mixthatdrink.com » How To

How to rim a glass

Jen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:52:09 +0000

Some cocktail recipes, like margaritas, call for you to rim the glass with salt or sugar. You should also feel free to add rims to cocktail recipes that don’t call for them -- this can put an exciting twist on standard recipes.

There are a couple of ways to rim a cocktail glass, but the basic steps are always the same:

Moisten the rim.
Turn the glass upside down and dip it.
Some bartenders recommend twisting the glass to get more stuff on the rim; some advise not. Try it both ways to see what works for you. Generally, not twisting will result in less stuff on the rim.

Now for the details and tips.

How to rim a glass

There are a couple of things you need to prepare before you can start rimming glasses.

The rimming saucer: Pour your sugar, salt or whatever you’re rimming glasses with on a saucer or plate. Use plenty to make sure the rim gets covered, and make sure the circle of powder is bigger in diameter than the rim of your glass.
What kind of salt/sugar? For salt, you want coarse sea salt or kosher salt -- almost anything other than table salt, which doesn’t have the right texture for rimming glasses. For sugar, plain white or brown sugar works fine, and powdered/confectioner sugar will, too.
The moistener: if citrus flavors fit the cocktail you’re making, use a wedge of lime, lemon or orange to rim the glass. If not, use a clean sponge dipped in one of the ingredients from the drink -- preferably a liqueur, so it’ll be sticky. Alternatively, you can also pour simple syrup onto another saucer and dip the glass in that.

Now you’re ready to rim!

Moisten the rim. Whether you’re using citrus or a sponge dipped in liqueur, rub it along the glass at a slow steady pace to make it even. If any pulp or seeds get on the rim, remove them. If you’re using simple syrup on a saucer, just dip the glass once without twisting to get proper coverage.
Dip the glass. Turn it upside down and dip it in the powder firmly, as if the glass rim has ink on it and you’re trying to stamp a perfect circle in your sugar or salt.
The twist? Most bartenders twist the glass. I find this leads to an uneven rim. Just stamping it in and pulling it back up yields a very even rim. If you do twist it, do it slowly, and shake off the excess when you’re done.

What to rim it with

Here’s where it gets fun. You are not limited to salt and sugar for rimming! You can rim glasses with anything powdered. The possibilities are pretty much endless. Your only inhibition is making sure the flavoring of the rim goes well with the flavor of the cocktail. Here are some suggestions:

Cocoa. Perfect for chocolate martinis.
Cinnamon-sugar. Delicious with lots of cocktails -- consider ones that use Kahlua, Bailey’s, orange or chocolate liqueurs.
Spicy Rim #1. Mix 1 part coarse salt with one part chili powder (cayenne, chipotle, etc.) for a fantastic hot & spicy rim.
Spicy Rim #2. Mix equal parts coarse salt, paprika, onion powder and garlic powder.
Celery Salt. Great for Bloody Marys.
Crushed candy or cookies. Basically, anything you can powder can be used as a rim.
Crushed graham crackers. Works on pretty much any drink that’s good with a sugar rim. Wonderful with Sidecars.
Ginger. Mix equal parts sugar and powdered ginger.
Powdered drink mixes. Not every powdered drink mix is the right texture for sticking to the glass, but you can usually work around that by moistening the glass differently -- for example, simple syrup may work better on really fine powders than citrus. A powdered mint hot chocolate mix makes a Chocolate Mint rimmer for Grasshoppers. Kool-Aid mixes can be great for fruity drinks.

Instructional Videos

Need to see these techniques in action? Here, Duggan McDonnell shows you how to rim a glass without twisting it in the sugar or salt.

In this one, you can see both sugar and (celery) salt rimming techniques. This guy shows you how to dig into the salt and sugar to make it even (rather than replying on the stamping method to be perfect).

How to pour a layered cocktail

Jen — Thu, 21 May 2009 05:07:49 +0000

Layered cocktails taste good, look amazing and impress anyone who sees you successfully pouring them. They’re typically associated with sweet liqueurs, but plenty of layered cocktail recipes use rum, whiskey, vodka and other hard liquors to cut the sweetness and add some kick. Whether your style is “cin-cin” or “chug chug,” there’s a layered cocktail out there for you.

Pouring these drinks is easier than you might think: you just need to know the specific gravity of each liquor or liqueur you’re working with, and pour them in order from heaviest to lightest. And with certain ingredient combinations, you’ll need to use a spoon so you can pour the upper layers very slowly.

