Popular Mechanics (South Africa)
Your first three cocktails
BARTENDERS LEARN TO make drinks the same way chefs learn to cook – one recipe at a time. Are there general principles? Sure. But those will emerge the more cocktails you make. “If you pick up a decent cocktail book, you’ll eventually be like, wait, that recipe looks exactly like this one. And it is, just with different ingredients,” says Kimber Weissert, bartender and bar manager at Pittsburgh’s Butcher and the Rye. For now, start with the basics. 1. The Martini ( 60 ml, 30 ml, 2 dashes) “I think the first drink a person should make should be a Manhattan or a martini. In reality, they are the same recipe,” says Weissert. “A Manhattan is 60 ml bourbon or rye, 30 ml sweet vermouth, and two dashes of Angostura bitters. A martini is 60 ml vodka or gin, 30 ml dry vermouth, and two dashes of orange bitters.”
2. The Daiquiri ( 60 ml, 22 ml, 22 ml) “A daiquiri is a beautiful cocktail, and it’s another one that you can turn into other cocktails just by changing out the ingredients. It’s 60 ml rum, 22 ml simple syrup, and 22 ml lime juice. It’s what’s called a sour recipe, which would be a base spirit, some kind of citrus, and some kind of sweetener. Just change the rum to whisky, the limes to lemons, and throw in some egg white and you have a classic whisky sour.”
3. The Old-fashioned ( 60 ml, 1 tsp, 2 dashes) “Old-fashioneds are a great way to impress people because they’re so easy to manipulate. I tell guests: Go home, get any bottle of whisky, rum, Old Tom gin, whatever. Add a teaspoon of maple syrup and then a couple dashes of bitters,” says Alejandro De La Parra, bar manager at the Teardrop Lounge in Portland, Oregon. “Then you can say, Here’s a maple-bourbon old-fashioned, and people will be like, ‘Ooooh!’ ”