sprayed, arguments might ensue. When it comes time to break the tins apart, push the small tin toward the gap between the shakers while you strike the large shaker at the beginning of the gap with the palm of your hand (this sounds harder than it is).
UPSHOT: Shake the way you like.
Putting It All Together: Making Some Daiquiris
At long last, it’s time to learn while shaking some daiquiris. The classic drink is a fairly low-alcohol, high-sugar cocktail, lying at one end of the shaken-drink spectrum.
The Hemingway Daiquiri is a variant high in alcohol and low in sugar (Hemingway was both a diabetic and a booze hound) and thus sits at the opposite end of this spectrum. If you fix both of these drinks in your mind, you will be able to judge all other shaken sour drinks in between.
CLASSIC DAIQUIRI INGREDIENTS
MAKES 51/3-OUNCE (159-ML) DRINK AT 15% ALCOHOL BY VOLUME, 8.9 G/100 ML SUGAR, 0.85% ACID
2 ounces (60 ml) light, clean rum (40% alcohol by volume)
3⁄4 ounce (22.5 ml) simple syrup
3⁄4 ounce (22.5 ml) freshly strained lime juice 2 drops saline solution or a pinch of salt
Before dilution this drink has a volume of 105 milliliters, is 22% alcohol by volume, and has 13.5 grams of sugar per 100 ml of fluid and 1.29% acid.
HEMINGWAY DAIQUIRI INGREDIENTS
MAKES ONE 54/5-OUNCE (174-ML) DRINK AT 16.5% ALCOHOL BY VOLUME, 4.2 G/100 ML SUGAR, 0.98% ACID
2 ounces (60 ml) light, clean rum (40% alcohol by volume)
3⁄4 ounce (22.5 ml) freshly strained lime juice
1⁄2 ounce (15 ml) Luxardo Maraschino (32% alcohol by volume)
1⁄2 ounce (15 ml) freshly strained grapefruit juice 2 drops saline solution or a pinch of salt
Before dilution this drink has a volume of 112 milliliters, is 25.6% alcohol by volume, and has a minuscule 6.4 g/100 ml sugar and a whopping 1.52% acid.
PROCEDURE
Shake the ingredients for both drinks separately as described above for 10 seconds, using normal ice, and strain them into chilled coupe glasses. The Classic Daiquiri should have picked up roughly 55 milliliters of water and now be at 15% alcohol by volume with 8.9 grams per 100 ml of sugar and 0.84% acid. The Hemingway should pick up roughly 60 milliliters of water and have a final alcohol by volume of 16.7%,
with 4.2 grams per 100 ml sugar and 0.99% acid. If you crunch the numbers, both drinks were diluted a similar amount on a percentage basis. I have run tests showing that in general, high-alcohol drinks dilute more on a percentage basis and get colder than low-alcohol drinks do, although a high-alcohol drink shaken side-by-side with a low-alcohol drink will always have higher alcohol by volume in the end. At the same time, I have run tests that show that high-sugar drinks dilute more than lower-sugar drinks do on a percentage basis. In the case of the Classic Daiquiri versus the Hemingway, these two dilution factors roughly cancel each other out.
Taste them. See what you think. I vastly prefer the Classic Daiquiri, even though it is a bit too sweet. When I make it, I just short the simple syrup a bit—use a flat or short ¾ ounce of simple and a full ¾ ounce of lime.
For a second experiment, make both drinks again with the same specs. This time shake for only 5 or 6 seconds. The results should be totally different. Your shaking time was not long enough, and your drinks will be underdiluted. The Classic should be almost undrinkably sweet. The Hemingway will be too tart but acceptable. The lesson here:
as sugar gets diluted, it attenuates in flavor more rapidly than acid, so high dilution favors adding more sugar, or less acid, for a particular flavor profile.
If you are up for a third experiment, make the two drinks again but shake for 20
seconds. They will be slightly more diluted than they were with the 10-second shake, but not as much as you’d expect—the last 10 seconds of shaking took place in the shallow part of the chilling curve and very little dilution took place. If there’s any difference in taste, the Hemingway should taste a bit thin, as its meager sugar peters out even more.
