Author: Tomas Curras

At its most basic, all one does when mixing a drink is combine two or more ingredients. But provide the same ingredients to different people with varying skill levels and experience, and you will get completely different results. The results are a combination of the quality of the ingredients, the technique, and the skill of the individual mixing a drink. I hope this post provides insight into how drinks are constructed and the techniques and tools used.

After having mixed drinks for over a decade, writing a mobile cocktail app, and gathering hundreds upon hundreds of recipes for a website, I have concluded that five primary methods of mixing are most frequently used:

1. Shaking
2. Stirring
3. Tiki Dirty Pour
4. Simple Combination
5. Building-In-Glass

The five above are the most common methods and will be 95% of the drinks you make. The eight listed below are less common but still worth knowing and are usually used in specific styles of cocktails or occasions.

6. Blend
7. Swizzle
8. Infusion
9. Stove-Top
10. Milk Clarification
11. Pousse Café
12. Toddy
13. Bomb Shot

There are many variations within these. For example, in my app Stirring has a 1). Neat stir, 2). Neat stir over ice, 3). Neat stir over crushed ice, and 4). Soda water topped neat stir. Shake has 14 variations. But the primary mixing method is still to stir or shake. I will go ahead and describe each in more detail below.

Shaking is one of the most common methods of mixing a drink, Stirring being the other. Shaking and stirring account for around 80% of the drinks you will make. While shaking is not difficult, performing the correct rhythm and timing instinctually takes time. The rhythm is dictated by how fast you shake and the size of the shaker used. A 500 mL cobbler shaker has a different rhythm than an 830 mL Boston shaker. Switching to an other type of shaker is hard if it’s different from the one you typically use. It can be done, but it doesn’t feel good. I’ll talk more about tools and techniques in their sections below.

The main point of shaking instead of stirring is to provide a creamier texture. Thats it. This is also referred to as softening the drink. Some drinks taste better flat and still, while others taste better soft and creamy. A martini or negroni with a creamy texture would be weird, so those are stirred, but a sidecar or margarita with a creamier texture is terrific, so those are shaken. Shaking is always used for drinks with egg whites and dairy mixed in. It is the only way to foam egg whites and fluff heavy cream. It is very often used for mixing drinks with citrus. Sours usually taste better with a creamier texture. An exception would be the crustas or oyster bay which are stirred. If you get into 19th-century style sodas, the syrups are often shaken before mixing in soda water to create foam.

Stirring is one of the other most common methods of mixing a drink, Shaking being the other. Stirring and shaking account for around 80% of the drinks you will make. Stiring is used to create a perfectly still drink free of air. Drinks like martinis are best cold and flat, so those are stirred. Usually old fashion drinks that are all spirit, liqueur, or aperitif are mixed.

Also called dirty dumping this method involves adding a scoop of crushed ice to a shaker. Shaking the drink for 5 to 8 seconds and then pouring the whole thing, Ice and all, into a glass. No strainers or double strainers are used here. What is in the shaker goes into the glass. I have come to like this method over the last few years. It adds a lot of air, dilution, and fun little crushed ice to drinks. This method works well for very boozy beverages as it softens the high levels of alcohol. Tiki drinks are known for being boozy, so i can see how this method evolved out of those bars. I’ve made long islands using this that are fantastic

This is used for making large punches and combines all the ingredients in a large container. This works well for drinks like the planter’s punch or soju cocktails, where the ingredients are mixed, set aside, and people serve themselves throughout the night. The single-serve version of this is built-in glass

This is simply for drinks that it doesn’t make sense to shake or stir in one glass to pour into another. The drink doesn’t need the air of shaking or the stillness of stirring, so it would be silly to use one of the tools to build it. The Mimosa is a great example of this. Those are only made in the glass they will be served in. The Rickey and Gin and Tonic are good examples of this too.

Blended drinks are drinks made in a blender. Unheard of in traditional bars, the blender is a staple of the tiki-style bar and the tool used to make delicious slushy drinks. If you want to make frozen margaritas or scorpions, you must have a blender. Alternatively, you can get an ice shaver and shake it with a scoop of shaved ice to get the same effect.

Swizzling is a mixing method where you quickly whisk the drink with a swizzle stick. The swizzle stick is a branch from the swizzle bush that grows in the Caribbean. Place the long end of the swizzle stick between your palms and rotate the shaft very quickly between your palms. It’s an excellent way to give the texture and air of a shake if you don’t have a shaker. If you own a shaker, swizzling is unnecessary, as the final result is the same. But it does look cool.

