ESSENTIAL COCKTAILS: Cocktail Course!

1. ESSENTIAL COCKTAILS: Course Introduction: All right, welcome along with everybody today. I'm ridiculously excited to announce that after months of planning, we'll finally go live with this course, Essential Cocktails right here on Youtube, free of charge over the next 50 days. This course is designed to take you from potentially having never made a cocktail before, right through to making 40 of the most popular cocktails in the world. And also making your own perfect drink. In this course, you can expect tips, tricks, tools and techniques. And also I'll be giving you recipes, which if you've followed this channel for a while, you'll know aren't necessarily recipes. They're actually templates that you can build upon, adapt, and twist to make your own perfect drinks regardless of your experience level. So with all that being said, let's roll the new intro. So for those of you who have been here before, welcome along. Thank you for being here. And for those of you who are new here, a quick reintroduction to myself. My name's Dan Fellows. I'm the first and only ever double World Coffee and Good Spirits Champion, which is the world's leading coffee cocktail competition. And over the last decade plus, my mission has been to learn as much as I possibly can about cocktails, about coffee, and to share it with people like yourselves. So after all those years, making cocktails in bars, in competitions, all around the world, delivering workshops and master classes, and right here on Youtube, this eight week course is the perfect opportunity for me to share the most important things I've learned about cocktails with you. Whether you're at the start of your cocktail journey or making your way through it. A lot of you have commented on my other videos that you either come from a coffee background or you're not an experienced bartender, so don't have the kind of high level skills needed to make drinks at home, which couldn't be further from the truth. So this course is designed to give you the confidence you need to make delicious drinks either at home or in a bar wherever you want to make them. In the first episodes, we'll cover the essential bottles, tools and techniques to set you up for success. And then after that, we'll follow up with 40 template style recipes designed to be super simple, using widely available ingredients wherever possible. And no complex homemade ingredients. So whether you're a bartender, a barista, a home enthusiast, or even high level pro come along for this amazing journey. It's going to be awesome to have you along, share it with a friend who wants to level up their own cocktail skills, get them involved too, make the drinks, and most importantly, have fun, which is what it's all about. Right, so before we get started with the course, a huge amount of time and work has gone into making all of this information available free of charge. And I really hope you do find huge value in it because I've really enjoyed creating it. And the only one thing I ask in return is that you subscribe to the channel, which number one, helps you stay up to date with the course, follow along in time, and as soon as the video is drop, you can watch them. But also number two, it helps these videos be seen by more eyes, therefore helping more people make better drinks. So without further ado, let's get started with Essential cocktails. 2. Stocking a Home Bar: Where to Start and Example Drinks! (1/2): All right, welcome along to Essential Cocktails, everybody. So in this 50 video course, I'm going to give you all of the tips, tricks, tools, and techniques you need to make better drinks. As well as 40 template style recipes for some of the most popular cocktails in the world. We've taken over this incredible bun in order to film these videos, and I really hope you do find them valuable. And in this video we're going to be demystifying the back path. So I'm fully aware that all these bottles can be kind of overwhelming. A little bit intimidating, but in this episode, we're going to demystify this, simplify it. And I'll run through some key styles and categories so you understand which bottles you can choose from based on your own preferences within each category. I'll give you some examples of some brands that I think represent a really good blend of value, versatility, quality, and availability. As well as giving you some example cocktails made with each bottle. So you can choose the bottles that actually represent your flavor preferences, rather than having to go out and spend all this money on all these bottles which you might not necessarily need. The truth, honestly, is that you could buy one bottle of spirit, some citrus, some pantry ingredients that you've got at home. And also some sweetness. You can make a big range of cocktails just to get started, so don't be fooled and think you need to have all these bottles to get started, buy one bottle, and you've got a really good starting point. So if you want to see those example cocktails and videos, make sure you subscribe to the channel. Say don't miss them when they drop. And we're going to start by exploring the first quite neutral category, which is vodka. All right, first of all, we're going to get started with vodka and there are a few different types of vodka, but I would recommend starting with just one bottle because we have similar end results when you mix this into a cocktail with subtle differences between styles. So the most popular base that vodka is made from is a kind of grain, and you have a few different grains within that category. You have things like a rye vodka such as Vi Brava. You have a wheat vodka such as boat yard. You also have a corn vodka such as the Crystal Skull. But outside this, you also get other bases to vodka which have slightly different characteristics. So we also have things like a potato vodka, which I'm a really big fan of. And we've got the Avaldor by coal with farm distillery here. This sounds a little bit strange to have potatoes as the base of your vodka, but don't be put off by this. It doesn't taste like potatoes. It tastes like a really good quality vodka with a nice body and a little creaminess in there as well. And we've got more contemporary things like a grape skin vodka from discarded. A rye vodka might be a little bit more spicy. A wheat vodka might be a little bit cleaner and lighter. A corn vodka might have a little bit of natural sweetness coming through. A potato vodka could have a little bit more body and then a grapeskin vodka might be a little bit lighter and a little bit tanic. So bear. Remember when I give these characteristics they are generalized. They're not specific to different brands within the production process, Within different brands, within different bases, you will get variety. So if I say this might be spicy, you might find another rye vodka which isn't necessarily too spicy. But these are kind of very loose starting point, just to give you an understanding, and whichever one you choose is going to be a really good starting point. Vodka is great in cocktails. It brings that neutrality which kind of lengthens the cocktail and brings the alcohol to the drink without adding too much character. And that's a really powerful thing. So I'm going to go with this potato vodka, which is the Avl door from coal with farm distillery. And this is actually fairly local to our iron. And that's another thing I really recommend. If you can buy local and find great produce, definitely do that. These are fairly widely available bottles. This is a little bit more niche, but it's really, really delicious and support local, that's always a really good thing to do. So as I said, this works really nicely in the vodka martini, but Volker also features in a huge array of cocktails. Things like the Pawns Star martini, Cosmopolitan, espresso martini. The list goes on. We'll be exploring all of those in the future, so stay tuned. And now we're going to move on to our second category, which is going to be gin. All right, so next up we're going to look at gin. And gin has had a real resurgence recently with hundreds, if not thousands, of distillers, crating their own signature blends of botanicals. But one thing that's common of origin is that it's based around a flavor profile of juniper and this has to be there for it to be called gin. So one of the most famous styles of gin you're looking at is a London dry gin. Something like beef Feta, which is very juniper forward. It has a big, complex range of botanicals that surround it, but juniper is kind of that punchy four fronted flavor. So this works really well in a huge range of cocktails. Things like a Negroni, a gin martini, a bramble. Lots of cocktails featured gin, all very delicious. This is a really good base for that because it has that big, heavy juniper flavor which cuts through the other ingredients. So we also have other distillers bringing their own signature blended botanicals which are behind the juniper, but bring other layers of complexity. So things like tan cre ten, which is a really delicious gin, a little bit more grapefruit tea, a little bit of Camamel in there, and very complex. So really nice martini. But those subtleties might be lost when you mix them with other big flavors. So you don't need to spend a huge amount of money on gin to get really good results. So interestingly, London dry gin doesn't actually have to be made in London, whereas Plymouth gin has to be made in the city of Plymouth, which isn't too far from where we are today. And this is a slightly different style, a little bit less juniper forward, a little bit sweeter and softer. And another really good mixing gin, which works in all the cocktails I spoke about before. We also have precursors to gin, things like Geneva, which has a little bit more of a multi style. We've got old Tom Gin, which is a slightly sweeter style, a little bit more kind of licorice coming through, a little bit less Juniper forward. And again, these are very broad sweeping statements, so there is lots of variation within categories. But if I were to start with one bottle to mix into as many cocktails as possible, I'd go beef eater. It seems to be really readily available, it's very good value. It's actually quite cheap bottle and it has all that Juniper flavor coming through. So now this is going to live on our back bar ready for making some delicious cocktails and we're going to move on to Rum. Okay, so next up we have a very wide category which is rum. So rum is made from sugarcane, or sugarcane juice, or molasses. And as you can see, there's a big variety in Rum, so typically a lot of people will talk about light medium, or golden, and then dark rums, or a black rum. But these boundaries if fairly loosely defined and there aren't kind of clear delineations between them. But when it comes to flavor, you can kind of path that journey through and choose some rums that work for you. So I'm actually going to choose three rums. A light flavored rum, an aged rum, which has those kind of subtle, rich woody notes. And then a black rum. So when it comes to your lightly flavored rums, I'd like to look at an aged white rum, and what that means is that it's actually aged and then usually charcoal filtered. So Eldorado three and Havana Club three are both aged for three years, given a little bit of complexity, taking the edge off the kind of sharpness of the alcohol, and given some light tropical flavors, some kind of vanilla and white chocolate. Then we have Diplomatic Planas, which is aged for around about six years, then charcoal filtered, which has much more ripe fruit coming through some of those nice fruit esters. So a little bit of banana again, white chocolate, vanilla, Really, really delicious. But I'm going to go for Eldorado three because again this is widely available, really good value. It comes in at quite a cheap bottle despite being really good quality and a really good base for lots of cocktails. Things like a majitomti, lots of tropical cocktails and Tiki cocktails contain white Rum, so this is going to have its place on our back bar. And then second of all, I want to go for something that stands in between your kind of light Rums and then you are richer. More molasses forward rums. So something like an aged rum, like an Appleton Estate, which is a Jamaican rum. And just like things like coffee, things like wine, Tai plays a huge impact in the production of rum. So when we think back to that kind of nature versus nurture thing, the nature has a big impact. So the soil composition, like the elevation where the sugarcane grows will have a big impact. But as well as the nature side of things, the kind of nurture or production method also plays a big, big impact in this. So that whole process in producing the rum has a big impact on the flavor. And we've got three bottles here which sit within our kind of middle ground of the rum category. Appleton Estate is a Jamaican rum which again has those really high fruit esters, almost like a tropical fruit. And some people say funky, which is traditional with Jamaican rum a lot of the time, kind of pineapple mango, passion fruit, really, really delicious. And if you're talking Tiki cocktails, look no further than Appleton Estate. But we also have things like a blended Rum such as Blacktop, which comes from three different origins. So you can control the flavor profile a little bit. It's got lots of nice sweetness, a little bit of funk without being overpowered by that. Or if you're looking for something really sweet and delicious and luxurious, almost like a butter Scotch flavor, something like diplomatic reserver exclusiva. These are some of my favorite rums in the world. But I'm gonna go with the Appleton estate because I really want that typical funkiness of Jamaican rum. And this is gonna live on our back bar, so I like to use this to add richness to a Pinarda in tropical drinks like a hurricane. And also to give a Dakar a really nice depth. And then the final Rum we're looking at is going to be a black rum. And I love goslings, black seal, so much so this, as you can see, is really, really dark in color. And this is indicative of the flavor molasses, rich, heavy burnt caramel and a little bit of almost like a treacle note coming through. So this is very sweet, but also really, really good in lots of cocktails. Black rum brings that really delicious depth of flavor to one of my favorite cocktails, which is called a Jungle bird. It's also a really important ingredient in a dark and stormy. All of these three rums are going to stand up in Tiki cocktails and you can substitute each rum in and out for each other. So when I spoke about the Miti, this also contains black rum. When I spoke about the majito, you can make a light majito with Eldorado three. You can make a medium kind of middle ground majito using our aged rum, the Appleton estate. Or you can make a black majito using goslings, black seal. All of these are completely different, but all soup is super delicious. And this is a kind of thing I'm talking about with all of this, we're going to be substituting ingredients out fairly freely. Not necessarily following tradition too hard, because I want to make delicious drinks which fundamentally are delicious. And we're not going to be bound by different boundaries and traditions too heavily. So these three rums are going to give you a really, really good spectrum of flavor on which to build our cocktails around. So now we've got our three Rums on the back bar. I want to talk about another thing, which is somewhat related to Rum, in that it's also made with the base of sugarcane. This time, sugarcane juice. And this is a Brazilian spirit called Cashasa. So this is used in cocktails you might have heard of, such as a Kiperinia, also Batida. And although this isn't technically Rum, it does share some of the kind of similar flavor characteristics, so you'll often get a butter Scotch character in Hasa, but it also has a little bit more grassiness, a little bit more astringency, almost a like characteristics, which in those cocktails are really, really good. And once again, you can substitute this in where you'd otherwise find rum to slightly change the flavor profile of your drink. So I'm going to add this to the back bar, and it's worth noting that this is a two year old Cshasa. And again, you get variant flavors as you work through the different ages of Cashasa. But Vacchasa, really delicious, really solid. And that is going to finish off our rum and Cshassa section. And now we're going to move into the world of a Gave. All right, so now we step into the world of a Gave. Spirits, specifically Tequila and Mezcal. And you may or may not know this, but Mezcal is not tequila, but tequila is Mezcal. So what I mean by this is tequila is a specific type of Mezcal which has some rules around it, such as it has to be primarily blue Gave, which is the type of a gave used to make. It has to be at least 51% legally. But ideally you want this to be 100% blue Gave for the best possible quality. Whereas Mezcal can be made using different types of Agarve. This can be made in lots of different parts of Mexico. Whereas tequila has to come from the Hellsca region and a couple of surrounding municipalities. So it has a very specific set of rules around it. From a flavor perspective, these are wildly different. And again, speaking quite generally about the flavor profiles of the two categories. Tequila tends to be a little bit more zesty, a little bit more citrus, fruit in there, a little bit more fruit altogether, a little bit cleaner and fresher. Whereas Mezcal tends to be kind of rich, big, earthy, robust, and a little bit smoky. And that's thanks to all the smoke that it's exposed to in the production process. So although these are very different products, they do share something in common, which is, as they're aged for longer periods in barrels, they take on categorizations depending on how long they're in there. So as with the other spirits we've spoken about, the longer time they spend resting in barrels, the more they take on the Ok notes. A little bit vanilla and caramel, moving into your kind of rich spice notes. Whereas a really young, unaged tequila will be a little bit fresher, a little bit greener, a little bit more zesty. And all of these categories, which are put on the screen, have different utilizations. But I really like a Repisado tequila because there's a little bit of body, a little bit of kind of age on it, and that's what we're looking for in our tequila cocktails, although silver tequila works really nicely. And then from the Mezcal front, I like a younger Mezcal because I really want to lean into those grassy notes, the astringency and the lightness with some of the smoke coming through. Because I want these to be as different as possible. So one thing you can do is you can interchange these bottles really easily. So if we think of tequila cocktails such as a Margarita, Tommy's Margarita, also a Paloma. Traditionally these contain tequila, but if you substitute out the tequila, bring in the Mezcal, you get a completely different dynamics. Still something fairly authentic in its flavor profile and its origin, but it just has more smoke, more of that kind of richness. And it's a completely new take on the drink. So I'm going to keep hold of these two, put them on our back bar and now we've got our re, gave section boxed off. We're going to talk about the big wild world of whiskey. 3. Stocking a Home Bar: Where to Start and Example Drinks! (2/2): All right, so now we're stepping into the world of whiskey, which is one of my personal favorite categories and potentially one of yours. And if you haven't discovered the world of whiskey, explore it. It's fantastic. There's such a range of flavor in there, Such a range of styles which you're going to explore here. And the first bottle I'd be looking at for a whiskey selection will be a kind of house whiskey. And this wants to be big, bold punchy because we're going to be adding it into cocktails. We don't lose the spirit and there was something too delicate. And for this I'll be looking at something like a Bourbon or a rye. So the difference between bourbon and rye from a flavor perspective is bourbon tends to be a little bit sweeter, a little bit more toffe and butterscotch in there. Whereas rye can be a little bit more spicy and a little bit more rich. But because the mash bill can be fairly similar on these, you do get a crossover between the two categories. So bourbon whiskey has to contain at least 51% corn in its mash bill, whereas rye whiskey contains at least 51% rye in its mash bill. But the remaining 49% can be quite varied, which is why you do get that crossover in styles. So pick one or two of these, whichever one you prefer. I really like Buffalo Trays because I think it's really nice and sweet and Toffy forward, I also really like the Woodford reserve rye, but bullet again is one of those kind of crossover spirits which has a little bit of spice as well. Explore this, it's a huge category, but I'm going to start with Buffalo Trace, because I really like to mix with this. But this could easily be a rye whiskey. And a lot of recipes call for rice specifically. So you do want to have a rye as well ideally. But if you were to buy one bottle, I think the Buffalo Trace is a really good start just because it's got that perfect mixing characteristic. You could also look at things like a Scotch whiskey, which is a really good option. So, Monkey Shoulder is a blended Scotch. Similar characteristics, a little bit more fruit coming through, but these are all winners. They're really good value, I think, quite widely available. So whichever one you choose here as your house whiskey, it's going to be a winner. Just go forth and conquer and make lots of drinks with it. So now we've got a house whiskey. I would also look at a smokey or a pet whiskey. And I've got two here which are kind of good examples of this. In fact, very good examples of this. But they sit at opposite ends of the spectrum. So, plemphytic fir and cane, I think is the best introductory peatd whiskey on the market. It's also aged in rum barrels, which gives it a little bit more sweetness to balance out that peat smoke. Whereas la froid, big, peaty, medicinal, salty, earthy flavors, which are really, really powerful. But you do need to tame them in cocktails. Otherwise it can be quite overwhelming. So I'm going to put the fire and cane on the back bar. But if you wanted to go really big, you could definitely go with a la frog or something similar to that to get a big pet flavors. And then I just want to stress, there's a world of whiskey out there. It comes from all over the world. I really love Cavalan whiskey from Taiwan. I love Japanese whiskey. I love Irish whiskey. I love Scandinavian whiskey. I love whiskey. You might love whisky too. So whichever bottle you buy, just make sure you experiment with making cocktails with it. But don't go super expensive to begin with because we're looking for something you're gonna mix. And if you mix it with other big flavors, you'll lose some of the subtle nuances. So these are a really good starting point. We're going to start with these in our back bar, but we'll explore whiskey throughout the course. You'll find whisky and a lot of the recipes we're about to cover, things like a penicillin, whiskey sour Manhattan. There's a huge range of whiskey cocktails out there which we're going to find in the future videos. But now we've got our whiskies on the back bar. We're going to move on to the next category. All right. So now we're going to talk about brandy. And although I wouldn't say this is an essential bottle to tab in your back bar, if you love brandy, you definitely should. So brandy can be subbed into a lot of different cocktails. Anything that's kind of rich and warming, a hot toddy, a penicillin, any sour style drinks can work really nicely with brandy. And there's a few different types of brandy. So brandy itself is actually an umbrella term for any distilled spirit made with fermented fruit juice. Typically, this is grape, but you can also have it made with apples, such as calvados. And we're going to be talking about things like Cognac, which has to be made in the Cognac region. Armagnac, which again, has to be made in the Aarmagnac region, but it's made all over the world. So when it comes to choosing a bowl for our backbar, I'm going with the hind cognac, which is a really good blend of those things. We're looking for value, availability, quality, versatility. So this is going to live on our back bar and it's a really, really nice option. We've got those really deep grape notes, but we could also look at something like