I picked a fairly tricky combination of liqueurs (Kahlua, then Patron Citronage, then Carolans Irish Cream) for this demonstration video. It took me quite a few takes to get it right because the Citronage didn’t behave as expected (more on that in a minute), but that’s part of mastering each layered cocktail. You don’t have to watch the video to follow the rest of this tutorial, but here it is for those who want to see it.

The drink I made is a B-52. Normally, the orange liqueur goes on top, but as I said above, the Patron Citronage surprised me. It was determined to mix with the Irish Cream. In fact, it wanted to mix with the Kahlua, too. I had to pour it very slowly to float on top of the Kahlua without clouding, and then the Irish cream floated easily on top of the Citronage. (Citronage is delicious, by the way -- a very clear orange note that’s not too sweet.) It took several tries for me to figure this all out, so you always want to practice these drinks on your own before pouring to impress somebody. Change out one ingredient or even brand, and the layers may not work like you think.

Your mistake pours needn’t go to waste, though -- first of all, they often still come out looking pretty cool. Check out the clouding in the middle clear layer -- it’s not how the drink is supposed to look, but unless you’re dealing with a real snob, you could just claim that’s your amazing sense of style at work:

And if your mistake pours look all kinds of wrong, just toss ‘em into a flask and put the flask in the fridge. (Since so many people asked when I used these flasks for the Skittles Vodka Tutorial, you can get them from The Container Store for $4.49 each.)

Drink the blend yourself, use it as a single ingredient in another cocktail, put it in some coffee (or other beverage), or soak sponge cake in it for a great dessert (this last one is just as simple as it sounds).

Pouring a layered cocktail

Now for the step-by-step:

Figure out the specific gravity of each of the ingredients in your drink. Recipes sometimes contain this information. You may need to research online or just experiment (as I had to with the Citronage). Sort out your ingredients in terms of heaviness, so you can pour them in from heaviest to lightest.
Pour the heaviest liquor or liqueur into a shot or cordial glass (or whatever you prefer -- the broader the glass is the less noticeable the layers will probably be). Try not to get any up on the sides -- pour straight down into the center of the glass.
Turn a spoon upside down. Place it inside the glass, with the tip of the spoon against the inside edge of the glass, above the first layer and not touching it. (Some online sources say it should be right at the top of the first layer, or even down in it a little -- for me, having it above the others worked best, but it may depend on your style and/or the exact liqueurs you’re working with.)
Pour the next heaviest liqueur as slowly as possible over the back of the spoon, moving the spoon up as the level of ingredients rises (keep it above the ingredients). It’s easier to do this with a bottle that’s half full (or less) rather than one that’s nearly full, so you may need to pour some of the liquor or liqueur into another container. Pour from the opposite side of where you’re holding the spoon (see picture).
If the two ingredients mix up a little bit, give them a few seconds to settle, and they should separate nicely.
Repeat the process with the third layer, continuing to raise the spoon as you pour. Bring it as close as you dare to the top (you can always wipe off any spillage on the outside of the glass). As you get closer to the rim of the glass, you can move the spoon just a few millimeters away from the edge of the glass and continue to pour over it -- that gives the liqueur plenty of room to land in the glass without landing too heavily. (Besides, the further along you get in that layer, the less danger there is of disturbing the one beneath it.)

Your finished result is three (or more, for the daring) distinct layers in different colors. Of course, this means you need to pick ingredients that aren’t too close in color if they’re next to each other (unless that’s what you want). This is an extremely artistic approach to cocktail pouring, and there’s no end to what you can come up with.

Cheers!

Vodka Gummi Bears

Jen — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 13:42:25 +0000

When you soak gummi bears in vodka, they absorb the alcohol and turn into a yummy fruity treat with a kick. The how-to part of this is pretty simple, so I decided to make things a little more interesting. In addition to regular vodka gummi bears, I made vodka sugar-free gummi bears, vodka gummi worms (purely to see if they turned out any cooler looking than the bears) and vodka Red Fish (these were disgusting, but in the interest of science I will share my mistakes as well as my triumphs).

For those of you who like really detailed instructions, first up is a tutorial. Those of you who already know how to do it, skip ahead to the “Results” heading.

How to make Vodka Gummi Bears

You’ll need:

Vodka
Gummi bears or worms, sugar-free or regular
A glass container (a glass with plastic wrap over it will do – rumor has it plastic does bad things to vodka, so be sure there’s no plastic actually touching the vodka). I used some Anchor Hocking glass storage containers I use for leftovers.