Infusion is the process of disolving oil and water-soluble flavors in alcohol. Alcohol is an excellent solvent because it bonds to both water and oil and, if done correctly, can emulsify oil in water too. Infusions are done by soaking plants in high-proof alcohol and letting the alcohol extract/bond to the desirable flavors or aromas of the plant. The soaking takes at least 24 hours and up to a week, depending on the hardness of the plant and the size of the plant bits. You’ll use this if you make ingredients like bitters, liqueurs, and infused spirits or make old-fashioned drinks like glögg or cherry bounce. Infusions are still very common in syrups.

One way to bypass the long soaking time is to use steam-distilled essential oils mixed with high-proof alcohol. I say steam distilled because using solvent-extracted essential oils is not advisable. This is also a more precise way of making infusions because it’s better measured and controlled. So instead of adding lemon peels to alcohol and letting them soak for a day or two, one can add 1 mL of lemon essential oil to 30 mLs of alcohol and instantly make lemon extract, which can be added to lemon syrup or to make lemon vodka.

Stove-top made cocktails are drinks heated over a stove and served warm. You’ll only find these in the wintertime when people want warm drinks. Technically any drink can be served warm, but it’s usually winter drinks that get heated and served for the holidays. Drinks include mulled wine, hot chocolate, hot ale flips, hot toddies, etc. The mistake most people make when making heated drinks is cooking the drink too long. It’s wine, not pork shoulder. This long and slow method is a product of the 1970s and the popularity of the Crock-Pot. When the Crock-Pot came to market, the manufacturer published a recipe book to show users what their new kitchen tool could do. Regular recipes were converted to recipes that could be assembled in the morning and cooked all day to be ready at night. Mulled wine was given the Crock-Pot treatment and never recovered in the USA. The best way to heat drinks is to prepare them ahead of time and heat them right before serving.

Milk Clarification is another very old technique that has recently become popular over the last few years. Check out my Benjamin Franklin English Milk Punch recipe for an in-depth breakdown of how milk clarification works. The process uses curdled milk casein protein to join together around particles in the drink and then trap the particles. The remaining liquid is completely clear once the curdled casin is filtered out. The problem with reviving this cocktail style is that the milk we buy today differs from the milk purchased in the 18th century. Today, milk is homogenized and pasteurized, all things that inhibit the cheese-making process, which means making clarified cocktails is much more challenging than 200 years ago when raw milk was used. Again read my clarified milk punch recipe to learn how to clarify cocktails and overcome some of these issues with modern milk.

Pousse Café is layering a drink based on the gravity of each ingredient to form clean separations between them. Pousse Café looks neat and is done for effect and looks rather than improving the taste. What it means to separate the ingredients based on gravity is to pour the heaviest/densest ingredients first and the less dense ingredients on top. The three factors to consider when determining an ingredient’s gravity are alcohol, water, and sugar. Sugar is the heaviest of the three, with water next and alcohol last. An ingredient that is higher in sugar will sit lower than one that has less sugar, and an ingredient that is higher in alcohol will sit higher than one that has less alcohol. For example, the Duck Fart Shot, originally named the IRA, is first Kahlúa, Irish cream, and whiskey last. Kahlúa has the most sugar, so it sits the lowest; Irish cream has less sugar than Kahlúa but more than whiskey, so it goes next, and lastly, whiskey since it has no sugar and the most alcohol.

The trick to layering is to pour as slowly and gently as possible. This causes the least amount of disturbance between the two layers. This is easier said than done. Everyone uses a spoon to help do this. Place a spoon at the top of the highest layer and pour as closely and slowly as you reasonably can into the spoon. This makes it so the top layer is as undisturbed as possible while pouring in the next layer.

This is an outdated colonial-era technique you will never see in a bar today, but if you have the right tools, you can make some enjoyable drinks. A toddy rod and flipping glass were tools for making hot toddies and flips in the 18th century. Also called a loggerhead, the toddy rod is a metal rod with a large head a tavern owner could keep in the fireplace to make warm drinks. Running a stove was expensive and took time to heat up and cool down. It was unknown if someone would even order a hot drink, too, so tavern owners would instead place several toddy rods in the fireplace and use one to heat a drink if a customer requested a warm drink.