Pisco, which is really popular in Chile and Peru. Something like Grappa from Italy, or even a Calvados such as the Avalon. These are all really nice, have very distinctive personalities when it comes to the flavor profile. But whichever one you go for, mix it in, mix it out, substitute other spirits in and out for it, and you'll get really good results. So now we've talked about brandy. We can start talking about aperitif and bitter style liquures. All right, so now we're going to talk about bitter liquures and namaro. I've got a selection here in front of me, all of which have very different flavor characteristics. But these work really well before dinner, after dinner as a parti or a digestif. But they also work really, really well in cocktails. And they often go together really nicely. Pairing with different spirits like gin, bourbon, lots of different spirits. And we're looking at drinks like a Negroni. A spritz a paper plain contains some of these ingredients. A white Negroni. White Jungle Bird. Black Manhattan. But these have quite varying flavors and intensities. So if we're looking at just one bitter liquor, I'd say go for Campari because it has a really nice balance of bitter, sweet flavor, kind of grapefruit, rhubarb, quite rich, but quite high bitterness when compared to apparole. Whereas apparole itself tends to be a little bit more orangy, a little bit lighter, a little bit less bitter, and also much lower ABV. So if you're looking for a lower ABV cocktail, apparole is definitely going to be your friend. We've also got some really delicious Amari here. We've got the Amaro nanina, which is a little bit fruitier, still has plenty of those bitter, sweet, complex notes. And we've got a Verna which is a bit richer, a little bit darker, a little bit more treakily but still really nice and bittersweet. And I also categorize susa in this category, which is a bitter gentian based liquor. It substitutes in place of apparolor campyri really nicely in things like a white Negroni, a white jungle bird. And you can get really delicious results with this, although it's a big flavor. So you do need to kind of tame it down nicely. So this is a huge spectrum. I'd say the most essential would be Campyri, which is going to live on our back bar. I'd also Chuck Apparlm there because I think it's a really versatile ingredient, but don't kind of miss out on these. These are really delicious. Again, can be used to make lower ABV drinks, and that's our bitter liquures. So now we're going to move onto our next section, which is going to be our sort of fruit and more versatile liquors. All right, so next up we're going to be looking at some liquures P bar. And there are countless flavors of liquur out there. But what I recommend doing is buying the liqueur based on the flavor that you love. So if you really love oranges, buy an orange Liqure. If you love cherries, buy a cherry liquor, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And within these categories, we've got a huge range of drinks with your orange liqure, which is, I'm going with Quanto. You're looking at things like a margarita. Things like a cosmopolitan. And a Long island iced tea in your cherry liqure. We're looking at things like a last word. Amaretto can be an Amaretto. Sour Blackberry is going to be in a Bramble. Violet is going to be in aviation. Cout is going to be in the 20th century. Elderflower works really nicely with a lot of different cocktails. I'm not going to tell you which liquors to buy specifically, buy the ones you love and then go from there. But two things you need to bear in mind here are the sweetness level and the alcohol level. Because you might need to adjust the other ingredients in the drink to make sure it's balanced when you add it. So if it has a very high ABV like quantro, which is 40% you might want to bring down the spirit a bit. If it's very sweet like Amaretto, you might want to bring down your sugar content a little bit. But I'll give you these templates you can play around with them at home, and then we can introduce your liquors to your drink. I should also mention a coffee liqure here, but if you're interested in coffee liqure, you can check out the rest of my Youtube channel, which is all about coffee cocktails. So we'll leave that to one side for now. But let's move on to our next category, which is going to be our herbal ingredients. Look at some herbal flavors which can bring real nice variety to cocktails. So I really like this pair of chartreus. So you've got yellow chartreuse and green chartruse. They're quite similar in flavor profile. They're very complex made with lots of different ingredients. But fundamentally yellow chartruss a little bit less herbal, a little less intense. Whereas green chartrus is much more intense, more herbal, and you get much more intensity of flavor. There are lots of other herbal options on the market, things like Benedictine, even Yager Meister, if you want to go down that route. But these bring lots of variation to cocktails and something a little bit different to your traditional sweet sour, fruity spirit and can go a really long way. So you'll find the yellow chartruse and drinks like a naked and famous, you'll find the green chartruse in the last word. But you could also look at something like absinthe, which has a really strong aniseed note, kind of strong herbal flavors. But my biggest advice here is to have a gentle touch. Don't overdo it with these, they can be very overpowering, particularly with the absinthe. You could even split this just over the top of a drink to get a nice aniseede character. But don't go too heavy 'cause it will completely take over the drink if you're not careful. So the green chartruse is gonna live up on our back bar here. But I really do like the yellow chartruse as well because it's much easier to control. And although you can see these syrups up here, we're going to talk about those in the future episode. So now what we're going to do is delve into the fridge, which is just down here, to talk about fortifies and cherries. All right, so now we're going to start talking about fortified wines, mouths, and cherries. And as a minimum here, I'd recommend having something from down here so you're dry, extra dry mouth or an aromatized wine. And then something from over here. So you're kind of sweet Vermouth and there's a few brands we're looking at here. Martini is very popular. I really like cocky. I think this is a really, really good brand which has the delicious Cokie Americana, which is on the lighter end of the spectrum. Cocky, Vermouth, Torino on the kind of rich red end of the spectrum. But we've also got some really interesting options in here such as discarded. So this is a really interesting product which I really like. It's a vermouth which is infused with cascara, which is actually the leftover fruit from around the coffee beans, which is often discarded as part of the coffee production process. Hence the name. This brings a really nice kind of raisin character, sticky dates, and a little kind of toffee characteristic, which is very, very complex. So whichever ones you go for, these are going to be found in lots of cocktails. White Negroni, a martini, a classic Negroni, Manhattan. The list goes on. This is in lots of classic cocktails. But you want to keep these in the fridge, fundamentally, because essentially they are wine. They will oxidize and they'll lose quality over time. Buy small bottles if you can store them in the fridge, and don't let them sit there for too long. A quick note on Sherry. I think Sherry is one of the most underappreciated categories within cocktails, and honestly, I'm as guilty of that as anyone else. I don't have any Sherry here with me today, but I really love Pedro Jimenez, particularly as a cocktail ingredient, because it's, again, got those rich raise and dried fruit notes in there. Lots of sweetness. And we'll explore Sherry in the future because I haven't explored it too much up until now. So we'll get these in the fridge ready for making some drinks. And then finally, I'm going to touch upon non alcoholic spirits. All right, so the final category we're going to lout, which is actually one of the fastest growing and most important is our non alcoholic spirit category. And something I'd mention here is that anywhere you see a spirit, you can actually sub out, substitute in a non alcoholic alternative and you'll still get really delicious drinks. So within this category, I'd recommend starting with two bottles which represent polarized ends of the spectrum. So we've got something kind of citrusy, a little bit of fruit in there, and some spice like the seed, Lip Grove 42. And this is going to substitute in anywhere you see vodka gin, even an unaged rum, or a white Rum, or even a Tequila Blanco. And then on the other end of the spectrum, I'd go for something like a, as spiced cane spirit, which is a spiced rum alternative. But the reason I chose this one is because it has those rich notes. Again, more spice, but also some depth and kind of dark fruit flavor, molasses, toffee, and some treacle in there, as well as our dried fruit. So these do a lot of kind of work. They can be blended together to meet somewhere in the middle. So if you substitute this win in for your unaged or lightly aged spirits, and if you substitute this win in for your aged spirits, so whiskey, aged rums, H tequilas, that kind of thing, They're going to do a huge amount of work for you and give you either low ABV or zero ABV cocktails to all of these are not entirely necessary. Start with one bottle, pick your favorite, pick your favorite cocktails and let's start building them from there. So now I've talked about all the bottles that you can look into to start making a decision on where you start with your own home bar. We can move on to the next video, which is going to be just here when it lands, which is going to be all about the tools required to make cocktails, I'll see in the next video. 4. Cocktail Tools and Alternatives!: Hello and welcome back to Essential Cocktails. So this is a 50 video course. We're going to be giving you all of the tips, tricks, tools, and techniques you might need to make better drinks all in 50 days. And what we're going to talk about today is the essential tools for making cocktails. And this is a massively inappropriate title because I'd let you go as far as to say that none of these tools are 100% essential and can pretty much always be subbed out for something you might already have in your house, at least until it starts to hold you back. So custom designed cocktail tools are quite expensive, particularly if you want to buy the best ones. But until then, use what you have. Don't let this be a barrier to entry. Don't have to spend any money because we just want to get started. All right, so what we want to do before we even start thinking about making cocktails is to prepare our ice. And to do this, you're going to want some ice trays, ideally some ice molds. I like to have a smaller size and a bigger size. But don't go too small 'cause you want plenty of surface area. When you're shaking the cocktail, get this in the freezer well in advance and make sure you have plenty of ice because you don't want to scrimp on ice when it's an ingredient in pretty much every cold cocktail. You can also buy bags of ice, but I actually prefer to make my own A because it's more economical and B, because it's more consistent and you can control exactly the size of the ice you make. Once we've got plenty of ice in the freezer, we can start thinking about lay in our bar. And none of this is really essential, but I do like to set a nice son place or having all my things in place ready to go. So it's an efficient process and an enjoyable process where to make drinks. So first of all, I'd like to have a bar maat. But again, completely unessential. It just makes things a little bit cleaner and a little bit easer to clean up afterwards. One thing that I would say actually is essential, but I would imagine everyone has, is to have a tea towel to hand so you can clean up any spills, and wipe around and do some kind of cleaning as you go, which is really important. I'd recommend having a chopping board, a knife in place so you can chop your ingredients, your fruit, your citruses, your garnishes. But again, this is something I'd expect everyone has in their house. And then something that perhaps you don't have, but I really strongly recommend buying actually as a first purchase would be a really good set of scales. Not a very expensive set of scales necessarily, but just something that's reliable, that can measure to 0.1 of a gram. And this just means we can be very precise with our measurements. If your scales just go to a gram, that's totally fine for making syrups, making a lot of ingredients. But because we're going to be actually seasoning our drinks, which we'll talk about in a future episode, you do have to have quite a delicate touch, and a little bit too much can actually spoil a drink. So if you're going to make one investment, I recommend a good set of scales that measure to 0.1 of a gram. So in scenario one, let's say you're making a shaken cocktail. The first thing you're going to need is something to shake the drinking. And that is going to be imperative, but it doesn't have to be a professional bar tool. So my preferred option, if you can, is to use a tin on tin. Boston shaker, we have a bigger tin, a smaller tin, they seal together and you shake the drink in here. And the reason for this is twofold. Number one, it tends to have a much better seal, so you're not going to get any kind of leakages or spillages or any accidents, hopefully. But also number two, this should last your lifetime. There's no reason for this to break. It should have that really nice seal, you shake it altogether, and this, particularly with the Tin on tin, is incredibly robust. You can buy these where you get a glass that goes onto a Tin. Still great results, but I just find Tin on tin is so robust they just kind of fit together really nicely because they're both slightly adapt to each other to get a really nice seal. And if you can go for one of these, another option you have is a kind of three piece shaker, which is something like this, where you have the base tin. You have the kind of built in strainer so you can strain the cocktail through these holes, which is really useful. And then a lid, similar fundamentals, you're going to shake the cocktail. But if you see the difference here, the tin on tin or the Boston shaker style has much more head room. So you're going to get more motion as you shake the drink up and down. More motion in the ocean. So you get a little bit more kind of texture. This one is a little bit smaller if you're serving a smaller drink. Really, really kind of works well. Some people prefer this. Whichever one you have, just use it, pick your poison. They're both going to do a great job. But I do prefer this just slightly in terms of texture. But if you have neither of these, don't worry about it. Use a corner jar or a jam, Ja, or even some kind of sealed container at home. So this works surprisingly well. You just build the drink in here, shake the whole thing up. The only limiting factor of this in particular is it's quite short. So you don't get that head room to get really nice texture, but still a really, really good starting point. So now I've chosen that tin and I'm gonna go with this one. I can move these to one side. We want to think about what's going to go in here. So if you're gonna add some fruit in here, first of all, you're gonna need your chopping board and knife to cut it. And then if you're going to crush the fruit or some herbs into the drink, you can use one of these, which is called a muddler. If you don't have this, not a problem at all. You can use a rolling pin which works really well. And all this is doing is just press in the fruit or herbs just to release the flavor into the drink. Really important tool to have, but it doesn't have to be a specific cocktail tool. In your cocktail, you're probably going to want to add some kind of citrus or some kind of fruit juice. And in order to do so, you might want one of these which are called Mexican Elbows. But if you don't have these which are custom designed for squeezing limes and lemons and oranges, again completely fine, use your hands, use what you have, squeeze the juice in there. You can perhaps use your other hand as a sieve to catch the pips, but chances are we're going to strain the drink anyway, so it doesn't really matter, but don't get too hung up on juices. You can use the hand pressed ones as long as you get the juice from the fruit. The most important thing next up, you might want to add some liquid to your drink in the form of a spirit, a juice, a syrup, whatever that might be. And you want to accurately measure this to make sure you can make the same drink over and over again. And if it's not quite right, you know exactly how to fine tune it next time. I do recommend measuring, and jiggers come in all sorts of forms. You've got this style, which is my preferred style, and the reason I really like this is it has lines inside each section which are bands to give you an idea of exactly how much you add into the drink. This particular model has 510-15-2025 meals on this side, and on the other side we have 102-030-4050, In the states, you might find a 1.2 ounce version of this with bands to measure the increments in between. But jiggers come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. These are really popular, which I also like because they're straight sided. But then you have to eyeball within them because they don't have the interior bands, 25.50 mile, These might be 1.2 ounce, 1 ounce is 30 mills, 2 ounces is 60 mills. So bear that in mind for the conversions and even if you don't have either of these, that's totally fine. Move them to one side, grab something you have, which is a similar size to a jigger. Something like an egg cup or a shot glass. And to measure exactly how much this holds, all you need to do is put it on a scale. Tear the scale to zero, fill it up with water, weigh how much water goes in there in grams. And because 1 gram of water is equivalent to one mill of water, however much it holds in grams, that's how many mills it holds. So you can use this to then have an idea of exactly how much you're adding to the drink in a way to control exactly your ratios and proportions. So really, really kind of easy to use. It might not be exactly a convenient number, which does make it a little bit more difficult. But again, I don't want any of this to hold you back. Use what you have to get. Great results. Something I can't stress enough is to taste. Taste. Taste. And if you've made a cocktail in a tin, you're not 100% sure it's gonna be perfect. You can just grab a straw, dip it in the drink. Put your finger on the end, have a little taste check. You're happy with the balance if you do this before you add the ice and before you shake the drink. Obviously it's going to be a little bit more intense. So you do have to kind of allow for a little bit of variation when you get the final drink, but this will give you a really good understanding, primarily the balance of the drink. To make sure you're happy with what you're about to shake up. Obviously, don't double dip your straws, so make sure that goes in the wash after use. But I do recommend using reusable straws. Definitely don't use plastic for this because it's incredibly wasteful. Next step, you're going to want to give this really good shake with lots of ice and now you've got your cold drink ready to go. You want to serve this in a glass. So the professional tools to do this would be a Hawthorn strainer and a fine strainer to catch all the little shads of ice and any kind of fruit that makes it through. But if you don't have these, that's completely fine. Again, hawthorn strainers come in all different shapes and sizes, But if you've got a nice tightly coiled spring, that's a really good sign to not let too much through. And with a fine strainer, substitute this out. You can use something like this, just a sieve, you can use a T strainer and in place of your Hawthorn strainer, you can just pour it through your kilnagjar. Just closing the lid slightly to kind of catch the main bulk of the ice through your sieve and you'll get really good results. Another thing you can do if you really must, which I don't really recommend, but it does just about get the job done, is put the smaller tin on the bigger tin just to catch the main bit of ice. But this does let a lot through, it's very difficult to control. So this is your plan, Ed. If you're going to do that but add a pinch, it will do a decent job. If you're making a stir drink, you might want something like this, which is a mixing glass. But if you don't have a professional mixing glass, that's also completely fine. You can use the bigger tin from your Boston shaker. You can even use a pint glass. Anything that's big enough to hold the liquid will work pretty well. And you're going to want to stir it with a spoon. Professional bath spoons look like this, which have your round neck, I guess, or something like this. But if you don't have these, that's completely fine. You can actually get really good results just by using a chopstick. And this will get you pretty similar results. The benefit of having a longer spoon is that you can reach all the way to the bottom of the ice and you can get the whole thing moving rather than just the top part of the drink. Ideally, a bath spoon will be great, but if you don't have that, go with the chopstick. You want to strain your drink into a glass, which I recommend keeping in the freezer. And if you were to have three glasses, I'd recommend a kind of short water glass, a taller high ball glass, and some kind of Coup or Martini glass. But again, whichever glass you have will work perfectly well. Just bear in mind, you don't want these glasses to be too big either because they'll look really empty when you add the cocktail. Or you'll need to multiply your recipe up, which might get you quite drunk, which is not ideal to prepare your garnishes. You might need something like a peel a greater or a lighter, and then with all that, and potentially a blender two. If you're going to make some blended cocktails, you'll be really well set up to make the vast majority of cocktails. Make sure you subscribe to the channel. So you can see the rest of the course where we start using these tools to make delicious drinks. And I'll see you in the next video. 