What is a cocktail? The first mention of a cocktail as an alcoholic beverage dates from 1806, when it was defined as a drink composed of spirits, sugar, water, and bitters. Since then, mixologists and adventurous drinkers have taken this definition and run with it, creating vast and varied categories of alcoholic beverages that include everything from sours, highballs, and spirit-forward cocktails to flips, fixes, rickeys, collinses, juleps, smashes, and tiki drinks.
Don’t worry, I promise there isn’t a quiz at the end of this section. All you need to know is that each of these categories is defined by the type of ingredients that go into it. For example, a sour is made up of a base spirit, citrus juice, sugar, and (if you like) an egg. A highball is a base spirit, ice, and a usually carbonated mixer. Once you understand the general outline of a cocktail, you can play around with foraged ingredients within the form.
Maybe you’ll start by simply substituting wild ingredients for more traditional cocktail components. Can you use pickled field garlic in place of a pickled onion in your next Gibson? Or cornelian cherry syrup in place of grenadine in your next Tequila Sunrise? The answer to both questions is yes, of course you can.
The easiest way to start incorporating foraged ingredients into your cocktails is by making some simple substitutions. You’re probably familiar with traditional ingredients like lemon juice, simple syrup, and soda, but can you capture those same flavors with wild ingredients? Absolutely. Here are a few useful foraged substitutes. With these basics in your refrigerator, you’re off to a good start.
Sour flavors are essential for creating a balanced cocktail. Personal tastes will vary, but you’ll always want to consider your ratio of spirit:sour:sweet. It’s all about the balance. The word verjuice is French for “green juice” (green in the sense of unripe, not the color green). If you live in a citrus-friendly climate, go ahead and pluck a ripe lemon whenever you need some acidity in your drink. The rest of us can choose from several tart wild edibles, including crab apples, silverberries, currants, and unripe grapes. It’s important that whatever fruit you use be extra sour, so taste what you’re harvesting as you go.
A spirit-forward cocktail usually contains a strong distilled spirit, vermouth or fortified wine, often bitters, and sometimes a liqueur or syrup. These are strong drinks in which all or most of the ingredients contain alcohol.
Unripe grapes are smaller and less juicy than ripe grapes, so you need lots of fruit to make verjuice. It’s important to work quickly during the first few steps to minimize oxidation. Exposure to the air turns the juice from yellow to brown. It will taste fine, but it won’t be as pretty. The flavor of a good grape verjuice will be almost indistinguishable from that of lemon juice.
Unripe grapes are hard, and you’ll need a food mill to crush them, as well as a mesh sieve and paper coffee filters for straining the juice. One pound of unripe grapes yields approximately 3⁄4 to 1 cup of juice.
Load your food mill with its coarsest plate and some grapes, place it on top of a bowl, and start grinding, which takes some hand strength. You’ll end up with a rough mixture of juice and pulp. Don’t worry if a few seeds make it into the bowl.
Next, put on a pair of rubber or latex gloves. Unripe grapes are full of acid (that’s what makes them so sour), and this can sting your hands after prolonged exposure. Place the sieve over another bowl and squeeze handfuls of grape pulp over the sieve to release maximum juice.
Moisten a paper coffee filter so that it absorbs as little juice as possible. Set the moistened filter in the sieve over a clean bowl. Pour the juice through the filter. When sediment builds up in the filter, wet and use a new one.
Pour the filtered juice into a mason jar, cover, and refrigerate the verjuice for 24 to 48 hours. At this point you should see a layer of sediment on the bottom of the jar. Gently pour the liquid off the sediment into a clean jar, and there you have it: verjuice!
Verjuice will keep in the refrigerator for several months.
Wild grapes (Vitis spp.) don’t come with name tags, so you may not know exactly what kind of grapes you’ve foraged. Fortunately, if you’re making verjuice, that doesn’t matter. The important thing is that the unripe grapes must be very sour. Most grapes you’ll find growing wild originally descended from domesticated grapes. Truly wild grapes usually have smaller fruit than cultivated or feral grapes, but they still have lots of flavor.
