I haven’t done a post in three weeks at this moment, as I have not made any cocktails for this time either I haven’t had anything to post. A little more than a month ago I was the co-host of a party. At the party, or rather the preparations, my responsibilities were to create cocktails for the event. Because I don’t like spending the entire evening tending to the orders of those at the party, the ideal thing is to have batched cocktails that are self-serve. In this post I will outline two vastly different types cocktails that I made.
To begin with, the important things in the cocktail are the proportions. Firstly, the main thing is the ratios between the ingredients. As always, the cocktails need to be balanced. Balance mainly come from the proportion of the ingredients. The second part is diluting cocktails, water adds to the balance of cocktails. Under-diluted cocktails are often strong, and the flavours may not merge in the desired fashion. What is over-diluted may taste bland and flavourless. When diluting cocktails for batching I use a calculating tool that is online that is based on Dave Arnold’s work (http://cocktailcalc.com/). You enter how much of the cocktail you want to make, wither in servings or volume and the calculator gives you the amount of the liquids that will go into the cocktails, including water for dilution. The advantage of this is that you can chill the cocktail in a refrigerator or freezer until it reaches the desired temperature and then serve it as it is.
I will go into detail on how I made a spirit forward and a sour cocktail for this event. The way I did them was slightly different and if I were to make long cocktails, those with soda water or sparkling wine. Further it is slightly different from a traditional punch, and I will not go into detail regarding that, I will probably do that in the future.
Batching a spirit-forward cocktail
This is probably the cocktail I prefer doing for batching because I don’t need to worry as much about timings and shelf life as with sours. With no fresh fruit in the cocktail that deteriorates the cocktail will have a long shelf life and it is possible to make it weeks in advance if that would be preferable. Though fortified wines will go bad, upping the alcohol will usually make it last longer and there are examples of people trying aged Negronis, where they have had Negronis age in bottles and then have had quite good results.
What I do for these cocktails is that I usually make them without the water that is recommended and then the day of the event, dilute them accordingly. By using this way, I make the shelf life as long as possible and then if I decide that I will not serve all of it, I can have it on my own later on as a premixed cocktail that only needs dilution. The ratio is the one that I get from the previously mentioned web application.
The cocktail I made was the Aperol Negroni. The cocktail is equal parts gin, Aperol and sweet vermouth. I mixed the ingredients in a larger container and bottled the cocktail mix when I had mixed the ingredients together. This can also be done with manhattans, old fashioned and martinis. This is the simplest type of cocktail to batch and quite frankly the one type I would do if it wasn’t for the fact that not everybody likes spirit-forward cocktails.
Batching the sour cocktai
Since lemon juice will go bad and deteriorate batching these kinds of cocktails are a bit trickier. My method is twofold, part one is mixing the what does not deteriorate, syrup and spirit in advance and chill, and then on the day of the event juice the citrus and then dilute. The reason for doing it this way is that I want the lemon as freshly squeezed as possible and then in my own fashion end with dilution.
In order to keep it chilled I prefer the fruit to come out of the fridge just as I start squeezing to keep everything as close to serving temperature as possible. Having made a syrup spirit mixture already, the only thing that needs to be done is to make the citrus juice and add water. And the cocktail is then put aside to chill until serving temperature or the event begins, to reduce the time if you are short of time you should use cold ingredients. The ratios I use are the ones that I get from the web application that I mentioned before.
Like I said this type of cocktail is a bit trickier than the spirit-forward cocktail because you need to take into account that the citrus will go bad. It cannot be consumed in the future the same way a spirit-forward cocktail can. Leftover batched sour cocktails are not