Ice shavers come in many varieties. Anything that will produce good-textured shaved ice will work, including my kids’ Snoopy Sno-Cone maker. I favor machines that shave ice off one large block; they produce a very consistent product and are easy to use. When we make shaved-ice drinks at the bar, we shave the ice to order into 5-ounce coupe glasses. To get the dilution right consistently, do the following:
• Divide your drink recipe into two roughly equal volumes. Add half to the coupe. You need to melt some of the ice right away as it falls into the booze for the presentation to work properly.
• Shave ice into the coupe until a beautiful mountain of ice domes over the top of the glass. You will add roughly 70 grams.
• Put the coupe in front of the customer and pour the remaining half of the drink over the ice. The ice should melt almost instantly, and the level of the drink should be almost at the rim of the coupe.
• Give the drink a gentle stir with a bar spoon to finish the chilling and thoroughly mix the ingredients. Some ice will be present, but most will be melted.
Shaving ice into a coupe glass. Note that there is already some liquid in the coupe, which melts the ice immediately. A dry coupe couldn’t hold enough shaved ice to make the drink.
POURING A SHAVED ICE DRINK: THE MARG
POURING A SHAVED ICE DRINK: The Marg.
Blender Marg
MAKES ONE 51/3-OUNCE (158-ML) DRINK AT 17.2% ALCOHOL BY VOLUME, 7.9 G/100 ML SUGAR, 0.57% ACID
INGREDIENTS
1 ounce (30 ml) Cointreau (Yep, you read right: more Cointreau than mezcal.)
3⁄4 ounce (22.5 ml) La Puritita mezcal. (A robust blanco mezcal is required for this drink because so little is used. Tequila would be lost. I used a
blanco because I didn’t want any oak in this drink.)
1⁄2 ounce (15 ml) Yellow Chartreuse (Completely untraditional, really good.)
1⁄2 ounce (15 ml) freshly strained lime juice
10 drops Hellfire bitters or spicy nonacidic stuff of your choice 5 drops saline solution or a generous pinch of salt
About 4 ounces (120 grams) ice PROCEDURE
Throw everything into a blender, blend just till the ice is fully crushed, and drink.
There should be some ice left over. If there isn’t, you’ve blended too long and the friction from the blades has led you to overdilute your drink.
This blender margarita has an initial recipe volume of 2¾ ounces (82.5 ml) instead of the 3¾ ounces (112.5 ml) of the shaken recipe. It will pick up around 2½ ounces (75 ml) of water from the blending, making a drink with a final alcohol by volume of around 17.2%. This recipe works because both Cointreau and Yellow Chartreuse have high alcohol and high sugar contents, so the amount of liquid in the recipe is lower, even though the alcohol level is the same. The blender recipe therefore has 2¼ ounces (67.5 ml) of 40% alcohol-by-volume booze in it and about 12.75 grams of sugar—the equivalent of a little under ¾ ounce (0.7 ounce, 21 ml) of simple syrup—
all with a total liquid volume of only 2¾ ounces (82.5 ml)!
BLENDER MARG
The beauty of this recipe is that it can be generalized. Just keep the alcohol:sugar:acid volume ratio fairly constant. The specs for a generic blender sour are as follows.
Generic Blender Sour
GENERAL INGREDIENTS
21⁄4 ounces (67.5 ml) of liquid that contains around 0.9 ounce (27 ml) of pure ethanol and 12.75 grams of sugar
1⁄2 ounce (30 ml) freshly strained lemon, lime, or other sour juice 4 ounces (120 ml) ice
2–5 drops saline solution or a generous pinch of salt SPECIFIC INGREDIENTS
The trick to making blender recipes is to find or make a mixture of liqueurs and spirits and flavors that add up to give the proper ethanol:sugar:volume ratio. Eighty-proof spirits contain the requisite amount of alcohol per unit volume but contain no sugar.
Adding simple syrup throws off the liquid balance. To get the sugar you can use high- alcohol liqueurs, like we did in the margarita, or very high proof spirits, like Lemon Hart 151-proof rum, or you can sugar your booze.
SUGARED BOOZE INGREDIENTS
MAKES 1140 ML (38 OUNCES) LIQUOR AT EITHER 44% OR 35% ALCOHOL BY VOLUME
212 grams superfine sugar (regular granulated sugar is okay but will take longer to dissolve)
1 liter either 80- or 100-proof spirits (40% or 50% alcohol by volume) PROCEDURE
Add the sugar to the spirits in a covered container and agitate until the sugar is
completely dissolved. This process will take a while. You can heat the spirits, as long as the liquor is covered so that you don’t evaporate any alcohol. Don’t boil, or your container will get pressurized and possibly blow up the bottle. Wait for the liquor to cool. You will end up with roughly 1120 ml (37 ounces) of sugared booze. If you are using liquor that comes in 750 ml bottles, use 159 grams superfine sugar.