Silverberries (a.k.a. sweet autumn olives) are invasive shrubs in the eastern half of the United States. The National Park Service has asked that no one plant silverberries, and since each fruit you pick is a seed that won’t have a chance to germinate . . . well, that makes harvesting silverberries like doing a public service, doesn’t it? Each shrub produces large amounts of fruit, making it easy to gather plenty in a short time.
You’ll need a food mill for crushing the berries and a jelly bag for straining. The resulting juice is slightly less tart than lemon juice or grape verjuice, and it has a light pink color.
In terms of juiciness, silverberries are more like blueberries than grapes. Two cups is a good minimum amount to start with and should yield on the order of 3⁄4 cup of juice.
Pull out your trusty food mill, place it over a bowl, and run the fruit through it. Don’t worry if seeds get into the bowl; you’re just breaking open the fruit to release the juices. Transfer the fruit to a jelly bag and strain into a mason jar, squeezing every last bit of liquid out of the pulp.
Silverberry juice will keep in the refrigerator for several months. It will separate, though, so be sure to shake it up before using it in your cocktails.
Silverberries (Elaeagnus umbellata) look ripe long before they actually are. Immature fruit is highly astringent, so wait until the fruit is soft before you harvest. Start tasting in September (depending on where you’re located), and when the fruit is pleasantly tart, go ahead and harvest. This could be 3 to 4 weeks after the berries are fully colored. They may even look slightly shriveled by the time they’re ready to pick.
Silverberry is one of my favorite foraged fruits, and not because it’s high in vitamin C and lycopene, an antioxidant. Let’s just get this out of the way right now: healthy food is not my primary concern. I love the flavor of silverberry and the fact that each shrub produces copious amounts of fruit.
Silverberry juice is a great substitute for lemon juice and can be used any time you don’t mind a little pink in your drink. But it’s more than just an accent of acidity — it’s delicious, and it deserves a drink all its own.
If you don’t have schisandra berries for making the syrup for this recipe, you can use plain old simple syrup, but the extra layers of spice you get from schisandra are worth foraging for. The raw egg white adds a nice creaminess to the drink without diluting the flavor. If you use the egg white, be sure to top the cocktail with a few dashes of light bitters, like the sumac bitter. If you skip the egg white, you can also skip the bitters.
Combine the pisco, silverberry juice, schisandra syrup, and egg white in a shaker and dry-shake for 30 seconds. Add ice and shake again for 30 seconds to thoroughly chill the cocktail. Strain into a rocks glass and top with a few drops of bitters.
Because sugar doesn’t dissolve easily in cold liquids, many cocktail recipes call for syrups, which may vary in their proportions of sugar to water. The difference among these syrups is not only the degree of sweetness but also the mouthfeel. A rich syrup (twice as much sugar as water) is much silkier than a simple syrup (equal parts sugar and water). A light syrup (twice as much water as sugar) is lighter and thinner on the tongue. Simple syrups are the most versatile and most commonly called for behind the bar.
Making flavored varieties allows you to add foraged flavor and sweetness to your drink with a single pour. Syrups may be flavored with mushrooms, herbs, flowers, nuts, or any other wild edible — once you start playing with foraged flavors, you may never settle for plain old simple syrup again. For example, acorn orgeat adds not only sweetness but also a subtle nutty flavor; you almost can’t identify it, but you certainly miss it when it’s not there.
Here is a recipe for making basic simple syrup; see chapter 3 for more on making foraged syrups.
Combine the water and sugar in a saucepan and bring to a boil, whisking to dissolve the sugar. Remove from the heat, cover, and let cool.
Strain the cooled liquid into a bottle or jar, seal, and refrigerate. The syrup will keep up to 3 months in the refrigerator. For long-term storage, process half pint jars in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. Leave 1⁄4 inch headspace.
Making simple syrup
Sodas are essential to many cocktails; you’ll often hear them referred to as mixers. It’s easy to make foraged sodas, like sumac soda and nettle cordial soda, but they’re so tasty, you run the risk of having them outshine the base spirit.
Makes 1 quart
To make sumac soda, you need to first make sumac-ade, then run the chilled sumac-ade through a soda siphon to carbonate it. I’m often asked if you can do this with a SodaStream, and while the answer is a qualified yes, I don’t recommend it. First of all, it voids the SodaStream warranty. Second (and more importantly), you may have a big, messy explosion on your hands if the liquid isn’t unsweetened and 100% clear.
