquid as shaking aerates it. Shaking can make dilution a little trickier to judge as we don’t have the same flexibility of tasting as we make. It’s a method often used in sour cocktails where we need a little more dilution to integrate the sour taste of citrus with the cocktail’s other ingredients. A shaken cocktail will have a cloudy liquid when served and most importantly this cocktail will have more texture on the palate; feeling light and almost fluffy. If you happen to make a cocktail with an egg white foam then you are in for a textural treat – this transformation is something that only happens when you dry shake a cocktail (that is, shake a cocktail without ice first, then add ice and shake a second time).
‘The Cocktail Cabinet: The art, science and pleasure of mixing the perfect drink’ by Zoe Burgess will be published 1 September 2022 at £20, Mitchell Beazley, octopusbooks.co.uk. Available to pre-order.
Left: Sorry Mr Bond, you were wrong!
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AL A MY, LU CY P OP E
Stirred vs shaken? It’s the ageold question that still divides people, especially when hosting and making cocktails in the home. You may be well schooled in the reasoning behind the methods involved in making cocktails and have established your preferences. But, for those of you who’d like a little information on how these methods of making affect a cocktail or wonder why this is debated, then read on. Firstly, and most importantly, both stirring and shaking add dilution and chill to a cocktail and this should not be overlooked. Warm, overly alcoholic cocktails are hard to consume let alone enjoy. So, irregardless of your cocktail choice be aware that the goal here is to create a palatable drink. The correct amount of water added via ice dilution will make or break a drink as it opens up its flavour profile, making everything more perceivable and enjoyable. Dilution is a balancing act and something you can only learn through the practice of making and tasting cocktails. There is no set rule as to how many stirs or shakes produce the correct result, as factors such as how warm a room is and the quality of your