I put the bears/worms/fish into the glass dishes. Then I poured in vodka until it reached the top of the candy. Using that much vodka makes the candy swell and take on a noticeable but not unpleasant “burning” alcohol sensation. If you don’t want the alcohol that strong, use less vodka. (The amount of time you let the bears soak has no impact on how alcoholic they are. They will suck up nearly every drop of vodka you put in, so the trick is to use the right amount for your taste. You can always add more if you taste them after a day or so and think they’re not alcoholic enough.)

Then I put the dishes in the fridge. (The purple stuff is plastic wrap I tucked under the glass lids as extra insurance against the fruity smell leaking out into the whole fridge, but I’m not sure it was necessary.) I left the bears soaking for a total of five days, but after three they had absorbed about all the vodka they could. Give yourself time to leave them in at least a couple of days, if possible. This picture was taken about twelve hours after they started soaking – you can see they’ve absorbed some of the vodka because the level of liquid is lower relative to the bears:

I was told gummi treats would swell up “huge.” The bears did get noticeably bigger, but what really got big was the worms. Here’s a before and after picture (the red bear is sugar free, the green one is regular):

You’ll also find some liquid at the bottom of the dish. This is fruity vodka. It doesn’t look gorgeous or anything (kind of cloudy, may contain a gooey lump or two), so you may not want to serve it at a party, but it’s perfectly drinkable for you.

The Results

The regular gummi bears turned out very yummy, but surprisingly, I liked the sugar free gummi bears better. They had a more refreshing taste than the ones with sugar, stayed a little firmer, and the alcohol kick was a bit stronger. If you’re watching your carbs, this is a really fun way to feel like you’re not.

The gummi worms also came out a little more exciting than the regular bears, in my opinion, but they were messier. I liked these because they got very big and… well, that was it, really. Big huge vodka worms. But they were a little more slippery to grasp than the bears, hence a little messier. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing – depends what kind of party you’re having!

The Red Fish were these gummi-ish, waxy-ish things I found in the candy aisle and thought, why not see if other candies will soak up vodka nicely? The answer, in hindsight: because it’s a waste of vodka. The vodka softened about a 16th of an inch of the outside of the candy into goo, left the interior part hard, and didn’t really penetrate the candy at all. There was still a lot of vodka floating around in that dish. Also, the candies themselves aren’t very tasty. So you really need truly gummi stuff for this. But I have to admit, the candy-flavored vodka in the dish was pretty tasty.

The alcohol content in each vodka gummi isn’t very high, but if you eat many of them, you’ll feel the effects. Be forewarned and plan accordingly.

How to make green beer, leprechaun style

Jen — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:18:28 +0000

When I decided to write an article on how to make the perfect green beer, I decided no fooling around: I captured a leprechaun and asked it for the recipe. At first, of course, it refused to tell me. It even offered to take me to its pot of gold instead, but I knew that was a trick. Then it started feeding me a spiel about squeezing shamrock juice into the beer, but I didn’t buy that, either.

I resorted to tickle torture, and finally the leprechaun admitted the truth: they use food coloring, just like everyone else. Huge disappointment, I know! And yet how cool is it that you, too, can make festive green beer with nothing more than a trip to the grocery store and a few minutes’ time?

The leprechaun didn’t tell me which color food coloring works best, so I had to test both blue and green. Below are the results.

The Players

To play along at home, all you need is beer, a clear glass or mug, a spoon or stirring device of some sort, and food coloring. Choose a pale beer – I went with Harp, a pale Irish lager. If you’re not of Irish descent, you may use a non-Irish beer if you must, but for goodness’ sake, don’t brag about it around St. Patrick’s Day.

Step 1: Pour your beer

On my first experiment, I allowed the beer to form a head as I poured. I thought it might be prettier for the experiment, but it’s just a pain when you’re stirring food coloring in, because the food coloring gets stuck in the foam. So I recommend you hold the glass at a slant, pour very slowly, let the beer stream hit the side of the glass and trickle down to the bottom, so you get minimal foam formation.

Step 2: Add food coloring

Next comes the food coloring. My first try was with blue, which is supposed to mix with the yellow of the beer and make green. I added a drop or two, stirred gently (you don’t want to create more foam by stirring too hard), added another drop or two… after six drops, I got something I wasn’t expecting: a green that leaned more olive than emerald.

I had really thought the “yellow and blue make green” thing would work. Were all those Ziploc commercials over the years just lying to me? Surely the green would come out even more yellowy than blue. But I tried green food coloring – again, about 6 drops – and got the bright beautiful emerald green I was going for:

I definitely preferred the look I got with the green food coloring. But both versions were equally tasty.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Mixology Tip: Customizing Cocktails for Guests

Jen — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 14:53:09 +0000

When you’re serving cocktails to guests, there’s a very easy way to impress them by tweaking the drink so it’s just how they like it:

Use just a little less of each ingredient than the recipe calls for, or pour in your pre-mixed cocktails but leave a little room at the top.
Ask if they prefer the drink sweet or dry or sour – whatever are the flavor options for that particular cocktail.
Add a little bit of the correct ingredient(s) to get the flavor they’re after.