To make sumac-ade, combine the sumac berries with the water and stir vigorously for 2 minutes. Let the mixture sit for several hours (or overnight), until the infusion is dark pink in color. Strain the liquid through a coffee filter and refrigerate.
Sumac-ade can be very sour. Taste it before carbonating and if you want a sweeter soda, add sugar incrementally until it tastes good to you. You want to preserve the tart flavor, so it’s better to start slow rather than oversweeten.
All sumac shrubs with red berries (Rhus spp.) are safe to eat. Poison sumac (Toxicodendron vernix) is a rare plant; it grows in swamps, bogs, and wetlands in the eastern United States and has loose, hanging clusters of white fruit. Stick with red-berried sumac and you’ll be just fine.
Sumac berries are at their most tart and delicious immediately after ripening. The sour flavor comes from a combination of acids that coat the fruit. These acids are washed away by rain, so gather your sumac as soon as possible after the berries ripen. The acid reaccumulates a few days after each rain, but the berries become progressively less tart (and less tasty) with each successive downpour.
Guest Mixologist: Emily Arseneau
Emily Arseneau is a hospitality consultant who landed her first bartending gig in 2006 at a pool hall in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. One dive, two pubs, a beer garden, and a few restaurants later, she arrived at Spirit of ’77 in Portland, Oregon. It would change her perspective on eating and drinking forever.
Emily is now a proud resident of Dallas, Texas, where she has bartended at local favorites like The Porch and managed the bar program at Victor Tangos. Emily has also consulted for HG Sply Co., which focuses on clean eating and drinking, and the Truckyard, an Austin-inspired food truck park and bar. She is a frequent contributor to the Dallas Morning News cocktail lifestyle blog.
Emily has worked as a brand advocate for Sailor Jerry spiced rum and is currently collaborating with an international bartenders’ collective, Collectif 1806, which focuses on cocktail education. Emily appreciates both the traditional and the innovative when it comes to cocktails. She chose The Botanist gin for this cocktail because its complex botanical flavors truly shine in a simple recipe.
Combine the gin and simple syrup in a collins glass, then fill the glass with ice. Top off with sumac soda and stir.
Elderflowers are all the rage these days. I get it. They’re delicate and pretty and have a seductive flavor. But what about elderberries? It’s almost as if people have forgotten all about the bold fruit that follows those delicate blooms.
Maybe it’s because the flavor of raw elderberries is slightly to extremely awful. Thankfully, someone figured out that the application of heat and the addition of sugar makes for a beautiful dark purple/blue syrup with a sweet, deep, fruity flavor. Some say the taste is similar to that of blackberries, but I think they’re fooled by the color. Elderberries have their own worthy flavor.
Benedictine is an herbal liqueur whose main ingredients are angelica, hyssop, and lemon balm. Is it any wonder a forager would be drawn to its complex, plant-based flavors? It’s a very sweet liqueur, so I only use it in small doses. Here it adds a subtle herbal background to the more assertive elderberry. Plus, it inspired the cocktail’s name.
Combine the vodka, elderberry syrup, and Benedictine in a shaker full of ice and shake for 30 seconds. Strain into a rocks glass and top with sumac soda.
Note: When prepping elderberries for juicing, be sure to remove all the big stems. And one more word of warning: elderberry juice stains, so work carefully or wear an apron!
Elderberries (Sambucus spp.) ripen in large umbels of blue/black fruit, making it easy to pick several cups very quickly. There are different species of blue-fruited elderberries and they’re all edible. Red-fruited elderberries are more controversial. Some people say they’re toxic and others say they’re not. But everyone agrees they don’t taste very good, so don’t bother!
Forager’s Tip: After harvesting your elderberries, put them in the freezer. It’s much easier to separate the frozen fruit from the stems than it is when the berries are fresh.