5. The Importance of BALANCE!: Chances are if you've ever ordered a cocktail and been really disappointed either 'cause you didn't enjoy it or you thought it just wasn't how you expected it to be. It's not the ingredients, it's the balance, that's the culprit. So any component element of cocktail can completely ruin it. If there's too much alcohol, it'll be too boozy and hot. There's too much citrus, it'll be sour and kind of uncomfortably sharp. And if there's too much sweetener, it'll be sickly sweet. And just really kind of coating and too much. So what we're going to do today is two experiments. First of all, to identify whether you prefer kind of less sweet things and more acidic. Otherwise maybe you prefer very sweet things. And then in the second experiment, we're going to look at exactly how much booze you find to be aroundabout, perfect for yourself. So, you know, you can add a little bit less if you find it too overwhelming or a little bit more if you're all right with that. So let's get started with the first experiment. So this first experiment is designed to just give you an understanding of where you sit on the spectrum of sour to sweet and your preferences. Most people sit in the middle, in the kind of balanced ground, but some people do really like sour things, some people like really kind of very sweet things. And you probably know this yourself, but I do recommend carrying out this test. So what we're going to do here is to each glass which has the same thing in it, 25 meals of lemon juice and 100 grams of Sparklin water. I'm going to add sugar in, increase in levels to these. I'm going to add modern sugar syrup, which is the cane sugar. And this is equivalent to a two to one sugar syrup. So two parts sugar to one part water. In the first glass, we're going to leave the 25 Mls of lemon juice and 100 grams of soda water on its own. In the second glass, I'm going to add ten meals of sugar syrup. In the third glass I'm going to add 20 meals of sugar syrup. And in the fourth glass I'm adding 30 meals of sugar syrup. So I'm just going to give these little mixed together to make sure they're fully integrated and then we'll give them a taste. And as you can already tell, they're going to get sweeter as we go along. But it's kind of good to understand where you sit with these preferences so that when you make a cocktail you can think, okay, the base spec is 25 meals of lemon juice and ten meals of sugar syrup. Let's say if you know you lean sweet and you prefer sweet drinks, you can increase the sugar, you can decrease the citrus or vice versa. So let's give the first drink a taste, which is our lemon and sparkling water. Cheers everybody. Sour, sparkling water. Nice but definitely a little bit sharp. Here's the ten mils of sugar syrup added. This is dry like a traditional lemonade and pretty good, definitely still taste the lemon. A little bit of sweetness coming through, but not too much. Now let's try the 25 mils of lemon juice to 20 mils of sugar syrup and 100 grams of sparkling water. To me, that's pretty perfect. Just really delicious lemonade too, So not too sweet, just well balanced. And then finally, let's go with our last glass, which is 30 mils of sugar syrup. So to me that's too sweet. Not crazy sweet, but definitely too sweet. And what I recommend you do is if you sit down at this end, you're probably looking towards a more sour drink. If you're here, you're going to want to add a little bit more sugar to your drinks if you like one of the middle two glasses. So somewhere 10-20 meals of sugar syrup to balance 25 meals of lemon juice. Chances are the recipes on this course are going to be just right for you in terms of balance. But as I said at the beginning, there are always templates. So feel free to make adjustments if you want to. So now we understand where we sit on our kind of sweet and sour spectrum. We're going to take this glass, which is, to me, balanced. So, 25 meals of lemon juice, 20 Mls of sugar syrup, and 100 grams of sparkling water. And I'm going to add different amounts of alcohol to this to understand my kind of preference when it comes to alcohol level. So onwards with number two. Okay, so now we've got what I consider to be four very well balanced glasses of essentially lemonade. So, 25 meals of lemon juice, 20 meals of sugar syrup, 100 grams of sparkling water. We're going to make these into essentially a Tom Collins by adding gin to it. So I'm going to go in with our beef eater. And in each glass I'm going to add 20 meals more. And we'll see where I sit on the kind of alcohol perception preference scale. So 20 meals in the first class will be our lowest ADV. We're going to go 40 mills in the second glass, which is pretty standard spec for Tom Collins. Maybe closer to 50, we're going to go 60 mills in the third glass, which is getting pretty boozy. Then in the final glass, if it fits, we're going to get 80 miles, which is probably beyond what recommended recipes would call for. But it's just interesting to see these things. We'll give these a little stir and then we'll give them a little taste. Again, I recommend doing this drink responsibly. Don't drink the whole thing, but interesting to see where your preferences lie when it comes to alcohol. Here's the lowest ABV of 20 mills. Still tastes mostly like that lemonade, which is really delicious. But I don't get much gin. I'm going to go 40 meals. Gin is coming through nicely. I think actually it's really well balanced. It could probably go a little bit more. So I think this might be potentially my favorite actually. That's way too much. 60 meals is overwhelmingly gin, like it's delicious, but I think it's now out of balance. It probably goes without saying that 80 meals, here we go, Takes me back to being a teenager when you mix your own drinks without using any measures. Really boozy, really hot. But these two are my favorite. I think probably 50 meals, probably closer to 40 is where my preferences lie. But now I understand this, I can factor into my cocktail recipes. So now we've got a pretty solid understanding of where we sit when it comes to our preferences, when it comes to sweetness versus acidity and citrus. We also understand how much alcohol we like in drinks. The next thing we can explore is different sweetness. Obviously, I've used a straight cane sugar syrup, but there are many different sweetness you can use in cocktails. And we're going to explore those more in the next episode, which is just here. I'll see in the next video. 6. A Simple Guide to SWEETENERS in Cocktails!: All right, welcome back to Essential Cocktails, everybody, today we're gonna be talking about sweeteners. So when you think of cocktails, there are actually many, many different ways of sweetening cocktails. And what we're gonna do today is talk through some of my absolute favorite ways to do this and the power that this holds. So whenever you see a sugar syrup in a recipe, you can actually substitute in pretty much any of these options we're gonna talk about today. And we're going to start, we're talking about different sugars followed by flavored syrups, and followed by some other alternatives you could choose which are going to really give you the power to level up your drinks. So without further ado, let's get started. Okay, so first of all, we're going to talk about sugars. And as you can see here, sugar is not one thing. Sugar is many, many different things. There are lots of different types of sugar and within that there's lots of different flavor characteristics which we can look for. What you want to do when you choose the sugar is think about the drink you're making. So if you were to make, for example, something gin based, which is light and floral, and delicate, a little bit kind of citrusy, Something like this, which is castor sugar is going to taste very, very different. Something like this, which is molasses. So these two look completely different. And if you've ever tasted these two things, you'll know they taste drastically different. And working through the spectrum here of some of my personal favorite sugars to use, Casta sugar, clean, neutral, brings basically nothing but sweetness. Golden castor sugar has a little bit more richness coming through, but only like a very light caramel kind of really still quite delicate and light like a Casta sugar. Then we've got the pair of scovadoes, light and dark. Two of my favorite sugars to use here because they bring really nice kind of richness, toffee notes, butterscotch, and even a little bit more kind of burnt caramel flavors in the darkness. Covado, and then as we move into our molasses, very rich, very heavy, almost. Kind of bitter sweet with that burnt caramel and kind of cinder toffe kind of flavors. So very different and as you move through the spectrum, you get more intensity and more kind of impact on the final drink. And then we've got things like coconut sugar, which although it's made from coconut, doesn't really taste like coconut. It's more kind of malty in biscuity. But you compare this with coconut flavors, tropical flavors, Tiki flavors. And it brings a nice storytelling element using the same kind of base ingredient as a lot of the other ingredients in the drink, particularly coconut. So when we look at these sugars, one thing you can do is pair your sugar to your spirit, and then you're going to really change the flavor profile of the drink. So if we take a majito, a majito with castor sugar and a kind of white rum, a very light rum is going to taste very different to a majito made with, let's say, light muscovado sugar. And then maybe an aged rum, maybe around about an eight year versus a dark majito, maybe with something like a dark muscovado sugar or a molasses, then maybe a goslings Black Al Rum. These are going to be drastically different drinks. The mint, the sweet and sour will be common, but the actual flavor profile will be worlds apart. So even within a very similar template, you can get drastically different drinks. And that's the power of this approach. So when you've chosen the sugar you want to showcase, you need to make a sugar syrup. And there are a few different ways of doing this. You could make a 11 sugar syrup, also known as a simple syrup, which is as simple as it sounds, equal part sugar and water. You could make a semi rich sugar syrup, which is 1.5 part sugar to one part water, a little bit thicker, a little bit less water, therefore a little bit sweeter. But my preferred way of doing this is a two to one sugar syrup, also known as a rich sugar syrup. And the reason I like this is threefold. Number one, it means you can actually sweeten the drink without adding as much water as you would in a simple syrup, let's say. Because obviously if it's a one to one syrup, you're going to need to add more of it to get to the same level of sweetness as a two to one. So this gives you a little bit more control over the dilution. Number two, it still pours perfectly easily, so no concerns there. And the number three, it's actually more shelf stable than a simple syrup because of that higher sugar content. So once you've done this, literally add two, put sugar one part water, bottle it up, and then store it in the fridge and you're ready to go. So I wouldn't recommend keeping this more than a month, But because it's such an easy process to follow, you can scale it down so you don't have too much sugar syrup left over. But if you don't want to go through this, what I do recommend doing is going with something like a moon syrup. And what I love about manon syrups is the quality is really high, but also they're two to one, so they have that same sweetness level across the board, meaning you can transfer different syrups in and out. And that's what we're going to talk about in the next section, which is our flavored syrup section. So when it comes to flavored syrups, you've got two options. Number one, you can make your homemade syrups by infusing fruit, spices, herbs into the sugar syrup. And that's really effective, but because we're focusing on kind of commercially available high quality syrups, which are easy to execute over and over again, We're going to be looking at Monn syrups for this course. So three of my favorites are vanilla, coconut and Org, because we're going to be looking at quite classic drinks, things like a Pawn Star Martini with vanilla syrup. Some Tiki and tropical drinks which introduce coconut syrup and also the orgiat syrup which is in the It. These are readily available, really high quality and just mean you can pour those drinks anytime you want to, so don't be scared of commercially available syrups. They're actually really high quality and a really good way to substitute out a regular sugar syrup. Bring in a flavored sugar syrup and create a brand new flavor experience in the drink. So now we've talked about flavored syrups, we're going to talk about a few other alternatives you have which can level up your drinks. So now we've touched upon a few different sugars you can use and also some flavored syrups. I just want to talk about a couple of options we have which can slightly change the dynamic of some drinks and give you something different again. So the most obvious would be honey, which you'll find in a penicillin, a hot toddy, but you can also bring this into a lot of whiskey based drinks. Any kind of warming drinks, even some summary drinks work really nicely with this. And I do recommend bringing this down with a little bit of water just so it's more pourable. And actually with all of these, you can introduce water to get the same level of sweetness you would from a two torn sugar syrup. So I do recommend experimenting with that. Something like maple syrup probably won't need bringing down because it's already quite pourable. A garve, perhaps not, it's still quite thin. Date syrup will definitely need bringing down with water and then golden syrup and treacle 100% world because they're super thick, rich, and heavy. So you can again, substitute all of these in where you see sugar syrup and bring something completely different to your drinks. A gave in particular is really exciting. This pairs really well with tequila. With Mezcal, you'll find this in the Tommy's Margarita a Picante. But again, you can bring this into lots of different kind of tequila A gave Mezcal based drinks and it'll bring synergy but also really delicious form of sweetness. So now that we've got an understanding of all these different sugars available to us to introduce to our cocktails. As I've said before, my recipes are templates rather than hard and fast recipes. So I really do recommend, experiment, experiment, experiment, introduce different sugars to exist in recipes. Try new things. Try flavored syrups. Try all these different options. See what you like, see what you don't. And you'll definitely learn something along the way. And now we've done that. We can talk about another really, really important factor when it comes to building cocktails, which is seasoning. So you can watch that video by clicking here. 7. The Power of SEASONING to Level Up Cocktails!: The idea of seasoning cocktails seems like an alien idea to a lot of people. But when you think about chefs, they wouldn't dream of creating a dish without seasoning their food. So we're buying the best ingredients possible. We're putting them together in a really balanced way. But if we don't season our drinks appropriately, we're not going to bring the best out of our ingredients. So today I'm going to show you my three favorite seasonings. So the first season we're going to talk about today is salt, specifically saline solution. In order to make this, my personal recipe, which I prefer to go with, is one part salt to five parts water. Mix the two together, dissolve the salt into the water, and then put it into a little drip, a bottle like this. Just so you've got plenty of control over exactly how much saline you're adding because salt is a big, powerful thing, you're going to be very careful that you don't overpower the drink, but equally a little bit goes a really long way. Ifever you've done the test of adding a little bit of salt to a drink versus not adding the salt. A lot of the time the drink with salt will come out on top. So most cocktails tend to be brought around sweetness, acidity, and bitterness, and incorporating salt into this is actually really, really powerful thing to do. So in the past I've talked about Uber foods and Uber drinks where you'll hip multiple taste components. So when we think about sweetness, acidity, bitterness, we've also got salt, we've got umami. Some people argue fattiness is one, pecans or spice is another. And even the alcoholic burn could be argued to be a kind of taste component. But what we're doing here is bringing more complexity to the drinks that we serve. And salt has a really interest in interaction with other taste groups. So salt tends to bring together acidity and sweetness when you add it to cocktails. But it also suppresses bitterness. So when I make coffee cocktails because there's an inherent bitterness there, I do often add salt, but when I'm looking for that kind of big, wide sweet and sour flavor profile, I probably won't. So I wouldn't add salt to a dackery because I do want the width of the sweetness and acidity, with the rum kind of coming through the middle. But what I would add it to is something like a Tommy's Margherita. Famously, salt works really nicely with lime. It wants to all come together, which the salt is a really good job of bridging the tequila, the lime, the gave, and just making the whole drink work together really nicely. Another example would be a Pawn Star Martini. Although it is technically a sweet and sour drink, what we're doing is really celebrating the passion fruit, so rather than kind of bringing the width of the acidity and the sweetness as primary notes, which has easily happened, I like to use salt to really focus everything in, bring together those edges, and really make everything look at that really delicious pan fruit underpinned by the vanilla. And that works really well in there. So saline solution, although this is a small bottle, is very, very powerful, can have a massive impact on your drinks. If you want to test this, I'd recommend making a drink, adding one drop of saline at a time until you can taste salt and then, you know, you've gone too far. The goal here isn't to make the drink salty. That's definitely not what we're looking to do. What we're trying to do here is elevate the ingredients in the drink to get the very, very best from them. So, saline solution, extremely powerful. Now I'm going to move on to my second favorite seasoning. So if the saline solution is going to be the salt in our seasoning, I'd say bitters are going to be treated a little bit more like pepper, where they're going to bring a little bit of bitterness as the name suggests. A little bit of warmth and just a new level to drinks which tend to be more sweet and sour. So if you're going to buy one bitters to rule them all, aromatic bitters are the way to go. I really like scrappies, but Angostora bitters are widely available. And if you're going to buy a second bitters, something like a Seville orange bitters or regular orange bitters will work really nicely. So aromatic bitters tend to be a little bit more spice driven and work really well with age spirits. But also a lot of stirred cocktails like a Martinez a Manhattan. But also in your more sweet and sour drinks, like a pisco sour, which they work incredibly well in. And they're kind of a critical ingredient, whereas your Seville orange bitters, or your orange bitters tend to be more pithy. Think of the kind of peel of a citrus fruit bitter, sweet, acidic. This is what you're looking at here and this works nicely with kind of fruit flavors. Works really nicely in my Porn Star Martini recipe, which will cover in a few episodes because it really focuses in on the passion fruit. So these two are going to go a really long way, but you've also got all sorts of flavors of bitters. So when you've got these, you can experiment even more. So we've got things like chocolate bitters, which is going to bring that really nice kind of c out in the bitterness. We've got black lemon bitters, grapefruit lime. These are going to be more towards that kind of pithy flavor. But there are so many bitters in the world, so go for your life, enjoy them, try them, and see which works well for you. And now we've got our bitters, we've got our saline sorted. We're going to talk about number three which is vanilla extract. Okay, so the final season to talk about today is going to be this little powerhouse, which is vanilla extract. And this might seem like we want to add vanilla to drinks, but that's not the goal at all. Similar to the salt, we're not making the drinks taste salty, nor are we making the drinks taste like vanilla. So you can add this in very small proportions until you reach that threshold of the drink tasting like vanilla, and then just pull it back for the next time you make the drink. Vanilla is delicious, so it's not too much of an issue, but what this does is just rounds everything out. So if you've got to drink this a little bit spiky, a little bit rough, a little bit stringent, you can add vanilla extract. And it just softens the whole thing and kind of in the same way as vanilla in a spiced rum just makes the whole thing a little bit more mellow and a little bit more manageable. Vanilla extract does that in cocktails, so I wouldn't use this all the time. I use it quite sparingly, But in your drinks, which are kind of focused on like something like a whiskey sour, it's really nice because it just seems to bring those big acidic sweet flavors. And the whiskey just brings them all together and focuses in on the whisky nicely. So a little bit really does go a long way, so even half a gram will make a massive difference. And if it's something that has those kind of vanilla notes, something like Amaretto actually works really nicely with vanilla. Your kind of age spirits, your rums, your age. Whisky is your bourbon here. That's going to be really nice with vanilla, but what we don't want to do is take away from their flavor. You just want to underpin it and add a new level. So now we've talked about my three favorite seasonings, salt in the form of saline solution, bitters which are treating a little bit like pepper. And then finally, vanilla extract, which has a massive impact on drinks, but we do use fairly sparingly. So in the next video, we're going to focus on something absolutely critical to every cold cocktail. Not only the taste, but also the texture and the temperature of the drinks. And that's going to be a deep dive into ice and dilution. So that's going to be the next video in the series, and I'll see that. 8. Ice in Cocktails: This is Important! : If I were to ask you what one ingredient is in pretty much every cocktail that's ever been made, the answer of course, would be water. Just like in the coffee industry. When I think a lot of people underestimate the power of water, even though it makes up a massive proportion of the drink. I think in the drinks industry, water in the form of ice dilution. And occasionally, hot water in hot drinks is often massively overlooked, even though it has a fundamental impact on things like the temperature of the drink, but also the taste and the texture. So today I'm going to run through my top tips when it comes to ice and dilution so that we can make the best possible drinks every single time. So the first thing I want to talk about, which is really important, is the quality and consistency of the ice. Before we even have ice, obviously we have water. The water wants to be neutral tasting without any kind of chlorine flavors or a metallic flavors. It wants to be the water you'd be happy to drink. Fundamentally, because you go into, we're going to freeze this into consistent cubes and ideally have an ice tray that you use repeatedly. I've got four or five of these, which means I always have the same size ice cubes for shaking, and I always use eight cubes when I shake a cocktail. I also have these bigger cubes which I use for serving drinks over given a little bit more surface area and a slower dilution, because I want the drink that you serve over ice to take a much longer time to dilute, so they've got more time to drink it. Consistency wise, the same ice, the same amount of ice. Ideally, it wants to come straight out the freezer like these. And you can see with these ice cubes, they're really nice and firm. They haven't started to melt, which is really important. And we're going to be using these straightaway, so we can really control the dilution. If we're going to be using ice that's been sitting out for maybe 15, 2020, 5 minutes, obviously it's start to melt, it's start to round off at the edges. It'll lose this kind of dry look and we get much more water introduced to the drink straightaway. So as soon as you add the wet ice into the drink, it immediately starts diluting. The clock starts ticking and with wet ice that's starts to melt, you really won't get the drink down to the temperature you want to, but more importantly shake it to the texture you want before the drink becomes over diluted. So the first tip I'll give here is to use the same, really high quality ice made with neutral, delicious taste and water. Use the same amount, same size, same shape in every cocktail. That way whichever drink you make is completely repeatable and easy to control the dilution. So number two is probably something a little bit less obvious and that's to measure your dilution, particularly when you first get started making cocktails. By doing this, you really understand how much water you're introduced into your drinks, which otherwise you wouldn't be able to do. So the process for this is really easy. Add your glass to some scales, tear the scales, add all your ingredients to the drink, so you know exactly how much the ingredients weighed before dilution. Add the ice, stir it down, or shake it up. Then pop your serving glass onto the same scales, tear them off, and pour the liquid into the glass, measuring how much you end up with. In the case of this drink, this started off as being just under 70 grams and after stirring ended up being just over 90 grams. Meaning we added just over 20 grams of water, which equates to around about 30% dilution. Measuring this gives you a really good control over how much water you're adding. And you start to understand exactly how much time it takes to add how much water. And one thing you need to think here is any less than 20% is going to be really kind of low dilution, giving big boozy flavors and lounder spirits to come through. Anything over 40% is going to be quite watered down. But again, you need to think about the ABV of the ingredients