For example, you’re serving pre-mixed gin martinis, and one guests prefers hers dry. Give her some extra gin. The next guest doesn’t like them dry – give him some extra vermouth.

Or you’re serving a Honolulu cooler to someone who isn’t wild about sweet drinks, but is curious to try this one. Just add some extra lime juice to increase the tartness.

Mellow a whiskey sour by adding extra sugar, or increase the sourness by adding extra lemon juice.

Add (extra) ice to any drink to weaken it for those who find the alcohol taste a little overpowering, or aren’t big drinkers.

Common sense, and tasting your ingredients, will tell you which ingredient will increase which taste factor. And the fact that you’ve asked what they prefer and are doing your best to make it perfect is half the show – even if the final result isn’t the best drink your guest ever had, she’ll appreciate the effort you’ve made and feel well taken care of.

Skittles Vodka Tutorial

Jen — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:33:19 +0000

Infusing vodka with Skittles is a very popular trend right now. There are a couple of different ways to do it. My way involves separating all the Skittles into their separate flavors and making five different bottles of Skittles vodka.

For this project, you’ll need:

One 1.75 liter bottle of vodka (I used Stoli – you don’t need the most expensive vodka, but do avoid the cheap ones)
Five 8.5 ounce flasks or bottles (I got mine from The Container Store. Also check out these from Amazon. For a Halloween party, serve these neon-colored concoctions in spooky lab flasks or potion bottles.)
One 1 pound bag of Skittles
Five empty plastic water bottles
A funnel
Bowls for separating the Skittles into flavors
A measuring cup (not pictured)
Coffee filters or paper towels

You’ll also want to cover your workspace with newspaper or freezer paper – this infusion can get messy. If you’re making a different sized batch, here’s the formula you need to know: I used 60 Skittles to 6 ounces of vodka, which yields about 8 ounces of infused vodka. If you want to make 1.5 times that, or 3 times that, just multiply your amounts.

Step 1: Separate Skittles into Flavors

Start by simply separating the Skittles into flavors. You want 60 of each.

Step 2: Setting up your Infusion Bottles

Fill your water bottles with 6 ounces of vodka each. It doesn’t need to be exact – you can always even it out later by pouring in a bit more vodka to the ones that come out with less.

Step 3: Add the Skittles

Pour the Skittles of one flavor into one infusion bottle, then pour the next flavor of Skittles into the next infusion bottle, and so on until all five bottles have a pile of Skittles soaking in the vodka.

You could certainly be more sophisticated than I was here, and use a funnel to pour the Skittles of each flavor into one of the bottles. The reason I did it this way was that I felt it would be easier to wash each flavor of Skittles off my hands before moving onto the next one than it than to get that flavor out of the funnel each time – that plastic tends to hold onto the flavors, skin doesn’t.

Step 4: Shake ‘em, shake ‘em, shake ‘em

Now your infusion bottles all have Skittles in the bottom. Give each bottle a good shake – the more, the better. In my picture here, you can see that the colored candy coating has already rubbed off into the vodka, but the white insides of the Skittles still have a lot of dissolving to do. After shaking them, set them aside for a few hours. It’s a good idea to shake them again then, especially if you’re making a bigger batch. My Skittles all dissolved overnight.

Once they’re all dissolved, you’ll notice a lot of white muck floating at the top. We’ll take care of this in Step 6.

Step 5: Strain

There are a number of ways to strain this stuff and get all the white gunk out. Some people prefer paper towels, but I used coffee filters and found they worked just as well. I put a funnel inside a measuring cup.

Then I put four coffee filters in the funnel. It’s hard to say exactly how many you’ll need, since not all coffee filters are exactly the same. I’ll tell you one thing I did learn, though: orange and green needed more filtration than the others. I discovered this when I thought I was finished, and found a little bit of white stuff still floating in those two flavors. No problem, though: I just strained them again through one more coffee filter, and that took care of it. So if you find you haven’t strained it thoroughly enough, the good news is: you can always fix that later.