• If you started with 100-proof spirits, use 2 ounces (60 ml) per drink. You might need a bar spoon of simple syrup, as the sugar in 2 ounces will be a little less than what is in the marg. Now add ¼ ounce (7.5 ml) liquid of your choice—
orange juice, pomegranate juice, water, whatever—just make sure it isn’t too sugary or boozy.
• If you started with 80-proof spirits, add 2¼ ounces of the sugared booze to the acid and salt. The alcohol level will be slightly low but will work fine. With 80- proof there’s no room for extra ingredients.
EXAMPLE 1:
Rittenhouse Blender Sour
MAKES ONE 51⁄4-OUNCE (157-ML) DRINK AT 16.7% ALCOHOL BY VOLUME, 7.8 G/100 ML SUGAR, 0.61% ACID
INGREDIENTS
2 ounces (60 ml) sugared Rittenhouse rye (44% alcohol by volume; see
above)
1⁄2 ounce (15 ml) freshly strained lemon juice
1⁄4 ounce (7.5 ml) freshly strained orange juice 4 drops saline solution or a generous pinch of salt 4 ounces (120 grams) ice
PROCEDURE
Blend and drink, baby. Blend and drink.
RITTENHOUSE BLENDER SOUR
EXAMPLE 2:
Blender Daiquiri
MAKES ONE 51⁄4-OUNCE (157-ML) DRINK AT 15% ALCOHOL BY VOLUME, 8.1 G/100 ML SUGAR, 0.57% ACID
INGREDIENTS
21⁄4 ounces (67.5 ml) sugared Flor de Caña white rum (35% alcohol by volume, see above)
1⁄2 ounce (15 ml) freshly strained lime juice
4 drops saline solution or a generous pinch of salt 4 ounces (120 grams) ice
PROCEDURE Blend, drink, repeat.
Cocktail Calculus: The Inner Workings of Recipes
I recently constructed a database of cocktail recipes, including both classics and my own, so I could analyze them for ethanol content, sugar, acidity, and dilution. Each drink category—built, stirred, shaken, blended, and carbonated (which we will discuss later)—has clear, well-defined relationships between the characteristics, regardless of the flavors in a particular recipe. This might seem obvious, but the implications are not. I discovered that given a set of ingredients and a style of drink, I can write a decent recipe without tasting along the way at all. I have tested this process dozens of times, and I am shocked at how close I can get to the desired result strictly through applying the math. Bitterness is a bit of a wild card—very hard to quantify. Thank God something is.
I’m not talking about swapping rum for gin or lemon for lime. I’m talking about this: given apple juice, bourbon, Cointreau, and lemons, can I make a recipe with the same basic profile as a daiquiri by plugging in a few numbers? Yes, I can. It won’t taste like a daiquiri, but it will have the same feel. I developed several recipes in this book mathematically, but I won’t tell you which ones for fear you’ll be prejudiced against them.
I don’t really know how I feel about this ability. It’s a little disconcerting. I tell myself that I still need to understand how flavors work together, I still need a brain and a palate—and that’s true. All the math in the world won’t help you if you can’t put good flavors together. And the math isn’t always right, either. Some drinks are better with more than average sugar or acid, some with less. The math will only give you the backbone of the drink—its structure. The soul of the drink will be the aromatics and flavors you choose. But the math has been incredibly useful to me for judging existing cocktail recipes and for developing my own.
It is easy to replicate the basic profile of a recipe you like in a new drink so long as you know the alcohol, sugar, and acid contents of your ingredients and target alcohol, sugar, acid, and dilution numbers for the recipe profile you want to emulate.
To that end, my recipes specify alcohol content, sugar content, acidity, and final beverage size. To calculate new recipes of your own based on my numbers, you’ll need to be armed with a list of the alcohol, sugar, and acid content of basic ingredients that I’ve provided here.
• Ethanol is measured in percentage alcohol by volume.
• Sugar is measured in grams per 100 milliliters, abbreviated g/100 ml, which is roughly equivalent to “percentage.” This might seem like a bizarre measurement, but weight-in-volume measurements like g/100 ml are the only
way to deal with dissolved solids such as sugar that must be measured volumetrically.
• Acid is quoted as a simple percentage. Although the same solid-in-liquid problem exists for acid as for sugar, the difference between actual
percentage and grams per 100 ml is very small at the low concentrations of acid present in drinks (usually roughly an order of magnitude lower than the concentration of sugar) and percentage numbers are simpler to think about.
• Volumes are measured in ounces (remember, 30 milliliters to the ounce in this book) and milliliters.
• Dilution is measured in percentage. If I quote a dilution of 50 percent, that means that every 100 ml of original cocktail recipe will be diluted with 50 ml of water from melted ice for a finished drink size of 150 ml. If I quote a 25 percent dilution, that means that every 100 ml original cocktail recipe produces 25 ml of dilution from melted ice for a finished drink size of 125 ml.