in the drink. And that 20 to 40 is probably a sweet spot that most people will enjoy, but not everyone. So make sure you understand where you are in terms of dilution. So they can tailor drinks either to yourself or whoever you're serving them too. So the final point here is a really important one, and it's to be intentional. So what I mean by this is to make sure that things you want to be cold start off cold. So you want to freeze your glasses to make sure as soon as you add liquid to the glass, it doesn't start immediately warming up. If there's ice in there, you want to make sure, again, this hasn't started to melt because as soon as you pour liquid over ice, it's going to start to dilute even further. And if that's wet ice, it's going to happen really quickly. So even controlling your dilution in the sterin or shaken process will be for nothing. Then finally, if you're making something that really needs to be as cold as possible, you can even freeze your spirits to give you as much time as you can to stir it down to the appropriate dilution with ice and get it as cold as possible. Then served in a frozen glass. Then with those three tips. Number one, using high quality, consistent ice. Number two, measuring your dilution. And number three, being intentional. With temperature, you're much more likely to get the drinks that you intend to serve. So now we've covered those three tips. We're going to move on to the next video in the series, which is going to be how to make clear ice. 9. How To Make CLEAR ICE!: Welcome back to The Central Cocktails. Everybody, today I'm going to show you the easiest way to make clear ice, which is an amazing way to level up the visual appeal of your drinks. So let's get started. So what exactly is clear ice? So clear ice is ice without any of those impurities, without any bubbles, which just looks like a completely transparent block which is going to sit in your drinks. And you may have seen this from some really high end top level cocktail bars, but it's actually really easy to do. And particularly on a small scale like this, you can do it at home. And it doesn't require any really very specific tools, just this, which is actually quite easy to get hold of. So the first thing I'm going to need is a cool box like this one, which ideally you can store with the lid open or even take off even better and leave that to one side. And the reason this works is called directional freezing. So directional freezing is where you insulate the sides around the water. So the freezes from the top down. And in doing this, all of those impurities in the water actually end up at the bottom, which freezes last, and you get all the kind of really nice, clear, pure ice in on top. Other than that, you're just gonna need a tray to catch the ice in later, which does make a little bit of mess. You could use a sink, but a tray is more hygienic. You want a chopping board and you want a serrated knife. And we're good to go. So step one is to fill up your cal box around about three quarters of the way with water that you'd be really happy to drink. So something that's neutral tasting, flavorless. Odorless. And then you're going to put this in the freezer for 24-36 hours. Step two is after those 24 to 36 hours, take your cool box out of the freezer, put it on a tray, turn it upside down, and just give it a gentle press to release the ice block. When you've done that, leave it in the tray for around about 15 to 20 minutes just to temper, and after that we're ready to carve. I recommend doing this with very clean hands for yourself, but if you're doing this in a commercial environment, you must always wear gloves. One, if the ice is tempered, you want to start carving your ice. And this is actually really easy to do. Just make score lines with a syrated knife on all four edges, just where you want to make a cup. And then very gently give your knife a tap with something like a rubber mallet just to release the ice. And this should happen fairly easily. Keep making cuts until you've got the shapes you're after and you'll be left with these amazing clear ice cubes perfectly cut for the glasses you're going to serve the drinking. So this works really nicely with things like an old fashioned, any kind of stirred down drink served over ice, that looks really good with, with anything shaking, it's a little bit pointless because you get the kind of emulsion and the kind of creaminess from the shaking process. But anything stirred with this looks fantastic. So now we've got our glassware with our amazing ice to serve our drinking. We're going to start thinking about how we can level up the drink even further. And we're going to do that through garnishing, which we'll cover in the next episode. 10. Easy COCKTAIL GARNISHES - Zests, Coins, Flamed, Wedge, Dried! : Welcome back to Essential Cocktails. Today I'm going to show you my top three extremely simple, but extremely effective garnishes. Let's get into it. So the first garnish we're going to talk about today is a citrus peel. And this is extremely simple. It could be from an orange, it could be from a lemon, it could be from a grape fruit, which I have one just here. Could even be from a lime, although these are quite small, and the principle here is extremely simple. Ideally, if you can peel your citrus first before juicing, that means you get maximum yield from your fruit. That's always a good thing. Whenever you can approach things from a zero waste mindset to maximize flavor output, always do that. The process is really simple, just start at the top. Work across the fruit if it's quite small, or down the fruit if it's a little bit bigger, give yourself a nice, big swathe of citrus. Before doing anything with this, you want to express it over the drink. If that's part of the recipe, hold it over the drink squeeze. As you'll see in lots of different recipes on this channel. And then once you've expressed those oils which you want to do on drinks which have particularly aqua fiber, because this can have a slight aroma and the citrus really covers it over. Or just any drink that wants that little zip and zinc of freshness over the top of it to use this as a garnish. Now we've got our piece of citrus here. We want to tidy it up nicely just using a knife. Straighten out the edges on both sides as our starting point to give yourself a nice long peel. Then you can either just box off the ends for a nice tidy garnish, or you can even take it into a slight diagonal to give it a little bit more elegance. I think that will be called a trapezium. And then you've got these really nice, simple, effective looking garnishes that can just sit in the drink or on top of the drink, or on the side of the drink. And it's also very aromatic. It smells delicious in here. A variation in our very long peel is going to be a citrus coin, which is really easy to take. So just using a serrated knife this time just kind of cut through the citrus without going too deep. And then back out again to give yourself this little, probably two pence pieced coin, which again you can express over the drink for a little bit less zestiness. But this is the foundation of our next garnish, which is going to be a flamed peel, which is all related to our peels. With this, you're going to hold it probably with 32 fingers in a thumb, I should say, over the drink. So when you do squeeze it, it goes over the drink rather than away from it. Also away from a customer. So take your lighter to flame our peel. You just want to warm it up, poviously being very careful. And then when you're ready to express, just give it a little quick squeeze and then you can rim the glass drop in your coin obviously. Sure in your hands are nice and clean and you have a really nice looking flamed citrus peel coin. It also gives a really nice aroma to the room. So win, win rather. The next really simple garnish we're going to look at, again, is a citrus based garnish and this is going to be a slice. So a lot of cocktails. You'll see a citrus wheel. I use this in Tiki drinks because they're kind of all about excessive garnishes, which really add to the visual appeal. But my general approach to garnishing is keep it extremely simple and if in doubt, leave it out. If it doesn't add anything to the drink visually aromatically, or from a flavor perspective, I'd actually rather it wasn't there. So one I use sparingly, it's going to be a citrus slice. So I don't use these very often because I don't think they're the best looking garnish, but I actually use it more functionally. So if you want an opposing color, that's really kind of easily done with citrus fruit, but more importantly, I use these as a way to rebalance the drink. So if you've served someone a drink, and for example, you think it's balanced, but you think they might actually prefer it a little bit more kind of acidic, a little bit more vibrant and zingy. With the citrus fruit you can actually serve the garnish on the side. Make sure you cut it lengthwiys, just like this. And then into small eighths essentially. And then you can just slide these into the drink. Give them the drinker the option to squeeze it in if they want to, but also not if they don't want to. Citrus slices can look great, can add to be aroma, but most importantly, they can impact the taste, balance the drink if you want to retrospectively. And then finally, we're going to look at dried fruit. So the final garnish we're going to talk about now is dehydrated fruit. So this works with all sorts of things. Lime, lemon, grape fruit, blood orange, even because these are quite seasonal. So you can actually dehydrate things in season, so they can eat them out of season. So blood orange is one of my favorite fruits in the world. I have some which is not in season right now, but I can give this little taste and it'll be delicious. And also, things like pineapple, I really like to use. These are all quite striking looking, but they also have really intensified flavor because you've removed all the moisture from them. So a couple of things on that because you've removed so much moisture, they keep for a really, really long time. So this is a really good way to preserve fruit. But also one drawback of this is it doesn't have a huge amount of aroma on the drink. So when you compare the peel of a citrus fruit to dried fruit, something like this, although it does have a little bit of aroma, it doesn't have anywhere near as much zing and freshness as a citrus peel. So you can actually combine the two together, Express the zestover, the drink, and then garnish with a dehydrated fruit that's both aromatic and visually beautiful. But if you just include this, then you want to make sure that the drink is well balanced, has enough acidity that you're looking for, because this definitely won't bring it, but it does have plenty of delicious flavor. When you give it a taste to make these, all you need to do is cut the fruit really, really finely, put it in the dehydrator, turn it on to around about 50 to 55 degrees, which is my preferred temperature. But it will vary for different fruits. And you want to leave this for at least 24 hours until as much of the moisture as you can has been removed from the fruit. This will give you these amazing shelf stable garnishes, which you can use all year round. So there we have three really simple, really powerful garnishes you can use in your cocktails. And there'll be plenty of examples of these in the future. So I'll see in the next episode. 11. A Beginner's Guide to Mixing Drinks!: Today we're going to talk about five of the most popular ways to mix cocktails. Shaking, double shaking, stirring, building and blending. In this episode, I'm going to try and help you understand which technique you use when you're making certain drinks, the impact it has on the drink. And also give you some examples of drinks that use each technique. So let's have a look at it. So before we get into those five different methods of mixing drinks, we want to talk about why exactly you do this, and there are three primary reasons. Number one is to mix the ingredients together. Number two is to chill the drink. And number three is to bring some dilution to the drink. Whichever method you go for, you need to be quite intentional with because it's going to have a big impact on the texture of the drink primarily. So first of all, we're going to talk about shaking. When it comes to shaking a cocktail, there are a few things you really need to think about. First of all, you want to make sure you use plenty of ice. Even though it seems kind of contradictory, using more ice actually gives you a slower dilution because the drink stays nice and cold. Whereas if you just add one or two ice cubes, they're going to melt pretty quickly. And they're actually going to dilute the drink before you reach the texture you're looking for. Again, Whichever shaker you go for, make sure you seal the two together, nice and tight. And you want to hold onto it at two hands, one hand on top, one hand underneath. And when you shake, there are many different ways to shake a cocktail. And the evidence seems to suggest that whichever way you go for can be greatly effective as long as you shake it for around about 12 to 15 seconds. So if you want to read more about this, you can read liquid intelligence which does a lot of work into this. But fundamentally plenty of head room, shake it really hard, end to end, and make sure the ice has plenty of room to travel and the drink also goes up and down through the shaker. You don't want to go side to side because it's just kind of going all over the place without really mixing. You want to use the full capacity of the shaker to get as much back and forth as you possibly can in the drink. The same applies for your kind of three piece shaker, top and bottom. Make sure you hold on nice and tight so you don't have any spillages. Shake, shake, shake could be a kind of up and down, could be over the shoulder, could be straight back and forward, but it has to feel comfortable, has to get the job done and shake nice and hard. Really important however you shake, shake hard, but when would you do this? So these are kind of rules of thumb. They're made to be broken, but they're also there for a particular reason. So shaking a cocktail is usually done when there's citrus in the drink, when there's dairy in the drink, or when you want to really air rake the drink to get it nice and vibrant and bubbly, and foamy and alive. So this is found in lots of different cocktails. Dacay, last word, paper plane, these are all shaken cocktails because they all contain citrus. But if you want to take this one step further and get even more texture on your drink, you can do what's called a double shake. So one of the key variations, the shake in a cocktail is called a double shake. And this incorporates a dry shake. So rather than just shaking the drink once with ice, you're actually going to do two shakes. Once with ice and once without either dry first or dry second. If you do the dry shake first where you just shake the cocktail to kind of emulsify it, that will be a dry shake. Whereas if you do it after the main shake with ice, that's a reverse dry shake. So both of these work really well. Experiment with both. But when I talked about emulsification, that's kind of important here because it's going to be used when you incorporate things like egg white or aqua fiber, or even pineapple juice. You can use this technique in drinks which is sour based, like a whiskey sour, or a pisco sour, or even something like a white lady. I actually try and avoid this process as much as possible because it is a little bit fiddly. If you're using things like pineapple juice, egg white, and aqua fiber, you do want that really famy texture. But if you also use ice that's fresh out of the freezer, you can just give it a single really hard shake over ice and avoid the need to do this. But if your ice has been out the freezer a little bit longer, you might want to do this so you don't shake it too hard and overly dilute the drink. So now we've got a shake, we've got a double shake. We can talk about stirring cocktails. So if you're making a drink that doesn't contain citrus or it's almost entirely booze, you might want to stir the drink and this doesn't add anywhere near as much aeration as your shaking. And double shaking is kind of silkier, more refined, a little bit smoother, but equally powerful. So you do this when you're making drinks like a martini. As long as it's not a shaken martini, a Manhattan, a Martinez, and an old Fashioned. And if you think about the texture of those drinks, they're very elegant, very silky, not kind of vibrant and alive, which is what you're going to get with a shaken drink. So again, the technique for this can be really simple. You just want to stir the drink down over lots of ice using a bas spoon, ideally, but also a chopstick might work. And then once you reach the level of dilution you're looking for, strain it out and you'll get that really nice silky cocktail. This retains a lot of really nice aromatics of the drink, but also it gives a really nice kind of clear final drink, which obviously if you're shaking the drink, you're going to irate it and lose that. So now we've got our shaken drinks, our double shaken drinks and our stirred drinks. We're going to look at building drinks. So when it comes to building drinks, what this means is building the drink in the glass, something like a majito would be a really good example of this or any drink that you're going to top with, something like soda, water tonic, or even sparkling wine. And the reason to do this is to avoid overly diluting the drink or to keep the entire pieces of fruit, herbs, or spices in the final drink. So when it comes to the majito, you're actually muddling the mint into the drink and leaving it in there. But you do have to be careful that if you're building in the drink, you don't break the glass when you muddle too hard. So now we're going to talk about the final technique today, which is going to be blending. So a final technique we can look at, which is featured in things like a peanut coalader and all sorts of frozen cocktails. It's going to be blending drinks and this is really useful if you want to leave the entire fruit in the drink or to get that kind of really nice blended, smooth, almost creamy texture if you can add something like coconut milk or cream. And it's just a really interesting way to do things where you actually blend the ice completely into the drink rather than straining out. So when it comes to adding ice, if you add a little bit of ice, you'll get a kind of almost milkshake texture. Whereas if you add a lot of ice, it'll become very thick, almost like a slushy. So there's no right and wrong here. I prefer it a little bit on the looser side so you can at least drink it rather than eating it, but your mileage may vary. If you like disco drinks, you might like them to be kind of slushy drinks, which is totally fine box to get a little bit lighter, a little bit more porable, a little bit more sippable. And we'll see a peanut glider in the future, which I'm very excited to share with you. So now we've got a really good foundation to build upon. We've covered some essential bottles, some essential tools, the importance of balance, sweetening drinks, seasoning drinks, all sorts of ways of presenting the drinks, including ice, clear ice garnishes. I think we're pretty much ready to start mixing some cocktails. 12. DAIQUIRI - Classic and Strawberry!: Welcome back to Essential Cocktails. Everybody, today I'm going to show you what I think is the quintessential sweet and sour cocktail, which is a dacery. And I'll also show you how you can introduce fruit to this, such as strawberries, to make something like a strawberry dacery. So let's get started. Okay, so the Dacerys, not a new drink. It's actually a really old drink invented over 100 years ago in Cuba. And it just contains three things. Rum being number one, and you can use different types of Rum for this. Lime and then sugar syrup. And I'm going to be using cane sugar syrup for this. And there's lots of variations on a dacory. You can introduce fruit in all kinds of different ways. You can also blend it if you prefer. But today we're going to be shaking up two dacories, classic and with strawberry. So the two recipes are actually going to be exactly the same, with the exception of strawberries pin in the strawberry deacory because both of these drinks contain citrus. As we learned a few episodes back, we're going to be shaking this drink. So the first thing I want to do is prepare my strawberries for the strawberry, Cory. And I'm going quite heavy on this six strawberries because these are super delicious, really kind of flavors And strawberries, if you want to get more of that, you can add even more strawberries. Or if you want it to be more rum forward, you can add a little bit less. So this is a personal preference thing. I like a strawberry dacory to be quite, you know, fruit forward, but it's up to you, which is your preference, and if you like it, boozy, obviously adding much, much less, maybe one or two strawberries. So I'm just going to be cutting these into four, removing the heads, and actually if you use these heads strawberry tops, you can actually infuse these into spirits and liqueurs. Strawberry top campuris, really delicious. Strawberry top gin is really delicious. Strawberry top vermouth is very delicious. And just infuse this into the liquid for a few days and you get loads of strawberry flavor coming through, even though these are often kind of wasted products. So consider that a little zero waste tack there. So I'm just going to finish this off with my six strawberries. Just reserving an extra one for later for garnish. Then we're going to start building the drink. So now we've got our strawberries prepped, we're gonna start building the daceries. And these have exactly the same spec. And when it comes to the specs for a dacory, there's a few different ways you can approach this. If you want it to be really kind of booze forward, obviously you can add less of your sweetness and acidity. If you want it to be more sweet and sour, you can add more of that. So I'd like to go with 60 Mls of rum in my drinks. In this version, which I think is a really nicely balanced dacory. We're going to accompany this with 25 meals of lime juice. And I'm just adding 12.5 Mls of sugar syrup, which is a two to one white cane sugar syrup. Before I add the other ingredients, we're just going to muddle up our strawberries just to release all that really delicious strawberry flavor. So I just want to press this into the sugar syrup to make essentially a strawberry syrup. But you can also use different syrups here, vanilla syrup might be really nice. We're kind of moving away from a pure dacory at that point, red and lots of other flavors. But as I've always said, these are templates. You can adapt them. You can adjust them. You could use raspberries here, you could use blackberries. Lots of berries work really nicely. Passion fruit is also really good, so just mix into the sugar and then we can move on to our citrus fruit. Next up to eat drink, I'm gonna ad 25 Mls of freshly squeezed lime juice. And ideally, this wants to be as fresh as possible. So I squeezed this just a few minutes ago. But if you want to make this in advance, I'd recommend doing it probably less than a day before serving if you can. And 25 meals gives you a nice balanced drink. If you want it to be more boozy, maybe bring this down to 20 mills and ten meals of sugar syrup. But this is a really well balanced drink. I'm going to go 60 Mls of Rum. And once again, template style, I'm going with an eight year old Jamaican Rum. You could use a younger rum, you could use a darker rum, You could use a more intense rum, A lighter Rum. Just bear in mind, whichever rum you do choose will impact the final flavor profile of the drink. You could even blend them together, which works really well, so you can get a bit of richness of darker rum and then the kind of tropical notes of a lighter rum. 60 Mls goes in. The next thing we want to do is give this really good shake up rice. It's going to pour our liquid into the bigger tins. Give them a good knock, and we'll shake these up now. We'll shake our fruity strawberry dcery. We grab out our chill glasses from the fridge, and then we're going to fine strain each of these starting with our regular dacery, because this leave our strainer nice and clean. The fine straining just removes any of the kind of ice shards from, in the drink. It gives you a really nice texture. And then the strawberry dacery, which is a little bit thicker. So we'll take a little bit more straining, but it's fully worth the effort. You can see the fruit does clog the strainer a little bit, but that's all good flavor. Going to garnish with half a strawberry on our strawberry dacery and then a little bit of dried lime on our regular dacery. There we have a dacery Two ways, strawberry and classic. 