Then I poured one of the infusions into my strainer setup. I had to pour about a quarter of my infusion in, then wait for some of it to soak through, then pour another quarter in, until I was done. (If the strainer clogs with white gunk, use a spoon to scrape the white gunk out of the way.) In the end, you’ll have about 8 ounces of Skittle infused vodka. Then I dumped the funnel and coffee filters into one of the bowls I’d used earlier for counting out Skittles, to catch drips as I carried it over to the sink. I washed everything out for re-using (except the coffee filters, of course – those I just rinsed before disposing of, so the sugar wouldn’t attract ants).

Then I took the liquid from the measuring cup and poured it into a flask, via the now-clean funnel. You can see here that the green is a little thick, and it shouldn’t have been – that’s why I ended up having to re-filter it. Then I rinsed the funnel out again.

Repeat this process for each flavor.

Here you can see about how much gunk the filtration takes out:

Step 6: Chill and Serve

Now you’ve got 5 flasks or bottles of Skittles infused vodka:

Stick them in the freezer for several hours – overnight is fabulous…

…and they’re ready to serve:

Now, these are pretty strong on their own – nearly pure vodka. They are also very sweet. You can drink them straight, served up in a chilled martini glass, or you can use them in a cocktail:

Mix them with ginger ale, 7-up or Sprite to taste
Mix them with cola to taste (diet cola cuts the sweetness a little)
Serve them on the rocks to water it down a little
Some people mix them with fruit juice. I didn’t try this, because to me the Skittles were plenty of sweetness for my taste buds.
Everyone’s taste varies – there are so many directions you can take this drink in, you really should try anything that sounds good to you!

Cheers!

ETA: Everyone keeps asking where I got these flasks. Here’s the link.

Entertainment Tip: Mixing Multiple Drinks

Jen — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 01:32:37 +0000

When you’re entertaining guests, you can save yourself time by pre-mixing a shakerful of cocktails. This is simple to do – just follow the tips below.

Premixing a pitcher of cocktails

You can pre-mix a pitcher of cocktails up to a week before your party, as long as you don’t add ice until you’re ready to serve:

Know how many drinks you expect to serve while entertaining. If your guests are friends and you have an idea how much they drink, that’s simple. If you’re not sure, a good rule of thumb is to figure each guest will drink the equivalent of four one-jigger drinks. That means 6 ounces of your main spirit per guest.
Now that you know how many drinks you need to make in advance, you can determine how large a pitcher (or how many pitchers) you need to premix. We’ll get to this in a minute.
Do the math to multiply your ingredients, and pour them into the pitcher. Or use the trick below to skip the math altogether.
Leave out ice until you’re ready to serve, or it’ll dilute the mix.
Leave out carbonated ingredients like 7-up, or they’ll go flat.
Once you’ve premixed your pitcher, cover it with plastic wrap and put it in the refrigerator.

Multiplying Measurements without Math

If you want to multiply to ingredient amounts, you can use a calculator to work out (for examples) just how many jiggers of an ingredient you need, and then use Google to convert the jiggers into ounces or cups. Just put (again, for example) “15 jiggers in cups” into Google, and it gives you the answer immediately. The only problem is, many of the measurements will have to be rounded. 15 jiggers equals 2.8125 cups, which isn’t exactly an amount that’s marked on your measuring cup. You can guesstimate this.

Or, unless you’re premixing dozens of drinks, there’s an easier way to do it (especially if you’re a math-o-phobe) and get the amounts just right so the flavor is always perfect: mix one drink at a time, and pour each drink into your pitcher until the pitcher is full or you’ve made the amount of drinks you need. Because this is just a matter of measuring and pouring, it’s still quick and easy (for some of us, much quicker and easier than doing the math).

Serving Your Premixed Cocktails

Once your guests arrive, serving is quick and easy. If your drink calls for nothing but the premix, all you need to do is pour. If it requires stirring or shaking or adding carbonated ingredients, you can do that one drink at a time. One last suggestion:

Serve in chilled glasses

If your cocktail doesn’t need to be served on the rocks, the combination of a refrigerated premix and the chilled glasses will keep drinks cooler longer – without any ice to dilute them. If a guest takes a long time with one drink and you suspect it’s become room temperature, bring the guest another chilled glass to pour the remainder into, then fill that glass with more of the premix. This is a very impressive hosting. There are several ways to keep glasses chilled.

Put them in the fridge for 3-4 hours. This is great for the first round of drinks, but unless you have lots of glasses and room in the fridge for all of them, you won’t be able to chill re-used glasses in time. So for the rest of the night…
Wash your guest’s used glasses quickly, then put them in an ice bucket. This chills them very well within 15-30 minutes, so they’ll be ready for the next round of refills.
Quick & dirty backup plan: fill a room temperature glass with crushed ice and swirl it around until it feels very cool. Dump the ice out and pour the drink.

Enjoy!