My First Batch of Cocktails
Until now I had bought a beautiful home bar cabinet, started a Rum collection and read a couple of books on the essentials of mixology and bartending. I had everything in place, or at least enough things, to start testing the new hobby. I wasn’t collecting bottles and bitters; I was trying to learn how to mix cool drinks.
I thought that serving drinks wasn’t going to be that tough and with the things that I had read, I was all set. After all, mixing good bottles of booze could only result in something good.
As you guessed, I was wrong.
On my very first try, I was in the mood for a Gin, and I used a recipe from the case of a @hendricksgin bottle I had recently bought. The recipe was a ‘Gin Basil Smash’ ala Hendricks. A ‘Smash’ is a type of cocktail that involves muddle fruit or herb, and it’s mixed with a base Spirit and sweetener. This drink is fast and loose, and it has a lot of variations trying to combine sweets and spices to balance the flavors and accomplish a refreshing and flavorful cocktail. In essence, this cocktail is relatively simple, but I think I went a little over my head on my first try. And what came out wasn’t quite what I was looking for but what the heck it was the first.
Since this was a Basil Smash, I had to be very careful when using the Basil. This herb has a strong taste and full of scent. It has a complex sweet, spicy aroma with notes of clove and anise. The flavor is warm peppery and clove-like with underlying mint and anise tones. So, when muddling this herb, you have to be very gentle.
In fact, the muddling technique is quite an art (I’ll have to dedicate a post to the different methods involved in mixing). For the leaves and herbs, you must do it very softly, since you only want to release the essential oils. Smashing the leaves and shred them into pieces generates a different effect, sometimes not what you’re looking for flavor. To try this, you can put a Mint Leaf in your mouth and pressed into your paladar and sense the tastes. Then chew it and see how it changes into a bitter flavor.
I think this was the main reason I failed with this first try. I did not muddle the basil the proper way, and the flavor I got wasn’t the one meant to be. Another thing I failed at was the balance of the ingredients. The recipe called for Lemon and I used Lime, sounds trivial, but it isn’t. It actually changes the flavor a lot, and the amount of acidity that is added from one or the other varies as well.
So when adding all those initial mistakes, my first cocktail kind of Smashed in the wrong direction. It was clear I had to review the different techniques again and flavor pairings so I could be more assertive in my next rounds. And I did, I went ahead and tried some of the classic recipes that didn’t call for a lot of ingredients. I went and prepared drinks like the Tom Collins (Gin, Lemon, Simple Syrup, and Soda), the Cosmopolitan (Vodka, Cointreau, Lime, and Cranberry), and Moscow Mule (Vodka, Lime, Ginger, and Soda). The latter was my best result thanks to a homemade-ginger-syrup.
From this first try at least I had the sense of what it was like to start mixing. The only way to get better was to keep practicing and learn to balance the ingredients.
Cheers! 🍹 Remember to raise the bar, drink consciously and live every moment mindfully.