13. How to Make Your Perfect WHISKEY SOUR! : Welcome back to Essential Cocktails. Everybody, today' going to show you how to make one of the most popular cocktails in the world, which is a whiskey sour. Okay, so the whiskey sour dates back to around about the mid to late 1800s. And it's such a delicious drink and I think this is a perfect gateway into the world of whiskey. So if you're not a massive whiskey fan, which is completely fine for now, give this drink a try. And I guarantee you you'll find a way to really start enjoying whiskey and once you down the rabbit hole, you'll never look back. The world of whiskey is an incredible world, so there's lots of different flavors to explore and I'm pretty confident you just haven't found the right whiskey for you just yet. This is a really good way to find it. So to make a whiskey sour essentially kind of build in a box around a whiskey to elevate it, bring it to the forefront, but also add some kind of sweetness, acidity and bitterness, and a little bit of creaminess, just making it a little bit more approachable for people. So, in order to do this, we need to start with a Whisky of course, and you can use any whiskey for this. I like to use a bourbon, which is kind of a traditional way to do things, but you could go with a rye, which would be a little bit more spicy. You could use a Scotch whiskey. For a Scotch sour, you could use any international whiskey which will bring different flavor characteristics. Let's keep things traditional for now. We'll go with Buffalo Trace is our kind of foundational whiskey sour ingredient to bring our sour element to the drink, which makes it a whiskey sour. We're going to go with lemon juice and this ideally wants to be freshly squeezed and we're going to balance this with a little bit of a two to one monn cane sugar syrup. So you can use, again, any sugar for this. That will just change the characteristic of the drink, but we're going to keep things kind of traditional here. So we've got whisky, we've got sourness, we've got sweetness. We're going to add some bitterness in the form of aromatic bitters. I'm going with scrappies, but you can explore the different bitters here. And we want that really nice kind of creamy foamy texture that you've had in a whisky sour before. And there's two ways to do this. There are probably more but two primary ways. So the first of which being to use Aquafaba, which is essentially the water for inside a can of chickpeas. And if you can avoid using a salted water, that makes a massive difference. And although this sounds a little bit strange, don't be put off by this. You don't taste chickpea in the final drink at all. It just brings that really nice kind of foamy texture. But if you want to go for a more traditional root, you can use an egg white, which works beautifully well. But obviously not everyone eats eggs. So I'm going to go with the plant based alternative, which is aquafaber. Because we want a really nice foamy texture and we're using citrus in here. We're going to shake the drink. And you can even actually incorporate a second shake into this, a dry shake, as we saw in our double shaken video, which I'll link above. But because I'm using ice that's straight out the freezer, you actually don't need to necessarily do this. You can give it a really good hard shake to get that really nice and multified texture. So whisky su starts with whisky and we want a fairly handsome pour of this, so I'm going with 60 mils. We're going to go 30 mils of our freshly squeezed lemon juice and then 15 mils of our two to one modern sugar syrup. And that four to two to one ratio of spirit to sour to sweet is a really popular ratio that a lot of people enjoy. But as with anything you can adjust this, you can add more sweetness, less sweetness, more sourness, less sourness, more spirit, less spirit. And find the ratio that works for you. We're going to go two to three dashes of bitters. But again, if you prefer it a little bit more bitter, go for a touchmore, then 15 mils of our Chickpea water, which is called Aquafaba. And you don't need a huge amount of this to kind of bring that really nice texture. We don't want add any Chickpea flavor, which it really doesn't do anyway. But if you went too high, it'd be unnecessary. It'd almost be too foamy. And this is the perfect amount for this drink. Going to give this a really good hard shake of a lots of ice to really whip things up and get that nice texture going to find strain into a chilled glass with lots of ice. We're just going to finish off the drink with a nice slice of lemon. And the reason for this is twofold. Adds a really nice contrast of color to the cherry, but it also gives people the option to add a little bit more acidity to the drink if they prefer. Just going to skewer the lemon wedge. Skewer the cherry avoiding the stone. And there we have a delicious whiskey, sour cheers everybody. 14. MOJITO - One Recipe, Endless Variations! : Today I'm gonna give you one majito recipe that you can use to make at least three completely different drinks. So let's get into it. So the majito originates in Cuba, but its popularity spread all over the world. Is a super popular drink. And if you see one majito ordered in a bar pretty much immediately after that, you'll see 5101520. Because if you see a majito, you want a majito. The rescipe I'm going to give you today, although technically kind of the same has variations within each category to give you very different results. So we're going to cover a full spectrum of majitos, from the lightest and most refreshing to the darkest and richest. But they're all completely delicious, so we're going to be building amjitos in the glass. And I've got three glasses here, so you can see the difference between each drink. And I'm going to start off with around about six to eight mint leaves in each glass. So this is going to be our kind of core flavor to the majito. As with anything, if you add more mint, it's going to be more minty. It's gonna be kind of a little bit more refreshing. Add a little bit less, and it'll be more kind of rum forward, but you know your own preferences. If you love mint, add more mint. If you're not a huge fan, add a little bit Les. So now I've got our mint bases. This is where it really starts to get interested for our lighter drinks. We're going to have a cane sugar, which is a two to one cane sugar syrup from min and then from the darker majito, I'm going to go with a two to one light muscovado sugar syrup. And straight away you can see these are going to give pretty different results. If you tasted cane sugar versus litmus govado sugar, you know they're completely different. But we're going to add the same amount of our two torn syrup to each drink. So in our lightest majito, we're going to go with 20 meals of our cane sugar syrup. And this is our really clean base. It allows the light Rum to really shine through in our kind of medium majito, 20 meals of our light sugar. Again, because we don't want to overpower the Rum in this, we want it to still be very vivid and evident. But then as we move into our dark majito, which is a completely different flavor profile, I'm going to add 20 meals of our two to one lights covado sugar syrup, which brings little butterscotch notes, burnt caramels, toffee, really different to our clean white sugar. And a little bit more character coming through as well. We're just going to give these a very gentle muddle using our muddler or roll in pin. And we don't want to press too hard here, because if you really bruise the mint or tear it, it's going to become quite bitter. You just want to release the oils in the mint, which then infused into the syrup. So do the same with our sort of medium hito, and then finally our dark majito. So with each of these, I've added 20 meals of our sugar syrup, if you like Mejito's a little bit, Les sweet, obviously add less. Maybe 15 meals if you like them a little bit. Seeter, maybe up to 25 meals. But then to balance that, we're going to go in with 30 meals of freshly squeezed lime juice. And this is a really important flavor. And Amjito just brings that vibrancy, acidity and freshness to the drink. And 30 mills per glass. Our spirit base in each hito is actually going to be Rum, but they're going to be three different rums. A lighter Rum, a kind of more middle ground aged rum, and then a very dark rum. So first of all, we're going to start in our very light majito with 60 mills of aged white Rum from Eldorado. So if you want to learn more about these bottles and why I've chosen them, you can click on the video above which explains all of my back bar decisions. So in our lightest majito, we've got our aged white rum into our sort of medium majito, I'm going to go 60 mills again of a Jamaican aged Rum Appleton estate. And this brings those kind of funky tropical notes, a little bit of pineapple coming through, which is really delicious. Whereas our white rum over here, more white chocolate, kind of unripe banana, very different flavor profiles. And then finally, into our dark majito, we're going to go 60 meals again of goslings, black seal rum, and this really complements that kind of darker sugar in there. Very rich, completely different to the light rum. This is more Trico molasses like and got that really nice kind of dark sugar going in there as well. Another thing about this majito template is it's really versatile. You can incorporate lots of different flavors here. Things like gin work really well. Happily flavors, elder flour, a full range of flavors work in the majito. Lots of fruit flavors as well. So I really do encourage you to experiment with all these. We're just going to 23 fill each glass with crushed ice and then just give them a little stir with a spoon just to move the mint around, really. And to mix the sugar, lime and rum together. Not to add too much dilution because there's a lot of crushed ice in here. So just go really easy with it. Be kind of strategic with your movements to move that mint around. And this is just going to really integrate all those ingredients together. We're not looking to churn the drink up too much because we don't want to over dilute. We're just going to top these up with crushed ice. You can add something sparkle in here if you'd like to. Something like soda would work really nicely in the light. Majito champagne works really well in the majito or even ginger beer in the dark, Hito. But I actually kind of prefer to leave these out. I think these drinks work really well on their own, and I don't like to over dilute them. So just to finish off the drinks, I'm going to go for a small straw, a medium straw, and a large straw. And then when I was picking the mint leaves earlier, I reserve these really nice big sprigs, which if you want to, you can just give a little slap to bring back to life and release the aroma. Add that into each glass and then we have three fantastic looking smelling and also taste of majitoesI. Hope you enjoy these. 15. Never Made a MARGARITA? Start Here! : Today on essential cocktails, we're going to make one of the most popular cocktails in the world, which is a margarita. So the margarita is an amazing cocktail that most people have heard of. And at its heart, it's essentially a tequila sour with some flavor accents of orange, often in the form of quantr and lime in the form of freshly squeezed lime juice. So our three core ingredients are going to be tequila, orange, liqueur, and lime juice. And on a little tray or some kind of receptacle, you want to pour out some really good quality sea salt, which you can either pour straight out or you can also crush up slightly if you want a slightly finer result. So just breaking down any little pieces into a slightly finer grind is what you want to do. The margarita is a great template for so much experimentation. So some people add fruit to this, which gives you a little bit more kind of sweetness, often a little bit more flavor complexity. Chili is a really good ingredient to margarita, but what's common is going to be our tequila base sweetness and sourness. So to get started, you want to take your salt, which is now a little bit finer than it was before. And with your glass, you want to grab some lime. And take a small section out of this just to kind of rim the top of the glass. Just make a couple of small cuts to give yourself a lime wedge. And what we're going to do is just coat the top rim of the glass with a little bit of lime. So we have essentially an adhesive for our salt to stick to. You can go all the way around. You can just go halfway around if people want to try it with and without the lime and salt. But I love salt, so I'm going to go the whole way round and be fairly liberal with our salting just now. Really importantly, you want to just connect the outside of the glass to the salt and not the inside. Because we're not adding salt to the drink directly. We want it to be something that kind of is external to the drink, bring in texture and also taste. So if you have any salt in on the rim of the glass that's likely to fall in. I recommend just running a very clean towel or tissue just around the inside to make sure none of the salt falls in. And you should have a fairly uniform salt rim around the attribute glass. So a round, about 34 of a centimeter should be plenty. And now you've got this. You want to whack this into a fridge or a freezer to get it really nice and cold. Or if you don't have a fridge or freezer to hand, you can just add an ice cube into the glass, or a couple of ice cubes to get it nice and chilled down. So now, preptar glass, which is a really important first step, you can start building our cocktail. So this is going to be a shaken drink because we have citrus in the drink, and we're going to start with a fairly healthy pouring of tequila. So the margarita was invented in round about the 1930s or 1940s in Mexico. And it's a pretty murky history, just like lots of cocktails. But what we do know is tequila is going to be a fundamental ingredient to any margarita. You can also blend in some Mezcal. You can use a Blanco Tequila Repisado, and Jejo doesn't really matter. Just think about the tequila that you use. This is going to have a massive impact on the final flavor of the drink because it's a core component. A younger Blanco tequila is going to be a little bit more grassy, a little bit more kind of citric and refreshing. A repisado tequila like this is going to have a little bit more sort of caramel coming through, a little bit more of the kind of aging notes coming through. And Nanieho is going to have more of those again, so it'll be quite rich and intense. And you've got a mezcal in there. You're gonna get smoky notes, a little bit of grassiness and almost astringency. You can blend pretty much do whatever you want, as long as it hasn't a garve spirit at the base. And I personally recommend a repisado. Tequila is a really good starting point. If you want to learn more about tequila and also all the bottles on the back bar and why I chose them. You can check out the essential bottles episode wich, I'll put above. But what we're going to do now is start building the rest of our tequila. So we've got our spirit base now. We need our sweetness and our acidity, because it's essentially a sweet and sour drink. So we're going to go with 25 mils of quanto. This brings those really nice orange notes, but also a lot of sweetness. But we do need to remember, this is 40% AVV, so it's a fairly high alcohol content. And then to balance this 25 Mls of lime juice, and you can add fruit in here, just muddle it into the bottom of the tin herb. Spices will cover the Picante dell Casa, which is a really similar kind of margarita template with chili and coriander in a future episode. So make sure you subscribe for more. We, it's going to shake the cocktail with lots of U dice and then we can find strain the cocktail into our now chilled Nian Nora or coupe glass. I'm gonna garnish with a little bit of dried lime. And there we have a delicious, salty, tequila based sweet and sour drink known as the Margarita Enjoy everybody. 16. AVIATION: Botanical, Floral, Delicious!: Welcome back to the Central cocktails. Everybody, today we're making a super refreshing cocktail called an Aviation, which is botanical, floral, citrus forward and downright delicious. So let's get started. The aviation has a couple of really interesting stories behind the name. One of which being that the aviation industry in the 1910s and 1920s around when this drink was being created was a really kind of growing industry. And this drink was a homage to that. And the second being that this drink, which contains a really interesting ingredient called rema violet. Which contributes a kind of distinctive blue, purple color to the drink that the drink was named after. The color of the sky where the airplanes would go. So a couple of different stories, we're not sure which is exactly true, but both of which seem pretty relevant. So this is a sweet and sour cocktail. Rema violet being one of our sweeteners, and the other one being Maraschino liqueur. So these are our sweet elements. We have our sour element, which is going to be our lemon juice. And this is a gin based drink, so going to go with our beefed gin once again. But whichever gin you have is going to work really nicely in here. This is a really straightforward recipe. It's going to be a shaken drink because we have citrus in here with 50 mills of gin at the base. And this gin brings a really nice botanical character. Obviously we have citrus in there, we have juniper, which is obviously the key botanical in there. And this is just light and refreshing and kind of the beating heart of the drink, but it's not the early element, so our sweeteners in the crema violet bring plurality primarily. And we're going to go 15 mills of this and this brings that really vivid, kind of vibrant purple color. As well as 15 mills Maraschino cherry liqure. You can go with a clear one like this. You could also go with a more colored, kind of rich cherry liqure. Both work really nicely. Obviously the clear keeps the drink a little bit lighter. If you have more rich colored cherry liqure, it's, can be a little bit more red, kind of purply colored. But this combination of cherry and violet with the kind of freshness of the gin, just really works so nicely. And then to add our sourness, 15 meals of lemon juice. So this is a really simple spec, we have 50 meals of gin and then 15 meals each of our crema, violet, maraschino, liqure and lemon juice. And I'm going to give this a really good hard shake over ice. This drink has an awesome color. We're going to find strand this into a chilled Nicanora glass or a coup glass and you can see that really nice violet liqueur. It's had a big impact on the color of this drink. And I do understand what they're saying with the blue sky reference. We're going to garnish with a boozy cherry. And there we have a delicious, refreshing, floral and citric cocktail called an aviation enjoy that one. 17. WHITE LADY: An Underrated Classic! : All right, welcome back to a central cocktails, everybody. Today we're making a drink called A White Lady, which is perfect for you gene lovers, but also those of you who love sweet and sour drinks. So let's show you how to make it right now. Okay. So in terms of style, a white lady is actually quite similar to a whiskey sour, but we're actually substituting that whisky, which is obviously the dominant flavor in a whiskey sour. And we're going to introduce gin to the drink, which really does change the dynamic altogether. And we're also going to bring in a little bit of orange flavor in the form of quontro. So these two become our kind of key flavor notes. A whiskey sour is obviously whisky sweetness and sourness with a little bit of bitterness. Whereas this is going to be more floral, more delicate, more kind of citric and refreshing. And it's a really nice alternative to the whiskey sour. Just like the whiskey sour, we're gonna need our sweet element, which is going to be freshly squeezed lemon juice. We're gonna need our sweetener to balance this out, which is going to be our in two to one cane sugar syrup once again. And then finally once again we're going to go with Aquafaba is our kind of emulsifi to bring that really nice creamy texture without adding any dairy to the drink. But if you prefer, you can go for egg white, which is more traditional. But it's obviously not a plant based option, not suitable for vegans. So we're going to stick with our chickpea water, also known as Aquafaba, for our recipe today. So this drink has quite an interesting story behind it, which is that it was designed originally in the 1920s to be a lighter alternative to a classic martini. And I'd say it does a good job of that. I'd say it's quite a different drink in terms of style. Less boozy than a martini, a little bit more refreshing, sweet and sour. And I think it does its job perfectly. Again, an alternative to a martini. So we're going to start off with 50 meals of beef et to gin, or whichever gin you have. And obviously the gin you choose will slightly impact the drink when you're adding so much of it to the drink. And then we're going to balance this. Bring in another flavor of orange with 20 meals of quanto. Again, use whichever orange liqueur is your favorite. But just be mindful that quantros quite high ABV. So we're going to want to give this a good shake to make sure we get plenty of dilution in there because 70 meals of 40% ABV alcohol is actually quite a lot. Even though this drink doesn't feel particularly boozy. We're going to go 20 meals of our freshly squeezed lemon juice, Fred, a little bit of Zip and Z, and also works really nicely with the gin. Ten mils of our two to one sugar syrup. And I would recommend using a white sugar here. Brown sugar would be a little bit jarring in this drink. So ten mils of our white cane sugar syrup, at two to one ratio, I'm using the onin. Then finally, 20 mils of our aqua fiber or one egg white. And this will bring that really nice fluffiness when we shake it up with this drink, I order to get it as light and fluffy as possible. So we're actually going to do a double shake or a reverse dry shake. First of all, we're going to shake it with lots of ice to begin with to get it nice and chilled and a little bit of dilution in the. I give that around about a 15 second shake, and then we're just going to strain this from the bigger Tin into the smaller tin. I don't need to find strain this just yet. Just going to ditch our old ice into the tin and then give this a second shake with no ice. Which does feel a little bit strange because it's quite a quiet process, but this really just demosifies everything and gives it that really nice, whippy light, airy texture, another ten to 15 seconds. Now you just need to find strain this into our chilled coop glass and you can see how lovely and foamy and airy that drinks going to be. Going to express a big peel of orange zest over the drink. This just gives another layer of freshness and acidity and zinc to the drink. Just gonna gently rim the glass, tidy up our garnish, just make it into a little perfect rectangle pop out on the side of the drink, and there we have a delicious, light, refreshing, and clean white lady. 18. PALOMA: The Most Refreshing Drink Out There?!: I think when a lot of people think of Mexican cocktails, they think of the margarita, which, although it's an incredible drink, and we've covered that in previous episodes, you shouldn't overlook the Paloma. So the Paloma is a longer drink, it's bubbly, and it's arguably even more refreshing, so we're going to make that today. So The Paloma is actually a really simple drink to put together, which might explain a lot of its popularity. But it's also extremely delicious, and tequila is at its base as you might have expected. But you can even blend in a little bit of Mezcal. To this, I like to go three parts tequila to one part Mezcla. I want a little bit more smokiness coming through, but for simplicity sake, we're just going to stick to the tequila now. It also has acidity coming from freshly squeezed lime juice. And if you want to balance this out, you can add a little bit of Garvie nectar. But I would say don't overdo it. Because a lot of the grapefruit soda, which we're going to lengthen the drink with, has a lot of sugar anyway. So a lot