A little more than 100 years ago, a dedicated band of radicals sparked a revolution. But this was not a political movement, these were diehard cocktailians. Nostalgia is unnecessary, however, for we are blessed to be living in the second golden age of cocktails. There has never been such a great variety of spirits and liqueurs available, and the wealth of talented and creative people working with those ingredients is similarly unprecedented. Just as home cooks have benefited tremendously from advances in restaurant kitchens, you too can mix drinks as delicious as those of any “bar chef.”
Baking is a highly scientific endeavor—too much of this, not enough of that, and your efforts will fall flat. So if you’re making bread, it's best to stick to the recipe. But if you’ve got a soup or a stew on the stove, there’s no harm in adding a little more garlic than the recipe calls for. And if the list of ingredients includes, say, okra, and you’re not an okra fan, you might leave it out altogether. True, the results won’t be exactly as its creator envisaged, but you’ll be happy, and that’s what matters most. That’s the way it is with cocktails and mixed drinks: Nothing is written in stone.
One huge advantage you have over the professional bartender is that you can tailor your cocktails to the taste of your guest. Does he or she enjoy a strong drink? If so, you might add more of the base spirit than you would if you were pouring for someone who likes their alcohol well disguised by fruit juices and mixers. Does your guest have a sweet tooth? Try adding a little more liqueur than the recipe calls for. As with chili or curry, if you know your guests enjoy their food hot, you add more spices; if you don’t know their preferences, it’s a good idea to ask—or just go easy on the hot stuff.
Of course, a typical drink recipe doesn’t take into account the individual taste of the drinker, and only rarely will it specify which brand to use. But when you actually go to make a drink from a book, it’s important to consider the specific ingredients you’re using—if a recipe calls for gin, which gin are you going to use? If you choose Tanqueray, for instance, it will be more pungent and perfumed than if you had opted for Bombay, a much softer, more subtle gin.
A Manhattan recipe might call for three parts whiskey, one part sweet vermouth, and up to three dashes of bitters. Recipes such as these are mere guidelines. You could make the drink with Wild Turkey Rye, a wonderful straight rye that has hints of dried cherries and honey. Or perhaps you’re a bourbon lover and prefer the full-bodied Eagle Rare Single Barrel, a smoky whiskey with some very complex fruit characteristics. If you use Maker’s Mark bourbon you’ll find notes of vanilla, honey, oranges, and sweet butter. But can that one recipe work equally well with all three of these whiskeys? Of course not. You need to be flexible when you make cocktails.
One way to zero in on the best ingredients and proportions for a particular drink is to taste each component separately. Going back to the Manhattan, once you’ve tasted several whiskeys, the sweet vermouth, and the bitters, you should begin to get an idea of how these ingredients will complement each other. You might decide to use four parts of Maker’s Mark to each part of vermouth since it isn’t a spirit that needs a great deal of soothing, and you might choose to put in three—or even five—dashes of bitters, just to add some spiciness to the drink. I’ve seen complete novices successfully prepare some very complicated cocktails using this method. And don’t hesitate to taste the drink before you serve it (dip a straw into the glass, place your index finger over the top of the straw, then release the captured liquid onto your tongue). Would you serve a bowl of soup without trying it first?
It might seem like a big leap from learning how to make a classic drink to creating a new cocktail, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s fairly easy to fashion new drinks by marrying, say, three different rums to four different fruit juices, but it’s far better to start with some established formulas and give them a tweak or two. Take, for instance, the Margarita: tequila, triple sec, and fresh lime juice. Simple, right? You have a base spirit that you sweeten by adding triple sec (an orange-flavored liqueur), then you add the lime juice to provide a counterpoint to the liqueur and balance the drink. This formula is repeated over and over again in some of today’s most popular cocktails. The chart below details some of these cocktails (I call them New Orleans Sours because the first recorded drink to follow this formula was the Brandy Crusta, a drink mentioned in an 1862 cocktail book by Jerry Thomas and credited to Santina, “a celebrated Spanish caterer” who worked in the Big Easy).
So the Cosmopolitan is simply a Margarita with a different base spirit, and a little cranberry juice thrown in, mainly for color. Could you make a rum-based drink using this formula? Of course. Could you remove the triple sec from the equation and substitute another liqueur? Certainly. But you must remember to taste the ingredients so you can adjust the ratios.
I make my Margaritas with three parts white tequila (preferably 100 percent agave), two parts triple sec, and one part fresh lime juice. My recipe isn’t sweet enough for some people’s taste, but that’s how I like it. In the course of experimenting with the Margarita, I substituted Disaronno (an almond-flavored liqueur in the Amaretto family) for the triple sec, but I found it necessary to adjust the proportions of the other ingredients because the Disaronno is sweeter than most triple secs. I ended up using a 3:2:2 formula, adding extra lime juice to balance out the sweetness of the Disaronno.
If you look at how many different liqueurs are available these days, you’ll realize that the possibilities of making variations on the Margarita are almost infinite. Try an apple liqueur or perhaps a butterscotch-flavored schnapps, and you’ll be on the way to mixing drinks of your very own in the style of the masters of the craft.
New Orleans Sours
Margarita
tequila
triple sec
lime juice
Sidecar
brandy
triple sec
lemon juice
Kamikaze
vodka
triple sec
lime juice
Cosmopolitan
citrus vodka
triple sec
lime juice
cranberry juice
Metropolitan
currant vodka
triple sec
lime juice
cranberry juice
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