Stinging nettles are a much loved wild green, a favorite among foragers. I harvest as many nettles as I can in spring, then blanch and freeze them to use all year round. I used to throw away the cooking water, but not anymore! That liquid, a.k.a. pot liquor, is not only nutritious (it contains vitamin C, vitamin A, and minerals, including calcium, potassium, zinc, and iron), it’s also full of flavor. Some foragers drink it straight, as a medicinal tea. I prefer to make mine into a delicious cocktail ingredient.
I blanch several batches of nettles in a single pot of water, straining the greens and saving the water to cook the next batch. I do this for several reasons: it saves water, the cooking water is already hot (so it speeds up the blanching process), and it yields an extra-strong nettle tea, which makes for a lovely cordial.
To make nettle cordial, strain the pot liquor through cheesecloth or a very fine mesh strainer to catch all the bits and pieces of nettle leaf. For every quart of nettle pot liquor, add 1 tablespoon chopped fresh wild ginger rhizomes or 1 teaspoon dried rhizomes and 1⁄4 cup agave nectar. Bring the liquid to a boil, then remove from the heat and add three or four slices of lemon. Cover the pot and let it sit for 24 hours. The following day, strain off the solids, bottle the liquid, and refrigerate. It will keep, chilled, for several weeks.
Run the nettle cordial through a soda siphon to carbonate. The sweetener in nettle cordial makes it unsuitable for carbonating in a SodaStream.
There are several species of edible nettles, but the stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) is the most common. The stems and undersides of stinging nettle leaves are covered with tiny, hollow hairs (trichomes) that contain several chemicals, including histamine and formic acid. When the hairs are broken — when you touch the leaves, for example — they release the chemicals, which causes the infamous sting.
Nettles are most tender and tasty in spring, before they flower. Use sturdy gloves (the stingers can penetrate light cloth) to pick the top several pairs of leaves and stems. Nettle stingers are destroyed by cooking and drying; either method renders this tasty plant harmless.
Rye is a cool-climate grain. It makes me think of characters in a Strindberg or Ibsen play, silently harvesting their rye as the sun sets at three in the afternoon. And while nettles grow in a wide range of climates, there’s something austere about them that fits with the whole “peasants harvesting rye” image.
Perhaps that’s because they sting, which means we must suffer to attain our goal, much as the characters in those Strindberg and Ibsen plays always seemed to be suffering for some reason. Those people were never happy. I think they needed more cocktails.
Pour the rye over ice in a rocks glass. Top up with nettle cordial soda and serve.
There are several ways to approach the process of creating a foraged cocktail. Simple one-to-one substitutions, trading new foraged flavors for traditional ingredients, are a great way to build confidence and get started with wild cocktails. They allow you to flex your muscles and explore the vast world of wild edibles. As you become familiar with foraged flavors, you may want to try entirely new flavor combinations. Opportunities abound for wild experimentation.
Let’s look at how a traditional whiskey sour — made with whiskey (base spirit), lemon juice (something sour), sugar (something sweet), and, sometimes, egg whites — morphed into the Cascadian Sour.
After harvesting a quart of Oregon grapes, I made syrup from the fruit. The grapes are a gorgeous deep purple and, even in syrup form, quite tart. Oregon is a cool and rainy place, which made me think of rye whiskey, made from a grain that grows well in cool temperatures. Verjuice is an obvious substitute for lemon juice, and I added a few drops of licorice fern bitters because I’d foraged the licorice fern in Washington State, which is right next door to Oregon. That part of the country is known as Cascadia, hence the name. It’s like a game of free association, where one flavor leads you to the next. In the end you have an entirely different (yet somehow familiar) drink.
Or a recipe might come to you in a flash of inspiration. I once brought home some ripe carissa fruit from a trip to Florida, and while I appreciated the sweetness and bright pink beauty of its flesh, the flavor was a little bland. I hadn’t tried working with it, but I kept thinking about how I might use it. I thought about it a lot. Thanks to my very active subconscious, I woke up one morning with the fully formed recipe in my head — carissa with white rum and schisandra syrup — and tested it before breakfast. Nailed it! (See Two Sisters.)
Occasionally I think of a name for a cocktail and build the drink around that. I find it much harder to name a drink than to create a drink, so when I get a good name I hesitate to let it go. That’s how the Gunwale Jumperwas born. The title conjured up memories of summer camp and northern lakes surrounded by spruce trees and blueberry bushes. I worked from there.