On the right, a Hemingway daiquiri. Standard variety on the left.
Stirred Drinks: Manhattan versus Negroni
Stirring a drink may seem like a simple task. In fact, it is more difficult to make a consistent stirred cocktail than almost any other type of cocktail. Stirring is a relatively inefficient chilling technique. It takes a long period of constant stirring for your drink to approach its minimum possible temperature. In our martini experiment, it took over 2 minutes of stirring for the temperature and dilution to plateau—way longer than anyone should stir a drink. The main variables are the size of the ice cubes you use and how fast and long you stir. Smaller ice has a large surface area, and chills and dilutes quickly. Really fine shaved ice can chill and dilute extremely quickly, getting down to near-equilibrium in a few short seconds of flaccid stirring (see the section on Blended Drinks, here)—not ideal for most stirred drinks, which aren’t designed to be highly diluted or overly cold. Conversely, a stirred drink made with giant 2-inch ice cubes dilutes and chills very slowly, usually leading to an overly warm, underdiluted drink. Some bartenders like this style, but I don’t. If I want a low-dilution, merely cool drink, I’ll order a built drink (see here). Stirred drinks should fall somewhere in between these and shaken drinks. The best ice to use for stirred drinks, therefore, is medium-sized and relatively dry: large cubes that you freshly crack into smaller cubes with the back of your bar spoon, or regular machine ice from which you shake the excess water. The size isn’t vitally important, because you can adjust the dilution and
temperature of the drink by how long and how fast you stir. If your ice is on the large side, you will stir longer or faster to achieve the same result you’ll get with smaller ice. Got small ice? Stir less or stir slower.
In real life, you often can’t choose what ice you’ll be working with at any given time, and you should thus be prepared to adjust your stirring to match your ice. It isn’t a good idea to change your technique; just adjust how long you stir. Practice stirring so that you can stir two drinks at a time with both hands stirring at the same rate. Try to make your stirring style consistent. If you are consistent, you can taste the first few cocktails you make in an evening and adjust how long you stir based on the ice you have.
I always prefer stirring in stainless steel shaking tins, because they have a very low thermal mass. It doesn’t take very much ice melting to chill them down. They don’t affect the temperature or dilution of your drink. Large glass stirring vessels can be gorgeous, but they have a huge thermal mass and can change the finished temperature of the drink by several degrees—enough to make the drinks seem too warm when served. You can get around this problem by prechilling all your stirring vessels with ice and water, but don’t bother. Most of my bartenders want to use glass.
I tell them that’s fine, so long as they pledge to prechill every single mixing glass with ice and water every time they stir a drink, without exception. Metal tends to win out.
Many bartenders add a boatload of ice to their mixing vessels when they are stirring. But if ice doesn’t touch the liquid, it does no good. Some excess ice can be helpful if you think the ice will settle a lot during stirring, but most bartenders use far more than is necessary. At best, the extra ice is useless; at worst, the extra water contained on its surface will overdilute the drink. Too little ice is also bad. Tiny amounts of ice don’t have enough chilling power to complete the task and can’t deliver what power they have rapidly enough. Ideally, you want the ice to contact the drink you are chilling from the bottom of the vessel all the way to the top of the liquid. To insure that this happens, you need to add more ice than is strictly necessary, because ice floats and you need a bit extra on top to weigh the mass of ice down into your drink. Any more ice than that is counterproductive, and a pain if you are making drinks at home, where your supply of ice is usually limited.
Remember, stirring drinks is a game of repeatability. Develop a stirring style and remain consistent and your drinks will remain consistent. The essence of stirring is pure dilution and chilling—no texture development, no aeration. Because stirred drinks aren’t aerated, they can look amazingly clear. I love that clarity and don’t want to add anything to my stirred cocktails to ruin it. Stirred drinks are relatively boozy (our Manhattan was 26 percent alcohol). The high booze level of the finished cocktails is why most stirred drinks tend to be very spirit-forward, not light and refreshing.
Refreshing is hard to achieve at 26 percent alcohol by volume.