Because drinks would boil and expand when a hot toddy rod was dunked in a large glass called a toddy glass was used to prepare the drink. These toddy glasses are long gone now, but a large Oktoberfest glass beer stein works well. The toddy rod also doesn’t make the drink hot like a stove or kettle. It has this unique effect of caramelizing and steam-heating the drink. The rod is usually so hot that a thin vapor forms around it, and the drink is heated with steam. It has a different taste from stove-heated drinks. Check out this list here for a list of what beers taste suitable heated and which do not. I’ve ruined many good meals and flips by using a beer that tastes awful warm.

The bomb shot is a drink served as a half-filled pint glass and a separate shot of alcohol. The pint glass is typically half filled with beer, but other low or no-ABV drinks also work. The shot glass has a higher ABV spirit or liqueur in it, and the shot glass is dropped into the pint glass and the whole drink is consumed at once. Good examples of this style of drink are the Irish Car Bomb, Sake Bomb, and Jägerbomb. As you can see bomb is usually in the drink’s title too.

Everyone has their own preferred shaking techniques and style of shaker. And the truth is there is no one right way, just the best way for you. Now some methods are more effective than others in getting specific results. These are the three most common shaking techniques you will see.

This is your standard vanilla shake with a scoop of ice that everyone does. It works well and produces excellent drinks, and it was the shake I did for over a decade. Simply build your drink in one tin (usually the smaller one, but it doesn’t matter.) and a scoop of ice into the other tin, pour the drink into the tin with ice, seal it, and shake until it’s properly aerated and chilled. Some recommend shaking for 20 seconds, but it depends on how hard you shake. I shake the drink very hard, and within 6 seconds, it’s done. Any more than that and i would be wasting my time. I also happen to be a male with a bit of upper body strength so that I can do that, but when I see others who don’t shake as hard as I do make a drink it takes a little longer. What you are looking for when you shake this way is to feel how cold the tin gets. You’re done shaking this way when the tin gets cold. Not so cold it frost, and your fingers stick to it, but just the right amount of cold. Ice is typically stored at 0°F/-17°C. So if you shake it long enough, the drink will get sub-freezing, which doesn’t make for a good drink. It will be over-diluted and too cold, so learn to feel when the drink is right before freezing. You’ll know how long you should shake based on how you shake.

A popular technique for egg white drinks, I feel this shaking method has become obsolete and is surpassed by the next one I will show you. I no longer use this one, but I will tell you how it works. The idea is to increase the time you shake the drink by first shaking it without ice to build a big foamy head and then shaking it with ice to cool it. The reverse dry shake flips the order by shaking with ice, removing the ice and adding the egg whites, then shaking without ice to build a big foamy head. This has been the go-to egg white shaking technique for the last 15 to 20 years, but another shaking technique has come to light that completely blows this method out of the water.

Often called a whip shake today, this technique was invented by Deforest Saxe in the 1880s at his soda fountain in Chicago. The Saxe soda shake technique only adds 1 or 2 ice cubes to the shaker and shakes them until they fully dissolve. The main advantage of this shake is it makes impressive and easy foam from egg whites. Using this technique, a Ramos gin fizz is no more complicated than a margarita. If you worry about the cooling capacity of this shake, keep in mind that ice is stored well below freezing, so two fully melted ice cubes are enough to cool the drink to just above freezing. The other advantage of this shake is it controls and limits dilution. Drinks taste better because they have less water. There is a very noticeable flavor and texture difference between the cocktails I make with the Saxe soda shake/whip shake and the standard shake. I use this shake for everything now, and I have tried to shout about how great it is from the mountains, but I have learned it is only for some.

After forcing many people to try the Saxe shaking method, I noticed it only worked well for people who shook hard, like me. The shaking took too long for them, and the dilution was not much better than their more softly shaken drink. The texture was nowhere near as good, but that’s simply an issue with not shaking hard. (I’m not talking about the Japanese hard shake, just how intensely one shakes.) The weakness of this technique is it works best with a Boston shaker and requires an aggressive hard shake. If you’re not shaking hard or you use a cobbler shaker, then it’s a difficult technique to get good results from. It is more advantageous for these individuals to continue doing the standard shake, but the Saxe soda shake is still the absolute best technique for making great foam for egg white cocktails.