Of course there are failures. I’d rather not go into specifics, but every mixologist ends up pouring booze down the drain. Sometimes you have to try six or seven different versions of a flavor combination before you get it right. (Does sassafras syrup go better with bourbon? With rye? With bourbon and rye?) Don’t be afraid to make mistakes . . . that’s how you make brilliant discoveries.
Most bartenders will tell you to add the base spirit last, the idea being that if you mess up, spill, or mismeasure, you won’t have ruined your most expensive ingredient. However, when you’re working with foraged ingredients, the spirit may no longer be the most precious part of your cocktail. Which is easier to replace, reposado tequila or persimmon purée? Small-batch rye or sassafras syrup? Yes, those spirits may be expensive, but there are some ingredients money can’t buy.
Memories of summer camp and northern lakes surrounded by spruce trees and blueberry bushes inspired the name of the Gunwale Jumper.
This cocktail includes both Oregon grape and licorice fern, a plant native to and symbolic of the Pacific Northwest. It’s a mighty tasty beverage wherever you make it.
Oregon grape is a shrub grown primarily for its ornamental value; most gardeners don’t realize the fruit is edible. On their own, Oregon grapes are face-twistingly sour but combined with sugar, they make a balanced, sweet-tart flavoring.
Sour cocktails generally contain a base spirit, citrus juice, and a sweetener. A bit of raw egg white is optional. If you have an aversion to raw egg whites, you can skip that part, but you’ll be missing out. The egg whites, when properly shaken, add a silkiness to the drink, creating an emulsion that is slightly thick and very smooth. The bitters are a finishing touch, not only adding another layer of complexity but also keeping the egg whites smelling fresh. (See Using Egg Whites.)
Combine the rye, verjuice, Oregon grape syrup, and egg white in a shaker and dry-shake for 30 seconds. Add ice to the shaker and shake again for 30 seconds to thoroughly chill the cocktail. Strain into a rocks glass and top with a few drops of licorice fern bitters for an extra burst of PNW flavor.
Oregon grape, also known as mahonia (Mahonia aquifolium), is a prickly plant. It doesn’t have thorns, but the leaves are sharp and pointy, like holly leaves. And the juice of its dark blue-black berries stains the skin. So wear sturdy gloves when you’re harvesting.
Berries ripen from mid- to early summer, depending on where you live. They hang in grapelike clusters (hence the common name), and ripe fruit will stay on the shrubs for several months. With time, the fruit may begin to shrivel. Harvest them before they dry up.
Foraged mixology is interdisciplinary. In addition to a few tools for gathering ingredients, you need some basic kitchen equipment and at least a few necessities for mixing up your cocktails when you get home. Many foraging tools are also gardening tools, so you probably have a few of these on hand already.
Pruners make it easy to cut branches and thick stems, while regular scissors are adequate for snipping flowers, leaves, and the slender stems of fruit like crab apples.
A special mushroom knife is useful not only for trimming your mushrooms in the field but also for brushing off any dirt that clings to your harvest. If you bag your mushrooms with dirt clinging to the bottom of the stems, that dirt will fall off in transit, bouncing around and making a dirty mess. The more cleaning you do in the field, the easier your work will be back in the kitchen.
Be sure to bring plenty of bags with you when you go foraging, so you can keep your harvests separate and clean. Paper bags are best for mushrooms, which may turn slimy in plastic.
In addition to several foraging tools and a well-stocked bar, the foraging mixologist needs a few common kitchen utensils for processing the bounty of the forest and hedgerow.
A food mill is essential for pulping fruits with medium to large seeds. No one minds eating a blueberry seed, but many wild fruits have seeds that are too hard to chew and too large to swallow easily. A food mill allows you to separate the fruit pulp from the seeds faster and more easily than straining or picking out the seeds by hand. Get a mill with interchangeable plates so you can choose the one with holes just the right size to catch the seeds but let the pulp pass through.
Pulping fruit with a food mill
A spice grinder is great for crushing or powdering spices. I keep a separate coffee bean grinder for spices. You can use a mortar and pestle for roughly breaking up seeds and spices, but for a fine powder, an electric grinder saves a lot of elbow grease.