of the time this isn't necessary. But what we're going to do to kind of bring all these big flavors together is add a little bit of saline solution. So a lot of classic recipes call for a pinch of salt, which is incredibly difficult to be consistent with. You can easily overdo it and spoil a drink. But using a saline solution with one part salt, five parts water, just gives you so much more control over this. And I actually use seasons quite a lot in my cocktails, which I covered in an earlier video in the course, which I'll put just above for you here. And then to finish the drink, we're going to add something sparkling, refreshing, which is going to be grapefruit soda. So I'm going with carritos, which is a Mexican option, quite traditional, but there are lots of grapefruit sodas on the market. And I'd say just give them a little taste beforehand so you understand how acidic they are, how sweet they are, and how fizzy they are. And then you can adapt your recipe accordingly. So if you don't have Horitos Grapefruit soda because it's not that widely available across the world, that's completely fine. You can either watch this video for a really good solution or you can even just blend grapefruit juice and soda water to top up the drink around about 2.5 and you'll still get a really good result. In that case, you might just need to add a little bit of garvae to bring a little bit of sweetness. We're going to build the Poloma straight in the glass which have child in advance. And we're going to start with 40 meals of tequila. But as I mentioned earlier, doing 30 mils of tequila, ten Mls of Mezcal is actually really good option as well. Just brings a little bit more earthiness and a little bit more smokiness. But for simplicity's sake, 40 meals of tequila and 15 mils of freshly squeezed lime juice. And so far we're looking quite close to the margarita, but this is where we kind of depart from the margarita template. So first of all, if your soda is not very sweet, you can add a little bit of a Garv nectar which obviously is the base of your tequila, your Mezcal. So it's kind of in keeping and synergistic bring in lots of sweetness, but because we're using Haritos, which does have a really good level of sweetness, we don't really need this in this recipe. So now we've got our spirit base, our acidity from the lime juice. The option to add some sweetness from the Garvie nectar. I want to add a little bit of saltiness to the drink, which won't taste like salt, but it just brings everything together really nicely. So in order to do this, I'm just going to add our glass to the scales. And I'd like to add quite a lot of this. So 1 gram of our one to five saline solution, this is a pretty magical ingredient with a Margherita. Obviously adding salt to the rim of the glass, you can also do that here if you'd like to. You can add chili to this, You can add tropical flavors like pineapplell work really well, but this is just going to be a really kind of clean grapefruit for a drink with that nice tequila under line. And then now our base is ready. We're just going to add our ice and don't scrimp on the ice. You want to add as much as you can fit in the glass, because you want this drink to stay really nice and cold for as long as possible. So I've gone five or six big cubes. And then we're just going to finish the drink with a round, about 100 grams, or in fact exactly 100 grams of our heritos, grapefruit soda. Just going to top this up, just leave it a little bit of room so they can give it a stir first of all, so I've not added all of 100 grams. Just going to give it a little mixed together to make sure all the ingredients are fully mixed. Top it up to 100. We're going to garnish with a nice big grapefruit wedge, which can squeeze into the drink if you like, finish off with a straw. And there we have the most refreshing tequila based drink I can think of, the Paloma Enjoy everybody. 19. CAIPIRINHA: A Brazilian Classic! : Cayprenia is a three ingredient Brazilian cocktail that's so much more than the sum of its parts, Hasa, lime and sugar combined to create one of the most refreshing cocktails imaginable. And today I'm going to show you how to make it. Welcome to essential cocktails. All right, welcome back to essential cocktails, everybody. I'm damn fellows. And in this course, I'm sharing with you 40 of the most popular cocktails in the world. And this cocktail, the cayprenia, is one of my absolute favorites. There aren't many things more refreshing than a cayprenia. And although this is a very simple drink on the surface, there are actually quite a few different ways of making it. And I'm going to show you my preferred way, but there are lots of other kind of techniques you can use, building it in the glass. Building it in a shaker, shaking versus churning, et cetera, et cetera. But this works really nicely. So the Caiprenia is built around Hasa, which is the national spirit of Brazil. And Hasa is an interesting one, if you're not familiar with it. It kind of sits within the realm of Rum, although it isn't rum. And whereas rum is often made from molasses, which is a byproduct of sugar production, hasa is made with fermented sugarcane juice. And you might be thinking this is very similar to Rum Agricult. There are elements that are similar, but there are lots of different rules around has, where it's made, how it's made, which make it distinctively itself. So Chata can be completely unaged. You can get a lightly aged cachassa like this one, which has aged up to two years in oak barrels. You can get more heavily aged. All of these will have slightly different results. The younger it is, the more kind of vibrant and grassy it will be. Whereas the more time it spends aging, the more mellow take on some of those nice kind of vanilla caramel notes. And this is a really nice sort of butterscotchy, slightly grassy cachasa. But play around with whatever you have. So all you need to make a ibrenia is going to be your casassa of choice. You're gonna need one big juicy lime and then something to sweeten the drink. And there are a few different schools of thought here. Some people really like to use a granulated sugar. The argument being that it helps to kind of encourage the oils out of the skins of the lime. I find this is a little bit inconsistent. A lot of people don't weigh how much sugar they're using, so you get varying levels of sweetness. I'd like to go with one lime, a fixed amount of sugar syrup, and get very consistent results. So the first variable we're going to talk about here is whether you make this in the shaker, tin, or in a glass. And because these are quite delicate glasses, I don't want to be muddling too hard into these. So I'm actually going to put this in the fridge to get it nice and cold. I'm going to build it in our shaker tin. You get started. You want to prep your lime? Make sure it's nice, clean lime. And you just want to remove the kind of nubbins on either end. So this one, if there's a little nub in there to pick that off, it's not going to do too much damage to the drink, but it just avoids it going in your mouth. I'd like to cut this into half and then cut each half into quarters, so you get these nice eighths of a lime which have a nice surface area to crush. But some people like to cut this length ways, some people even remove the pith, which is an option. If you have particularly bitter pith, then you may want to remove this, but I'm not bothered about that. I can catch a little bit of bitterness is welcome in the drink, so I'd like to leave them as they are, as a kind of scattering a very wide pressible lime eights. I'm gonna pop these all into our tin, and then to that I'm going to add my sweetener, which is going to be 20 Mls of a two to one sugar syrup. I'm going with Monn cane sugar syrup and this just balances out the acidity of the lime. And we're going to model the two together to give them a really nice base, which we're going to build our shasta and ipen on top of. And we're just going to model these together to give ourselves a kind of sweet and sour, lightly pithy and bitter base. Squeeze it out all the juice from the lime but not too hard. You don't want to overdo it and get too much bitterness from the skin, but it will just give you sweetness, acidity. And these really sit alongside the hasa to create a delicious harmony of those three ingredients. A really nice variation here is called a prana d'uva, where you add grapes in here as well. Maybe five or six crush those in with the lime and the sugar, and you get that really nice kind of grapytanic acidity in there, which really complements the lime. So that's a really recommended variation. And then to our lime and sugar, I'm going to go for a healthy pour of Hasa. It's going to be 60 Mls. But again, this is a kind of template which you can build upon if you add vodka instead of Hasa, which is a really popular alternative, you get a Kiperosca. If you add rum, you get a Kyprisima. But there's nothing wrong with Hasa. I think this is the perfect base for a Kyprenia. People play around with it, but I don't think they need to this those three ingredients potentially with some grapes. And there are absolutely perfect in my opinion. So experiment but I don't think can go wrong with hasa. If you're building this in the glass, you can just add your rushed Thai straight into the glass and give it a little churn. But I'd like to just add my crushed this into the shaker, not too much. And just give it a really light shake. Just kind of almost turn it upside down a few times rather than shake it just so we really integrate the ingredients. So just a very delicate shake, so everything's kind of mixed together. Crushed ice does really kind of dilute quite quickly. So we don't want to do that. Just want to make sure the sugar and the lime juice and the chata all kind of mixed together. And then we're just going to open, pour this into our glass. Some people like to shake the drink over ice and then strain over crushed ice. But I think we've got to be really careful, we don't over dilute the drink. So I think this method works really well, and it avoids us breaking any delicate glasses, which we don't want to do. We're going to top that up with a crown of crushed ice, just to really make it look very, very, very refreshing. Add a little straw. And there we have, in my opinion, one of the most delicious cooling, clean cocktails you can imagine, which is gonna be the Brazilian classic. Perna. Enjoy everybody. 20. How to Make a CLOVER CLUB!: Welcome back to essential cocktails, everybody. I'm damn fellows. And today I'm going to show you a really refreshing raspberry based gin cocktail, which has sweet and sour elements and is just an absolute winner. It's called a Clover Club. All right, so the Clover Club was credit in the early 1900s and it was actually named after a really popular club which went by the same name, the Clover Club. And this has some pretty interesting ingredients. We've got raspberry in there, we've also got gin in there, which is going to be our base spirit. But interestingly, we have a little bit of driver move in here, so I'm just going to grab this from my fridge. And this actually lightens the whole drink down slightly, reduces the ABV, especially if you can compare it to something like a white lady which uses quanto as well as gin. So that was quite a high ABV. This one's a little bit less intense. The vermouth just brings kind of maltiness, a little bit of roundness to the drink, whereas obviously quantros quite a big old orange flavor. As with a lot of our sweet and sour recipes, we're going to go with lemon juice balanced out by a little bit of white sugar syrup. I'm going with nin cane sugar syrup, which is a two ton ratio. And again, we're making this into quite a sort of foamy drink, a little bit creamy. And you can either do this with an egg white, which is one option. Or you can do it with aqua fiber, which is the water from a can of chick peas, which is what we're gonna do today. So these are our kind of key liquid ingredients. But we also have one more ingredient which brings a real nice, delicate sweetness and fruitiness to the drink, which is going to be raspberries. And we're going to muddle these in the bottom of our shaker tin. But if they're kind of soft raspberries, you probably don't need to model them because they're going to get really knocked around when they get shaken up. So in our tin, because we're gonna shake this drink because we have citrus in here. I'm going to add ten mils of our sugar syrup to our five raspberries. And if you want to get a more raspberry kind of forward flavor, obviously add more raspberries. If you want it to be more delicate and less fruity, obviously add less. But five raspberries here is a pretty good starting point and I think this gives enough of the flavor that it kind of comes through without overpowering the drink. So it's going to give this a light press with our muddler just to release the raspberry juice into the syrup. And some recipes actually call for a raspberry syrup, but essentially what we're doing here is making a raspberry syrup, the base of our shaker. Now we're going to build the rest of the drink, which is going to be 40 mills of gin. And you can use a London dry gin here. You could use a Plymouth gin, which would work really nicely because it's a little bit more kind of sweet and fruit forward. But whichever gin you have is going to work really nicely. And we're complementing this with 20 mills of a driver mouth, or an extra driver mouth, or a blank over mouth. Obviously, these all have slightly different sweetnesses and different characteristics. But again, whichever one you have is going to work really nicely. As with lots of our sweet and sour drinks, we're going to go 20 mills of freshly squeezed lemon juice to bring our acidity and a bit of zestiness to the drink. We're going to go 15 mils of our aqua farber just to bring our nice foaminess. But if you're using an egg white, just use one egg white. And then we have one more optional ingredient, which actually I do recommend. So onto a set of scales, I'm just going to add our tin. And I'd like to add around about, not, 0.5 grams of a saline solution made with one part salt, five parts of water. And this has an interesting effect on the drink. So if it's not here, it's kind of wide, kind of sweet and sour. But just adding a little bit of salt just brings it all together, almost makes the drink a little bit moulty. And it ties in with the vermouth in particular, really nicely. Just to lighten the drink and add just something a little bit more kind of round and warming to the drink. Whereas otherwise it's kind of bright, vibrant, sweet and sour. Give this a really hard single shake over ice if you're just using really kind of fresh ice. But if you're not using fresh ice, you can do a double shake, which our shake had to do in this episode. With this, I've got ice fresh out of the freezer. So a single shake will suffice as long as you do a very, very hard shake like this. So after ten to 15 seconds, you'll get a nicely frosted up shaker, which is a really good sign, means the drinks nice and cold. You can see in the drink it's got really nice foamy texture already, so we don't need that second shake in there. But if this wasn't completely kind of whipped up in emulsified, just strain it out to a second shake dry, and you'll get that nice foamy texture fine. Strain this into a chilled glass and it has that really nice light pink color and a foamy texture on top of the drink. I'd like to express a little lemon coin over the drink just to give it another kind of citric aroma. Just really freshens the whole drink up, you can discard this and then garnish with a raspberry spear. And there we have the raspberry forward in based sweet and sour cocktail called A Clover Club. Andrew. 21. BRAMBLE: An 80s Anti-Hero! : Cocktails from the 1980s don't usually scream refinement, balance, and beauty. But **** Bradshaw's creation, the bramble is all of those things and more this drink tells the story, has a unique aesthetic, and has an elegant simplicity that requires no adjustment. So today we're going to make a bramble for those of you unfamiliar with **** Bradshaw. **** was one of the greatest bartenders of all time, really influential, and was doing kind of things against the grain in the 1980s when creating cocktails like the espresso Martini and also the Bramble that we're talking about today. So there's actually a really nice story behind the Bramble. Where **** was working in Fred's bar in London and a supplier brought him in a bottle of this, which was Rem Demure or a Blackberry liquor. And **** grew up on the Isle of Wight and he'd pick blackberries as a child, eat them. He'd be covered in scratches and semi dyed purple. And this bottle of Rem Demure took him back to his childhood memories and he wanted to create a drink around this, which really celebrated British produce. So **** essentially made a blackberry gin sour using the rem, demure gin, lemon juice, and also sugar syrup to provide some balance. And this drink is actually a really simple, elegant serve, which although it has really kind of simple foundations, punches were above its weight and it's a really iconic drink. So although you can shake this drink, I actually prefer to build it straight in the glass because we're going to be serving it with crushed dice. And if you shake it, you dilute it. You pour it over crushed dice, you dilute it even more. And I'd like to keep that dilution a little bit lower. So we can always add dilution, but it's very difficult to take away. So in the base of the glass, we're going to start with 50 mils of our gin. And this brings those really nice botanical notes. Again, a British product which **** was really trying to celebrate. And then we're going to add our citrus, which I think **** was a bit annoyed, that doesn't grow in the UK. And this is lemon juice, so this is a really nice kind of gin, sour base spirit, citrus and sugar. And it's going to be a little bit less sugar than we'd use in our four to two to one ratio, which we're used in a few other videos. Primarily because we're going to add the creme demure, which has its own level of sweetness as well. So I'm just going to go to ten mills here, But you can adjust this according to you, Nate preferences. And if you like things a little bit sweeter, add a little bit more. If you like things a little bit more dry, which actually works quite nicely in this drink, you can add a little bit less or even no sugar, although it does get a little bit tighter at that point. So I do recommend around about 5 miles minimum. So that's our classic bramble base, which you're going to finish with the rem demure, but there are lots of ways you can rip on this. You could introduce fresh fruit to the mix. You could muddle it into the bottom of the glass. Something seasonal, maybe Blackberry, when it's in season, would be the obvious choice. But also raspberry works nicely. Maybe strawberry, you can use different spirits. I've seen this made with Pisco before, which adds something completely different to it. Or even vodka, which is a little bit more neutral. You can even use a different Liqure to drizzle with, so obviously Cremedamure, Blackberry Liqure is the really obvious choice, which is kind of classic for the drink. But you could use raspberry liqure, you could use cherry liqure. There are many different variations on this, and this is a really nice starting point. So as a pro type now as we're about to build the drink, we want to maximize the kind of impact of this. So you want to prepare everything, so our drizzle is as impactful as possible. So grab your straw. Have that ready to go? I'm going to garnish with blueberries because we don't have any blackberries. They're out of season at the moment. But this is kind of in the spirit of ****'s idea behind the drink, all about seasonality. These are what I could get hold of. I'll do a great job. And then we're just going to take a little slice of lemon. Just add a bit of color and a little bit of citrus to the drink. So now we've got our base. It's going to add our crushed ice. Don't go all the way to the top just yet, Just give it a little mixed together, add some dilution, and get all those flavors kind of knowing each other. I don't have to do that. We're going to add more crushed ice, kind of crown on top of the drink. It's got that really nice, impactful look. I don't usually do this, but we're going to pre straw pre garnish. Then the final thing we do, in ****'s words, is to add a lovely trickle of our chremdomurever, the drink. And I'd like to add a round, about 15 to 20 mills. And if you're seven this for friends or even in a bar, you could take this as it is, take it to the table like so. And then finish the drink with your remdemule. Drizzle 15 to 20 miles in a jigger. This is going to be a really nice blackberry sweetness to the drink and it's very impactful and beautiful drink with it bleeding through. And then we have an absolute celebration of seasonality in British produce called a Bramble is everybody. 22. DARK AND STORMY: A Rummy Zinger!: Welcome back to essential cocktails, everybody. Today we're talking about a drink which is equally refreshing and warming. At the same time we're going to be making a dark and stormy. So the dark and stormy is a classic Bermudan cocktail built around goslings, black seal rum, with which it's synonymous and it really does celebrate everything that's amazing about this rum, those treacle flavors, the molasses flavors, those big dark sugars. And it really kind of brings warmth, but also freshness to this using sweet and sour ingredients. So Rum is going to be at the base of our drink. We're also going to go with freshly squeezed lime juice, py acidity. If you have a sweeter tooth or a slightly less sweet ginger beer, you might want to go with a little bit of sugar syrup. And I'd really like to add a little bit of our saline solution just to kind of bring those big acidic and sweet flavors together so that they really focus in on the goslings black seal. And then we're going to finish the drink with our ginger beer. And I'm going with Fever Tree, which I think is a really nicely balanced ginger beer. So if you watch the Poloma vida from a few days ago, which I'll link above, you'll actually recognize this template and this template of 40 meals of spirit, 50 meals of acidity, up to ten mils of sugar, up to 1 gram of saline solution. And 100 grams of something sparkling can be utilized with so many different ingredients and flavor profiles. So you can start experimenting with this to either riff on these creations or even create your own brand new cocktails, which is pretty cool. So whereas in our Paloma we're using a tequila base. Now in our dark and stormy, we're going to use a Goslings black seal rum base. And we're going to go 40 mils of this and this is the main flavor in the drink for our acidity. We're going to go 15 mils of fresh lime juice, which brings that kind of zinc and a lot of vibrancy and a little bit of freshness. Whereas otherwise these are quite rich ingredients. If you wanted to, you could add your sugar syrup now. But I'm actually not going to. But I wouldn't recommend going above ten mills here because I think that's gonna be plenty of sweetness for you. We're going to add 1 gram of our saline solution, which is made with one part salt, five parts water. And as I said in my previous episode, all about seasoning drinks, this just brings those kind of wide flavors together. So when there's big sweetness and acidity, we actually want to focus in on the kind of middle flavors, which are going to be our Rum and Ginger. This does a really good job of that. Kind of bridging it all together and just softening the kind of width of the drink. Because we're building this drink in the glass. We're just gonna add our ice straight on top of the liquid. Gonna add our ginger beer, but not quite all of it. Just 'cause we want to give it a little mix together. So I'm going about 75 meals in there now. Just give this a little quick mix together so we're done. Over dilute here. Top up with our remaining ginger beer up to 100 grams. And then to finish the drink, just gonna cut a little lime wedge in case you want to increase the acidity of the drink. And finish that off with our wooden straw. So this drinks hot and cool. The ginger brings heat, it brings coolness. We've got the acidity which makes it kind of light and refreshing, the richness from the rum and all in all, despite its simplicity, this is an extremely complex drink and it's called a dark and stormy. 