The Tiki Dirty Pour is a fantastic shaking technique that is useful beyond just tiki drinks. The Tiki Dirty Pour is a pouring technique where you pour the entire contents of the shaker. The drink and ice are both poured into the serving glass. You do not use a strainer with this method. It’s fast and easy, and the same ice you shook with is the same ice that goes into the glass. I’ve noticed this shake works very well with softening boozy drinks. Perhaps this is why it is a go-to shake in the tiki world, as many tiki cocktails are very boozy. A Zombie, which is usually loaded with booze, is delicious and refreshing. I used this technique for Long Island, and they came out amazing. Even my wife, who mostly only drinks hard seltzers, likes my Long Island Iced Tea when I make it using a tiki dirty pour. I like using crushed ice, to begin with, but non-crushed ice works too. Give this a shot and see for yourself. Take a shaken drink that is usually too boozy for you and make it using this method, and I bet it will be much improved.

Many things are going on when you make a drink, but the two most significant factors that contribute to the taste of a drink are temperature and dilution. A little dilution is essential for softening the drink, but too much makes the drink flat and lifeless. The other is temperature; often, the goal is to make the drink as cold and close to freezing as possible I don’t subscribe to this and personally find cool but not freezing drinks more desirable. It also depends on the drink, where I am, and what I am doing. Most drinks are over-diluted. The current top-ranking post on how to shake recommends using as much ice as possible to get the coldest drink possible. This is terrible advice. Your goal shouldn’t be to make the coldest watery drink possible. The colder a drink gets, the harder it is to taste, so cool the drink, but don’t get it so close to freezing that it’s bland. It also depends on the environment. An ice-cold tiki drink on the beach sounds great, but drinks like the Manhattan benefit from being a little less cold.

This may seem weird, but I have weighed my drinks before and after and found that adding water at 25% of the drink’s initial volume results in a nicely diluted drink. So, for example, if the ingredients come out to 4 oz (120 ml), then 1 oz (30 ml) of dilution is good. Luckily most standard ice cubes are 1/2 oz (15 ml). For any drink less than 4 oz, I use one cube. I’ll use two cubes for any drink between 4 to 6 oz. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but it works for me.

• Do nothing useless. This quote is from “The Book of the Five Rings”, but it applies to everything and mixing drinks is no exception. Don’t jiggle your arms all weirdly or hold stuff goofy. Sure, it looks cool and helps bring in tips, but if you want to make great drinks, then focus on making great drinks, not showmanship.
• Get a big all-metal Boston shaker. Thats it. That’s the only shaker to buy. It’s not a matter of preference; They work better. The Boston shaker is the best, and drinks mix better in larger shakers than in smaller shakers. Your standard Boston tins are 18 and 28-oz cups. You can buy a cobbler or Parisian shaker if you want, but plan to buy a Boston shaker later once you realize the other shakers stink or you lose the cobbler’s cap.
• Shake the hell out of the drink. A strong hard shake will make a better-tasting drink than a gentle shake.
• Don’t over-ice a drink. A drink should be cool and chilled, but it doesn’t have to be freezing. Too much ice makes for a watery flat drink, and drinks last only a short time. I once discussed this with someone who argued that I don’t put enough ice because after 10- 15 minutes the drink will warm up too much. A drink lasts only a few minutes and should be long gone by then, but a drink with too much ice is terrible from the start. Life isn’t perfect and is full of trade-offs. So what would you rather have? A flat, watery drink that is cold for a long time, or a great drink that isn’t freezing after 5 minutes?
• Always use fresh cold ice. Thats all.
• If you’re not sure what someone likes, ask them. Every drink has countless variations, and the best-made drink is the one each person likes. Some people want different things, and that’s fine. And the truth is no one cares what your opinion is on how to make the best martini or old fashioned. This leads to my final opinion.
• Ignore anyone who tells you there is a right or wrong way to make something. Most people fall into this trap with something they get passionate about. This is the best way to make x, or I have the ultimate technique. I do this too, so ignore me when I make those claims.* It’s not to say the method or recipe they offer isn’t excellent at what it does, but it’s objectively not the end all be all. There are more and less effective ways to accomplish a goal, but nothing is ever purely right or wrong. Find the most effective strategy for you and refine it. Learn what you can from the “experts,” but don’t be fooled into thinking they hold all the answers. Experts are ordinary people like you and me who just happened to practice a skill longer than others. *(Although, in my defense, I do it intentionally to get attention and clickbait. No one clicks on an article titled “I found a very effective technique for mixing egg cocktails that has a few shortcomings but is better than most current solutions, in my opinion.” But folks love “I have the best shaking technique you’ve never heard of!” regardless of the title, you will still learn something useful.)