A jelly bag is an essential tool for juicing. You’ll also want a jelly bag stand so you can leave the juice to drip, unattended. The fine mesh of a jelly bag produces a clear, pulp-free juice. You may use cheesecloth instead of a jelly bag, but you’ll need to use multiple layers; line a colander or strainer with three layers of cheesecloth to get the same kind of clarity you would from a jelly bag. Both jelly bags and cheesecloth are washable and reusable, although jelly bags have a longer life span. I also find them easier to use and more convenient to store. Go jelly bags!
A blender comes in handy not only for making purées from foraged fruits but also for crushing ice and making slushies.
A boiling water bath canner is useful if you want to preserve your syrups, pickles, and preserves for long-term storage. You can buy a dedicated boiling water bath canner with a rack to hold jars, or you can use a large pasta pot and place a folded dish towel on the bottom to keep the jars from breaking as they boil.
A well-stocked bar isn’t critical, but it’s fun. Here are a few items that make the mixologist’s life that much more pleasant.
A jigger or other measuring device is useful for a properly measured cocktail. Professional mixologists use jiggers smoothly and easily. The most versatile are double sided, with interior markings for interim measurements. For example, one side will hold 1 ounce, with markings for 1⁄2 and 3⁄4 ounce. The other side will hold 11⁄2 ounces, with markings for 3⁄4 ounce.
Personally, I prefer a clear plastic 2-ounce measuring vessel with continuous markings at 1⁄4-ounce intervals. It’s just easier for me. Maybe if I were a professional mixologist and made hundreds of drinks every night I’d be a master of the jigger, but I’m not. Also, I like a set of teaspoons that includes a f teaspoon measure because sometimes you want just a taste of an ingredient. Jiggers, and measurements in general, are important not only for keeping your proportions correct but also for making your results repeatable (or avoidable).
Muddlers come in many shapes and sizes. You may not think you need a muddler, but it really is the best tool for crushing fruits. You can get away with using any number of kitchen tools (the end of a rolling pin, the handle of a wooden spoon), but it’s nice to have a dedicated muddler. Muddlers may be smooth ended or toothed and made from wood, plastic, or stainless steel. Don’t use anything with paint or varnish; it will eventually come off in the cocktail. My muddler of choice is a smooth-ended wood muddler that looks like a large pestle.
Muddlers shouldn’t be used on herbs except with a very light hand. Muddling can tear their leaves and release chlorophyll, which has a bitter taste. Instead, spank your herbs by laying them flat on one palm and smacking them a few times with your other hand. When you smell the essential oils, your herbs have been punished enough and are ready to use.
A soda siphon is a bottle used to carbonate liquid by forcing carbon dioxide into the liquid. You use individual CO2 cartridges to carbonate each batch of liquid, like sumac-ade and nettle tea. SodaStream is a brand of siphon designed for household use. While the manufacturer expressly tells you not to use SodaStream equipment to carbonate anything other than water (you add their proprietary flavors after carbonation), you can use it to carbonate nonwater beverages safely as long as the liquids you use have not been sweetened. However, doing so will void the manufacturer’s warranty and may also cause a messy explosion. Flavored waters, like sumac-ade, are easily overcarbonated in the SodaStream. If you want to experiment, aim for undercarbonation and, trust me, do it outside. You’re welcome.
Is there anyone who has not heard James Bond call for his martini “shaken, not stirred”? I love James as much as the next gal, but he got it wrong when it came to mixology. If a cocktail includes only alcohol-based ingredients (like a classic martini with gin and vermouth), it should be stirred. The gentle motion of stirring allows the drink to be properly chilled without integrating air into the mix. This maintains the silky, smooth feel appropriate for this kind of cocktail.
A dedicated bar spoon may feel like an extravagance, but it isn’t, not really. Yes, you can stir a cocktail with a knife or a chopstick, but the long handle of a bar spoon lets you spin the contents of your cocktail glass or shaker with an effortless twirl. And since you want to stir for at least 30 seconds, effortless is good.