23. My Best Ever AMARETTO SOUR Recipe!: The amaretto sour, is it a good drink? Is it a bad drink? It really does depend on how you make it, and crucially, whether it's balanced so often, an amaretto sour can be really kind of sickly sweet and poorly balanced. But if you make this drink well, it can be a really delightful drink for you to enjoy. So today I'm going to show you my favorite recipe for the drink, which makes some subtle changes to the original template, but actually I think makes a massive difference. So let's get started making an Amaretto sour. And welcome to essential cocktails. Okay, so when we think back to a more classic sour template, something like a whiskey sour, something like a pisco sour, rum sour, gin sour, et cetera. It tends to have a fairly fixed template, which is a spirit base citrus as your kind of acidity, some kind of sweetener, potentially some bitters. And there may be something to give it that really nice, emulsified creamy texture, such as aqui fabra or egg white. When we move into the world of an amereto sour, this changes quite significantly because actually amaretto has a fairly high amount of sweetness in itself. So even though this is the base ingredient, it also serves pretty much as the sweetener in the drink as well. So we're going to be building this round Serrano Amaretto, which is where the drink was originally designed. It was in the 1970s promotional campaign and the original spec was just amaretto and lemon juice. This kind of makes sense. You're bringing balance to the very sweet ingredient which is the amaretto, which is an almond liqueur. But actually what we can do today is kind of build some layers around it, add some seasonings, which is something I often talk about. And just create a really well balanced drink, which also has some slight flavor accents, which I think really elevate the drink. So obviously at the heart of the drink is going to be our ameretto, But I'm actually going to cut our base with a bourbon, or ideally a higher proof bourbon or such as Bullet, which is 45% ABV. And this just kind of takes the edge off the sweetness of the amaretto, and this is going to be our kind of base ingredients, which is going to be our liqueur and our spirit. And then to this we're going to have our sourness, which is going to be freshly squeezed lemon juice. We're going to go for our emulsifier now, because we don't need a sweetener, hence the amaretto. And this is going to be something which you don't often see in an ameretto sour, which I'd really like to add, which is pineapple juice. So, as well as bring in texture in that really nice foamy mouth fill when we shake the drink up. This is also a sweetener, but it also has acidity in there. So lots of complexity brought there. And the drink doesn't taste like pineapple. Even though pineapple is delicious, it just brings something slightly different to the drink in an extra layer of dynamics. And then on that note, we've got some seasonings. We're going to go saline solution, which is a one to five salt to water ratio. We're going to go vanilla extract, which again, is a flavor which kind of bridges all these ingredients together really nicely. And then finally, we're going to go with some aromatic bitters. And I'm actually quite heavy handed with this, because the rest of the drink very much sits in the realm of sweet and sour. And bringing some really nice bitterness to the drink is a very welcome addition. So let's build our amaretto sour. So before we start mixing the drink, you just want to make sure your Glas ware is really nice and cold. And if you've got your ice on hand so we can move nice and quickly and preserve the really cold temperature which this drink really benefits from. And also the nice foamy texture so you can serve it really kind of lively and awake. So we're going to be shaking the drink today, so we're going to be building in a tin. And because we do have an emulsifier in here, which is the pineapple juice, you could double shake this, but a single shake here is going to be perfectly adequate. It's going to give it that really nice foamy texture if you shake nice and hard. And that's exactly what we want in the drink. So if you're want to deep dive more into different mixing techniques. We actually covered this earlier in the course, which I'll link above, but we're going to start with 40 mils of our amaretto. And this has got that really nice kind of nuttiness, some sweetness obviously, that really nice almond flavor. And it's just a really kind of strong, intense flavor baste the drink. And because it is so strong and intense, we want to kind of dial that down and bring up a little bit of alcohol in here just to avoid the drink becoming too kind of sweet and sour without any kind of spirit behind it. To 40 meals of Amretto. I'd like to cut this with 20 meals of bourbon, ideally a high proof. So the addition of a Hi BV spirit like this one is credited to Jeffrey Morgan Thorlo and it really does improve the drink. Our acidity is going to be 30 Mls of freshly squeezed lemon juice, But you could also use lime juice here if you want a little bit more sharpness. It's just lemons, a little bit more traditional to the original recipe. And then, as I said earlier, pineapple juice, a bit of a secret weapon here. Not only does it bring acidity and sweetness, it brings a really nice texture, which you'll see in a second. So now we've got the core of the drink ready to go. You could shake this up and get a really delicious drink, but I think these seasonings really take it to the next level and just bring everything together really nicely and just kind of complement all the flavors. So first of all, we're going to go a half a gram or not 0.5 grams of saline solution, which just brings all the flavors together. If you think of almonds as well, nuts and salt, a really delicious combination, also not 0.3 grams of vanilla extract. And again, this is not designed to make the drink taste like vanilla. It's just a complimentary flavor that works with pretty much everything in the drink. And then when it comes to bitters, I go pretty heavy handed here because I really want to add dimension to the sweetness and the acidity. And I think a depth of bitters is a really powerful thing to add. So I'm going to go four dashes of scrappy aromatic bitters, and that's equivalent to around about two to two on a 2 grams. I'm going to add this to our shaker with lots of ice, and get this a really good hard shake over ice. And if your ice isn't fresh out the freezer or the ice machine, you might want to give it a double shake just to get that nice texture while torso chill in the drink. But because this is really cold ice, really big cubes which is going to shake it really, really nice and hard and fast like so fine strain in the serve. Some nice big cubes of ice. We're gonna garnish with a fresh cherry which complements the almond really nicely. And there we have a really nutty, sweet and sour, very lightly tropical, really well balanced amaretto sour enjoy. 24. LONG ISLAND ICED TEA... But Good! : You know, the Long Island Iced Tea? It's a drink that's called tea that doesn't contain Tea does contain far more spirits than seem sensible. And on paper, it's a complete mess of a drink, but somehow it works. So today I'm going to show you how to make one. Welcome to Essential Cocktails. So I don't think the Long Island Iced Tea has a really kind of beautiful, illustrious history it seems to have been creating around about the 1970s. But I think most people watching this will have their own stories of Long Island Ic tea. Maybe from your kind of late teenage years, your '20s, if that's when you're allowed to start drinking. And it'll often be served in a jug, It'll be a load of booze chucked in there, topped up with loads of cola. Really sugary, really boozy. Not great for the head the next day, but probably quite good times in your life. And what we're gonna do today is make a slightly more refined version of the drink. Taking a little bit more care, not getting too over the top on the booze, but still kind of balanced, brings through the cola nicely, has a little bit of that iced tea flavor, but not a really kind of messy, horrible jug of boozy coke like you probably remember. So the Long Island S Tea actually has five different bottles in there. We're going to need all sorts of things, so get shopping Vodka, it's going to be our number one gin, it's going to be number two. White Rum is going to be number three. You can tell this is going to be a pretty dangerous combination. Tequila is number four, and Quontro, or Orange Liqueur is number five. And this is a sweet of alcohol you wouldn't usually put together, But in a long islandized tea, apparently that's a good idea and you'll taste it later. And, you know, I wouldn't necessarily beg to differ. So for our acidity, we're gonna go with freshly squeezed lemon juice. We're going to go just a little bit of cane sugar syrup, but we're also going to get sweetness from the other ingredient, which is kind of famous and synonymous with Long Island iced tea, which is good quality Coca Cola. And I'd like to use the OG, particularly in a glass bottle. I don't know if it actually tastes any better, but the experience of drinking from a glass bottle is always lovely, especially if it's really nice and cold. I don't know who exactly put all these bowls together and thought it was a good idea to make one drink from them. But regardless of what goes into the drink, this is an undeniably popular drink. And even in bars that don't list it on the menu, a lot of people ask for it just because it's kind of a cult classic. So some people build the drink in the glass. Some people build it in a jug, sometimes in a big bucket, maybe a goldfish bowl. But we're not going to do that today. Whereas I'd like to actually shake the drink, so I'm going to get a little bit lighter on the booze than a lot of people would. And I'm going to go 15 meals of each, but even 15 meals of each spirit is quite a lot when you add it altogether. So you don't want to be drinking too many of these 15 meals of our vodka, 15 meals of gin to follow, which brings a little bit of the botanical notes, a little bit of a kind of citric character to the drink, a little bit of white Rum, 15 meals once again, which has those kind of vanilla notes, A little bit of white chocolate in there, which actually ties in nicely with the cola. 15 meals of tequila. I'm going Repisado, but a Blanco, it'd be more grassy. Repisado has more kind of rich notes to tie with the Coke. Once again, 15 meals of Contro, which also has a 40% ABV. So this is no slouch of a drink. Take it easy, this brings a little bit of sweetness, a little bit of orange character. And then we're going to bring a little bit of welcome acidity to the drink, which is going to be 25 mils of freshly squeezed lemon juice. You could also use lime if you prefer. Has a little bit more sharpness, but lemon juice is the kind of classic. And then again, 15 mils of our cane sugar syrup, I'm going with modern cane sugar syrup, which is a two to one syrup, and this just brings a little bit more sweetness to drinks. With this many ingredients, I'd like to add a few seasonings to kind of bring them all together. And one ingredient that works with pretty much everything on the table is vanilla. And this isn't in the classic recipe, but it is a flavor in Coca Cola. And I'd like to add 0.5 grams just to kind of bridge everything together before we shake the drink. I'm just going to prep my glas with our Coca Cola be cause we're gonna get a really nice looking layered effect on here. This isn't necessarily required, it just gives a really nice aesthetic to the drink. So before I shake the drink, I've just added 60 grams of Coca Cola to our glass. And then we're just going to give this a good shake over ice, not for too long because we don't want to over dilute the drink. But we do need to give it a good shake to get all these kind of disparate ingredients kind of come together. So we can do that. Now if you want to slightly change the dynamic of the drink, you can use different base ingredients in terms of your soda. You can use some like ginger beer. You could even use Prosecco if you want to get all fancy. And then in terms of the spirits, you can use pretty much anything here as long as they do kind of synergize together. So adding vanilla to your vodka is really nice. Using dark and more age spirits can work really well, but play around, this is a really good starting point and then see what you can come up with. I'm just going to slowly pour this over the ice so that you get a really nice kind of layered effect on the drink. So don't pour too quickly and you get, actually, quite a striking looking drink. Something which isn't necessarily the most elegant set of ingredients. We're going to carefully add our straw to the drink without interfering with the layer in too much. Add yourself a slice of lemon or lime, whichever you want, so you can adjust the acidity of the drink. And who knew a long islandized tea could be so fancy. Before you serve the drink, you want to give it a lot mix together. But there we have a very well balanced, slightly more elegant and leveled up long island, ized tea and drew that one. 25. TOMMY'S MARGARITA: A Clean, Fresh, Easy Marg!: The Margherita has become the base for countless rifts over the years. And this version, the Tommy's Margarita, might just be one of the most popular versions in the world. And for good reason, this drink really champions the tequila in the drink. And today I'm going to show you how to make one. Welcome to Essential Cocktails. The Tommy's Margarita was created in the 1990s by Julio Bermejo at his family restaurant, Tommy's Mexican in San Francisco. This is actually a really simple variation on a margarita. Whereas we have a traditional margarita with tequila, lime, quantro, and salt. All we're doing here is substitute it out. The quantro or orange liquel, which obviously brings that kind of strong orange characteristic to a Margherita. And we substitute in in a garve, which is a really kind of synergistic sweetener to use with tequila made from the same base ingredient as tequila itself. So this is our sweetener. We're going to continue with lime, once again, freshly squeezed lime juice. And then the base is going to be our tequila. And I'm going for a repisado tequila. But you could use a Blanco, you could use Aanejo, whichever you kind of prefer there. I also really like to add a little bit of our saline solution as a bit of season into the drink, But if you prefer to rim the glass with lime and then salt, that's completely fine. You just obviously get a very different texture. And you can either serve this drink straight up or you can serve it on the rocks, which is what we're gonna do today. So essentially, a Tommy's Margherita is a tequila sour. With tequila being the spirit base, lime juice ban acidity, a garvea, bonar sweetener and then the saline, just bringing that kind of season Ed bridge and all the ingredients together and it's a shaken drink because we want to get it really nice and vibrant and alive. And it's kind of clean and refreshing, but also very much focused around the tequila, which is really the beaten heart of the drink. So into our Tommy's Margarita, we're going to start with 60 mils of our Repisado Tequila. And if you use a Blanco tequila, obviously this is going to be a little bit more grassy, a little bit lighter, a little bit more kind of citrus forward and fresh. Whereas a repisado brings a little bit more of the kind of richer, more kind of woody notes to the drink. Although Neo would bring more of those. I think a repisados, a really nice middle ground between the two. We're going to go 30 mils of our freshly squeezed lime juice. Again, following the formula we've used in a lot of our sour recipes, which is four part spirit, two parts acidity, one part sweetener, which means we're going to add 15 grams of our Gave nectar. And because this is easy enough to shake up, it's not like a honey which is super thick, which is going to weigh this on scales much easier than using a jigger which is a little bit less accurate. And 15 grams works for me. If you like it a little bit sweeter, you can add some more. If you like things a little bit more tart and sharp, obviously you can add a little bit less. But 15 grams is a really good starting point. And then we're just going to finish that with 0.6 grams of saline solution made with one part salt to five parts of water. We're going to shake the drink over lots of ice to chiller drink, mix it and add some dilution. Fine strain over ice into a nice chilled rocks glass. Or you can serve this straight up garnish with a dehydrated lime wheel. And there we have what I think is the cleanest, most refreshing and tequila forward variation on a margarita, which is a Tommy's Margarita. Enjoy everybody. 26. PICANTE DE LA CASA: The Ultimate Spicy Margarita!: If you love spicy drinks, this might be a drink for you. If you love coriander, this might also be a drink for you. But if you hate coriander, this might be the worst drink in the world. So you could always watch this video instead. But if you love both these things, this might be the absolute perfect drink for you. And it's called a Picante dell Casa. So the Picante della Casa is an iconic drink, particularly in the Soho house members clubs, which is where the drink was created. So if you're going to any Soho house site, at pretty much any time of day, you'll see people drinking these drinks. You'll even see people wearing Picante T shirts. The power of this drink has gone a very, very long way. But essentially all we're making here is a Tommy's Margherita with chili and coriander. And that's no bad thing, this is a delicious drink. So to make our Picante della Casa, or our Picante for short, we're going to need one chili, a handful of coriander, And then the other ingredients in the Tommy's Margherita, which are going to be tequila, freshly squeezed lime juice, and also a little bit of a garve nectar, and then also a saline solution just to kind of season the drink and bring it all together. So the first thing we need to do is decide how spicy we want this thing to be. So a good idea is to kind of taste your chilies. If you're up for that, you can just take a few slices, give one of them a little nibble, just to see whether it's super spicy, not too spicy or very mild. And obviously, if you add the seeds of the chili, it's going to be much more spicy than if you don't, so have a little nibble of the chili that's not too spicy. So I'm going to go with probably three slices of chili in here, one of which does have seeds in there, so it's going to be a little bit more spicy. So chuck these into your shaker tin and then we're going to build the rest of the drink. Start in with a good handful. Coriander, about that much, but again, if you love coriander, add more. If you hate coriander, don't add coriander to these. We're going to build essentially a Tommy's Margarita on top of our chili and coriander. But I actually like to build in a slightly different order, starting with a gave. The reason for this is we can muddle the coriander and the chili into the agave. To kind of infuse it into a syrup, 15 grams of agave. And then all we're going to do is give us a little gentle press with our muddler just to crush the chili and create our spicy herbal syrup. Now we're going to build the rest of our Tommy's Margarita, 60 mils of tequila. I'm going with the repissado, this brings that really nice tequila forward flavor, which is inherent in the drink. We're going to go 30 meals, freshly squeezed lime juice which is obviously our acidity. So now we built this. We're going to give this a really good hard shake over ice to chill, mix and dilute the drink. And then we're going to find strain in the drink, into our rocks glass filled with lots of ice, you can garnish with a couple of slices of chili or if you're going go really excessive the rest of the chili, which you can also eat. And then we have a really delicious spicy herbal and tequila forward cocktail called a Picante Delacsea, which is 27. TWENTIETH CENTURY: Chocolate Orange But Refined: Even though the drinks over 100 years old, I think that the 20th century is a prime candidate for a renaissance. This underrated classics got a really unique set of ingredients which are both bang on trend and readily available. It's perfect for any time, whether it's day, night, summer, or winter. And I think it's definitely time this drink gets the recognition that it deserves Gin, lemon juice, white chocolate in the Le Blanc. This sounds like a very strange combination of ingredients, but you have to trust me on this. It's an amazing combination. And today I'll show you how to make it. So let's make the 20th Century. So as you can probably guess, the 20th Century was created around about the start of the 20th century. And it was actually named after a luxury train that used to run between New York and Chicago around the same time. These ingredients sound like they might not work, but actually the combination of a really good quality Juniper forward gin, a little bit of lemon juice for a little bit acidity, a white creme de cacao, so a white chocolate liqueur and Le Le blanc, which has a really nice kind of herbal character, all come together surprisingly well to create a very unique but also harmonious flavor profile. So because we've got the citrus fruit in the drink in the form of lemon juice, we're going to be shaking this and we're going to start with 40 meals of good quality gin. I'm using a kind of Juni Perfward London dry gin here, which is beef. But because this does have some sort of floral notes in there from the Lee particularly, you can play around in lots of different gins. Let me know which is your favorite in the comments below, but something like this, which is a really good value. Juniper Ford Gin is going to stand up the slightly bigger flavors of the chocolate and give a really nice base. And then to add some acidity, we're just going to go five Mls of freshly squeezed lemon juice. And I know these don't really kind of sound like they're going to work together. Lemon white chocolate, florality, botanical notes, but the end result really doesn't make sense in the glass. So we've got our spirit, we've got our acidity. We're going to add some sweetness from our white Rem Deicco, which I'm going to 20 mills, and this does have some sweetness in there, as well as that really nice white chocolate flavor. And then finally, 20 mils of L Le Blanc, which brings those light floral notes, tie them really nicely with the gin. And it's got a subtle richness in there, which just works really nicely with the white chocolate. I'm going to give this a shake over ice grub, our chilled Nick and Nora glass from the fridge or the freezer, and then we're going to find strain this straight in there, straighten out any shards of ice that we've created. In the shaking process, I'd like to garnish this with a little orange zest coin, which we're going to express over the drink. And that combination of white chocolate and orange with the delicate florals from the gin and the lile is just a magical combination that shouldn't work but just does. So there we have an underwriter classic which is Ju Renaissance. Give this one a try. It's called the 20th Century. Enjoy everybody. 