Cocktails that include juices, fruit, eggs, or cream need to be shaken to fully integrate all these ingredients with the alcohol. The result is frothy, creamy, and aerated. A “dry shake” is a preliminary shaking, with no ice; it’s used for egg-based drinks and allows for frothing and emulsification. It is usually followed by a regular shake, with ice. There are two kinds of shakers.
A cobbler shaker is all metal and has three pieces: a large metal bottom tin, a smaller top with a built-in strainer, and a cap. This is my preferred shaker for several reasons: 1) I like the convenience of the built-in strainer; 2) it’s faster and easier to pour from; 3) it weighs less and so is less tiring to shake; and 4) it’s small enough that I can hold it and shake it in one hand.
A Boston shaker is composed of a pint glass and a shaking tin. Some people like it because you can see what’s inside the pint glass. Others don’t because of the uneven weight of the two pieces and the breakability of the pint glass. There are all-metal versions of the Boston shaker, although they are less common. The Boston shaker is the choice of most professional bartenders. If you go with a Boston shaker, you’ll need a separate strainer.
A julep strainer is usually used for straining stirred drinks. Its small round holes allow liquids to pass through without overaerating them.
A Hawthorne strainer is primarily used for straining shaken drinks. A spring holds the strainer in place inside the tin when you’re pouring the drink. How firmly you press the spring against the rim of the tin controls how quickly you pour the cocktail (you want to pour fast to maintain the aeration) and how finely you strain. When the spring is held just barely touching the rim of the tin, the strainer holes are wide open and the cocktail pours quickly. When the spring is pushed hard against the rim of the tin, the openings in the strainer are reduced, which slows the flow of the cocktail and catches more chunks of ice and fruit.
Mesh strainers are useful for finely straining a cocktail and for making various juices, syrups, and infusions. I often strain liqueurs through a fine yogurt strainer to make sure they’re crystal clear.
Shaking or stirring your cocktail with ice and then straining it off the ice allows you to chill your beverage without overdiluting it. This is extremely important in maintaining the balance of a mixed drink, especially one you’ve taken great care to create. And let’s face it, nobody makes a foraged cocktail casually. This kind of mixology takes commitment. If you do use ice in the serving glass, or if you make a frozen blended drink with ice, make this choice thoughtfully.
For frozen drinks (e.g., Frozen Persimmon Margarita), factor the extra water into the recipe so the flavorful ingredients aren’t overwhelmed and weakened. If you want to serve a spirit-forward cocktail on the rocks, use one large ice cube rather than several smaller cubes. A single large cube will melt more slowly, maintaining the integrity of your ingredient balance. And never underestimate the importance of clear ice. Cloudy ice not only takes away from the beauty of your beverage but also may have picked up stray flavors in the freezer. Boiling your ice cube water and making ice in closed containers guarantees clear, pure cubes.
There are so many different kinds of glasses out there: beautiful shapes, various sizes and materials. Sometimes your glassware choice is an integral part of the cocktail and sometimes it’s just a matter of personal taste. I find myself reaching for a classic champagne coupe more often than anything else. I like the way it looks and it’s the right size for a spirit-forward cocktail (my beverage of choice). If you tend to like cocktails with a healthy dose of nonalcoholic mixer, you may find a highball glass to be your best friend.
Martini glasses are for martinis, margarita glasses are for margaritas, and a champagne flute shows off the bubbles in sparkling wine. But in most cases you can use whichever glass you have on hand or like the best. I wouldn’t turn down a Sumac Spritzer just because you served it to me in a rocks glass. Here are some of the most useful glass types. I like to pick them up at flea markets and secondhand stores; they can usually be had for about a dollar apiece.
Martini glasses are used for Manhattans, martinis, and other cocktails that are served straight up rather than on the rocks.
Rocks glasses come in single and double sizes. The double rocks glass is also known as an old-fashioned glass. Rocks glasses are used to serve cocktails on the rocks.
A highball glass is the same as a collins glass and is used for a wide variety of shaken or stirred cocktails.
The champagne flute is great for any cocktail containing sparkling wine.
The classic champagne coupe (or coupette) can be used for much more than champagne. It holds 5 to 6 ounces of liquid and is generally used for drinks served straight up, not over ice.