28. ENZONI: Your New Favourite Cocktail?!: If ever you've had an Negroni and been overwhelmed by either the bitterness or the level of alcohol in the drink, then this drink might be perfect for you. It has a similar flavor profile in a way, but it's more sweet in sour style. And it also contains grapes, which I think of massively under utilized in cocktails. This drink is an absolute winner and it is one that you need to try. And it's called an end zone. Welcome to Essential cocktails. Okay, so when it comes to the flavor profile of the Enzoni, we're looking at something quite unique. Which is a hybrid of two drinks. First of all being Agroni and the second being a gin sour. Both of these bridge together with the use of green grapes, which are really under utilized ingredient in cocktails which I think need to be used more because they're sweet, acidic, tangy, delicious, really refreshing and really powerful in cocktails. So first of all, we're going to start with our grapes. We're going to go with gin, which is common to both those drinks. Also campari, which obviously you'll find in Negroni, which is a bit of sweet aperitif has lots of kind of rhubarb, grape fruit, citrus flavors in there. Very delicious. And then for our sweet and sour elements, we'll go with lemon juice and sugar syrup. And then finally, I'd like to add a little bit of saline solution made of one part salt, five parts water, And this is a bit of a seasoning in the drink and it does two things primarily. Number one, it reduces our perception of bitterness in the drink. Obviously, Campari has an inherent level of bitterness which you want to kind of bring down our perception of in the drink because we don't want it to be overly bitter, we want it to be a nice balanced drink. And then number two, it just bridges all these big flavors together, crating something which is really harmonious and just a really delicious drink in the end. So if you want to learn more about seasonings and how I use them and approach them, you can click on this video from earlier in the course. And what I'm going to be doing here is shaking the drink one because it has our modeled grapes, but also number two because it contains citrus. So into our shake it in, I'm going to go with our grapes. And I'd like to go quite heavy handed on this. I think grape is a really good ingredient in cocktails. So I've got six in there and I just want to muddle this together with ten meals of two torn sugar syrup. And I'm going with one in here, so you do want to use a white sugar in here. Really just works really nicely with the grapes. And a brown sugar is going to be a little bit jarring compared to all the other really fresh ingredients in the drink. So six grapes, depending on the size ten meals of sugar syrup just give them a crush together. The grapes all kind of pop can be a little bit messy, but that's the way it goes. And that's just going to release all the really nice grape juice into our sugar syrup, and that's going to be the basis of our drink. Now we've got our sweetened grape juice. We can start by adding the rest of our ingredients. First of all, we're going to go 30 meals of beef to gin or whatever gin you have. You do want to go something with plenty of juniper body and juniper kind of flavor coming through because then it's going to really cut through in the final drink and it'll be obviously a gin drink which we want. And then we're going to get 30 meals, so the same amount of campari. This seems like a lot, but actually because we've got the sweetness, the sourness, and also the bitterness from the campari just ends up being a really nicely balanced drink without overpowering too much. And then we've already got our sweetener. We just want our acidity in there, which is going to be 20 Mls of freshly squeezed lemon juice. And this is going to provide that zip and zinc to complement the grapes. And then finally, not 0.5 grams of our saline solution just to bridge the whole drink together really nicely, we're going to shake the drink over ice to chill it, mix it, and dilute it. We're going to find strain that over lots of ice in the chilled glass. And it's got this really nice pink hue from the Campari and the other ingredients. And then we'll finish it off with three grapes. Just skew it onto the drink to provide a little bit of contrasting color pop of flavor from the grapes. And that is a sweet, acidic bitter, refreshing, joyous drink called an en zone. There we go, enjoy that one, give that a try, and cheers. 29. An Easy PISCO SOUR Recipe! : Today I'm going to show you how to make a pisco sour. So this drinks really popular in Chili and Peru and for good reason, it's an absolute winner of a drink. And now I'm going to show you how to make it. So Piscos, a type of grape brandy made in both Peru and Chili. This is a chili in version, you can also buy it from Peru, obviously. And what we're gonna do today is celebrate the really nice kind of gray py aced flavors of the pisco in the form of a sour. So in our previous whiskey sour episode, we followed a framework of four parts spirit to two parts, citrus to one part sugar, which we're going to follow again today. But we're going to change this very slightly, bringing some slightly different flavor accents and really focusing in on the pisco. Piscos going to be our base ingredient. I'm going for two different types of citrus, lemon and lime. Taking inspiration from both the Peruvian and chili in version of the Pisco sour. We're going to balance this with our white sugar syrup, or our monn cane sugar syrup, which is a two to one ratio. And then we're going to use some aromatic bitters just to finish the drink, which also serves as a garnish, but it's also a big kind of flavor component of the drink as well. And then finally, I'm going with Aqui fiber, which once again, is a really good way to emulsify and bring that nice creaminess to a sour. But if you prefer, you can always use an egg white. So because this drink has citrus in there, we're going to be shaking it. And we're going to start with our spirit base, which is going to be our pisco. Pisco has a really nice, subtle grapiness, but also a bit of an aniseed characteristic. And brandy can be made with all different fruits. This is made with grapes, but it just brings a really nice kind of base flavor to the drink and this is what we're really celebrating. So we're going to make sure we add plenty of this. We're going 50 meals this time to this 50 meals of pisco, which we're calling four parts in our recipe. I want to add two parts of citrus, and you can do 25 meals of lime juice, 25 meals of lemon juice. But what we're actually going to do here is blend the two together. So first of all, we're going to get 12.5 meals of lime juice, which is a little bit more acidic than lemon juice, and also 12.5 meals of lemon juice. And the reason for doing this is that it pays homage to both the Chilian and the Peruvian version of the Pisco sour balance are 25 mils of citrus. Two parts. We want to go one part of our sugar syrup as long as it's at a two to one ratio, 12.5 meals, and this will bring really nice balance into the drink. And then for our foamy texture, we're gonna go 12.5 meals again for Aquafaba, which is the water from tinned Chickpeas. Because my ice has fresh out the freezer, I'm just going to give this a single shake. But if it was kind of starting to melt, you could always do a double shake, which would give it a little bit more emulsion, a little bit more creaminess. But in this case, not entirely necessary. Just give it a really good hard shake over ice. We're going to fine strand this into our chilled coop glass. And then the garnish, which is also our final ingredient, is going to be five drops of aromatic bitters just to the top of the drink, which not only look amazing, but add a little bit of bitterness to the drink, which is much needed. And then we have a creamy but light delicious drink, which really celebrates the pisco at the heart of it, which is called Pisco Sour And enjoy it. 30. The LAST WORD: Simple But Perfect!: The last word is a very old drink that's actually regained huge popularity recently. It's one of those drinks that's deceivingly simple to make all equal parts with each ingredient bringing something completely different to the final drink. When you mix it all together, it's everything you want in a cocktail spirit forward, fruity balanced, and herbal. And it's just a really great combination, which is a really hard thing to get right, despite its simplicity. So let's grab some bottles and make a last word. So the last word was originally created around about 19:15 And it really did fall out of favor after initial popularity to the point where it was almost an extinct drink being picked up and then gaining huge global popularity, which we see it having today. So the recipe for the last word actually seems to be very simple, but to get these equal parts, recipes with four ingredients to be balanced, delicious and all kind of harmonized together is actually a really fine skill to have. The four ingredients in the last word are going to be our spirit base, which is going to be gin, acidity or sourness is going to be lime juice. And then the sweetness is going to come in the form of two liquures. First of all, maraschino cherry liqueur and then second of all, a herbal liqueur which is going to be chartreuse. So these are actually going to be shaken up together because we've got the citrus in there and you can adjust this up down as much as you like. So I'm going to be starting with 25 meals of our gin. And you do on a gym with plenty of body and kind of intensity to cut through these really big flavors. So beefy is a really good option for that. We're going to go 25 Mls of our freshly squeezed lime juice for acidity and vibrancy to bubbles, our liquures, we're going to go 25 mils of Maraschino cherry liqure, which is our first form of sweetness. And then 25 mills again of green chartreuse, which has a completely different type of sweetness to the cherry liqure. This is much more herbal, a little bit more complex, lots of ingredients going to make in this. This in itself is super complex, but now we've got our four ingredients together, this has become a basis for lots of variation. So, as I said before, making four ingredients in equal parts, balanced and delicious is really difficult. But there have been some exceptions to this, with some really, really great results. Things like the paper plane, the naked and famous the final Ward are all really delicious drinks. And I've actually personally rifted upon this drink before to create a drink called a word upper, which is kind of an upper. It contains coffee with these ingredients as well, with some slight tweaks. And I think this is one of my favorite cocktails've ever created. So if you want to watch that video, you can click here. But now we're going to finish off our last word by giving it a good shake over ice. We're going to find strain this into a chilled Nickinora glass or a Coup glass and then finish the drink with a cherry on the rim of the glass. And there we have a ridiculously complex, really well balanced, fruity boozy, herbal equal parts cocktail called a Last word. Cheers, everybody enjoy. 31. PAPER PLANE: Equal Parts, Epic Drink! : Think back to the year 2008. The MIA song, Paper Planes is playing everywhere. All I want to do is you know the one. And Sam Ross is in the bar Crate in a drink. Inspired by a cocktail called The Last Word. Which in some ways is the same, but in some ways is completely different. So what we're going to do today is explore that cocktail. And today I'm going to show you how to make the paper plane. So when I said the paper plane is kind of the same as the last word, but also completely different. What I mean is it contains a spirit, a citrus, and two liquurs, all coming together to be very balanced and very complex, despite being quite simple on the surface. So whereas the last word, we've got the ingredients across the front, Gin, lime juice, maraschino and chartreuse. We're going to be substituting these out for the ingredients in a paper plate, so the spirit subbing out the gin and bringing forward bourbon, which has a much rounder, more kind of toffee like characteristic for the citrus. We've taken out our lime juice and introducing lemon juice which is a little bit less acidic, allowing it to feel a little bit sweeter in the final drink. And then our liquurs, we're getting rid of our maraschino and our chartreuse and we're going to bring forward a Maro nanino, which is actually specified as a branded product in this because it has quite distinctive characteristic. And then finally we had Campari, which Samatly thought brought a little bit too much bitterness to the drink, so substitute this out and introduced aperol, which is a kind of sweeter, lower ABV, lower bitteresus product. And then we have the paper plane. So this is an equal part drink, it's going to be a shaken drink. And what that means is you can scale it up pretty much as far as you want to. I'm going to be doing 25 mils each, but you could do 30, 35, 50 if you want to make a couple of drinks. Or you could even scale this up into a big old batch and just shake it to order whenever you want to have it available. So keep in your fridge, shake it when you like, and easily done. You can have a really delicious cocktail within seconds, so I'm going to 25 miles each. First of all, our bourbon, which has those really nice, deeper notes. Whereas obviously, gin in the last word is more botanical and light. 25 meals of freshly squeezed lemon juice, which is our acidic note in the drink, 25 meals of Amara, Nino, which is actually a quite light Amara. So it's not super bitter, but it does have some bitterness in there. It's got some spice and some citrus in there really nicely. And you can experiment with different Amari Although, just be mindful that really kind of big dominant Amara is going to really over power of the drink, so we don't want to kind of take over the other ingredients. So Amara, Nino is delicious, but experiment with this and see which you prefer. And then finally, in with the aperol for those really nice bitter, sweet citrus notes a little bit of orange in there, grapefruit blood orange, and a little bit of complex spice as well. So just before we shake up our paper plane, a couple of notes on the variations you can make to this drink. To change the dynamic slightly, you can change your base spirit. You could use rye in there, which is going to be a little bit more spicy generally. All play around with lots of different spirits. And a flavor I think really works nicely in this drink is actually coffee. So I made a riff on this called a filter paper plane, which I'll put above, which has a pretty different characteristic with the coffee, kind of tying it all together. But now we're going to shake up our paper plane and then get that one served. Fine, straying into a chilled Nickenora glass or a coup glass. And you can see it's got that really nice color and a little bit of texture in there as well. It's very vibrant and a live drink garnish with a paper airplane because why not? And there we have a bitter, sweet, lightly spicy, really rich, but ultimately very well balanced drink made of equal parts ingredients called a paper plane. So enjoy that one, everybody you can see in the next episode. 32. NAKED & FAMOUS: A Stroke of Genius!: Invented by Jacinsimo in 2011. The naked and famous takes elements of two other equal parts cocktails. The last word and the paper plane, and introduces Mezcal to the mix. Bringing together a really spicy herbal, bright and fruity cocktail and sternoche, how to make it welcome to essential cocktails. So if we think back to our other two equal parts recipes that I mentioned, over here we have the last word, which contains gin, lime juice, marachino, and green chartreuse. And then over here we have the paper plane which contains bourbon, lemon juice, amaro, nanino apparol. These are both delicious combinations, but the naked and famous takes something from kind of each of these and create something brand new from the last word. We're going to borrow the lime juice from the paper plane. We're going to borrow the apparol. Then there are other two ingredients that we're going to add to the drink. First of all, are going to be Mezcal, which is our spirit based, and then also we're going to add yellow chartreuse, which is going to be our herbal element. This is a really simple equal parts cocktail, and once again we're following our formula of one part spirit, one part citrus, and then two liquors, both equal parts as well, which bring crazy complexity despite being only four ingredients. So once again, because we've got citrus in the drink, we're going to be shaking this and I'll start with 25 Mls of Mezcal. Whichever mescal you choose is going to have a massive impact on the drink, so choose one that you really enjoy. If you like something a little bit more grassy, a little bit more astringent and kind of green tea like go for a younger mezcal. Whereas if you want those flavors rounded out a little bit more with more kind of caramel coming through, more of the aging impact in there. Go for something a little bit older. So this is quite a young meskalor I'm using today. I really want to lean into those kind of grassy notes and the smokiness. And this has plenty of those in abundance. And we're going to complement this. So 25 meals of Mezcal with 25 meals for freshly squeezed lime juice. So now I'm going to talk about our sweet elements, which honestly, I think are a touch of genius in this drink. So first of all, when we think back to our last word, this contained green chartrus, which is a much higher intensity version of this. Whereas the yellow chartrus is a little bit less herbal, a little bit less intense. And this is going to really allow the mezcal to come through. So when we think about our equal part recipe, if we had equal parts of these with green chartruse, this is way overpower the mezcal. And actually that smoky element is really what we want to celebrate. So using yellow chartreuse rather than green, absolutely genius. And then when we think back to our paper plane, Sam Ross, when he created it, originally started with Campari in there. But he found this to be too bitter and too intense. And the same applies here, if we use Campari instead of aperol, it really overpower our mezcal. Throw the drink out of balance. So by using apparole, which is a little bit lower, ABV, a little bit less bitter, With a little bit more sweetness, again, we allow the mezcal to really cut through, so we're going to go 25 mils of each. First of all, yellow chartreuse, which has many ingredients and brings loads of complexity to the drink, as well as some sweetness. And then 25 mils of our apparole, which is going to be our kind of bitter sweet element with a pithy, orangy flavor. Some red fruit in there. A little bit of rhubarb as well. 25 mills. Also four ingredients, crazy amounts of flavors, which all works surprisingly well together. So before we give this a shake, I'm just going to move it to one side because as soon as we add ice to the drink, it's going to start diluting. We're kind of up against the clock. So before that we're going to prepare our garnish. Our glass is already chill in in the fridge, and with this I'd like to use a nice lime wedge. So the reason for this is some people really like to add a little bit more acidity to their drink, and this gives you the option to do so. As well as having a really nice contrasting color to the beautiful color of the drink, which you'll see in a second. And I'd just like to add a little slice into the line because it sits proud on the glass. And now we've got everything ready to go, all our things in place, we can shake up the drink with lots of ice. We're going to find straight and listen to a chilled Nick and Nora glass or a coup glass garnish with our lime wedge. And there we have a smoky bright herbal and fruity drink called the Naked and famous. 33. PENICILLIN: The Best Whisk(e)y Sour Riff?!: The penicillin is one of the most popular, modern, classic cocktails. And if you've never tried it before, you really do need to fix that. Today I'm going to show you a really easy version of the drink which has become my go to recipe. So without further ado, let's make a penicillin. So the penicillin, this drink was created in 2005 by Sam Ross, who is probably one of the most influential bartenders of our times. He's created some modern classic cocktails including the paper plane, the left hand, and then this, the penicillin, which might be his most popular creation. Sam cred this rink while he was working at Milk and Honey in New York City. The drink itself, the penicillin, is actually riff on another of Sam's drinks called The Gold Rush, which contains bourbon, lemon juice, and honey. So the penicillin makes a few changes to that recipe and really kind of freshens it up and brings new levels of complexity. So, rather than using bourbon, we're going to go with a blended Scotch Whisky. I'm going with Monkey Shoulder, I'm going to go to lemon juice, which will be our acidity of choice. And then Sam actually makes a homemade ginger and honey syrup, which I'm going to forego today because I don't want it to become too complex. So I've got two ingredients which go in here which not only bring the kind of similar flavor profile, but also the zero prep. So first of all, we're going to go from the syrup in stem ginger and syrup and this is really kind of vibrant and fresh and quite spicy in zingy as you know a ginger to be. And then rather than using honey, I'm going to go with the Garve nectar just because it's more vegan friendly. So hopefully more people can try this drink. It also brings a similar flavor profile and viscosity to honey. So it's a really good substitute, but if you prefer to use honey, definitely go for that. I'll just bring it down with a little bit of water. So two parts honey to one part water. I'd like to add a little bit of saline solution to this just to bring all those big flavors together. So one part salt to five parts of water. And then the final ingredient is going to be a big old peta scotch whiskey with really kind of intense smoky flavors which don't be alarmed by, it doesn't overpower the drink. It actually brings so much more depth and complexity to the drink as an aroma in the drink, either float it on top or I'd like to add it to a little aromatizer like this, which can spritz on top of the drink. So I'm going to add that in here now. Now that's ready to go, we can start building the drink. And this is going to be a shaken cocktail because it contains citrus. Starting with 60 meals. A blended Scotch whiskey. And this is a little bit less toffy forward often than a bourbon. Although you get a massive variation in flavor in scotch whiskey, I find the monkey shoulder to be a really good base here, but experiment with whatever you have. This drink would also work really nicely with bourbon or rye. Whichever whiskey you choose is still going to be delicious. It's just going to slightly change the flavor profile. So 60 meals of our blended scotch and then we're going to go 30 meals of freshly squeezed lemon juice. And if we think back to a few of our episodes in this course, we're going to follow that same four part spirit, two part citrus, one part sweetener ratio, which gives really nice balance in many different drinks, including this one. So now I've got our four parts of spirit, or 60 meals, two parts of our citrus, or 30 meals. We're going to add one part of sweetener. But I actually like to mix this up slightly and do this in grams on scales just because it's a little bit easier to control. So we're going to look for 15 grams in total. And because Sam's original recipe was a homemade ginger and honey syrup, I'm going to be using two ingredients. The first 7.5 grams in the syrup from our stem ginger and syrup. And this is really kind of fresh and zingy, and using a Bars spoons probably the easiest way to measure this. And definitely, definitely, definitely do use scales for this, so you can easily control and consistently control the amount of sweetness in the drink. I'm also adding 7.5 grams of our Garve nectar, or our two to one honey syrup if you prefer, totaling 15 grams in total to bring through our four to two to one ratio, which is a really tried and tested recipe. So now we've got our key ingredients. We've got our spirit, a acidity, and our sweetener. We're going to add a little season into the drink. And because these are quite big flavors and they're kind of sweet and sour, we don't want them to be really kind of wide and apart. We want to kind of bring them together so you get that really nice combination of the whiskey, lemon, honey, ginger, or a Gave if using that kind of similar to a hot toddy, that doesn't want to be a sweet and sour drink. I don't think this needs to be a sweet and sour drink either. I think the whiskey should be the kind of key characteristic with the other flavors kind of working around it to really elevate the whole drink. So in order to do this I'd like to add around about not 0.5 grams of our saline solution, which won't make the drink taste like salt. It'll just bring all those big flavors together and then particularly when you add the pet whisky later, I think this really kind of combines everything really beautifully. Going to shake this over lots of ice, to chill it, mix it and dilute it. Fine strain over ice into a chilled rocks glass. And then the garnish is going to be a little bit of a crystallized ginger, which is a nice snack as well. That's a delicious drink, but actually it's not quite finished here. You've got two options here. Number one, you can either very carefully layer a little bit of pthiskey on top of the drink, but my preferred method is actually to serve the drink with a little spritzer like this, which you can keep add into the top of the drink. So every time you take a sip, you get a really nice smoky prom. With each sip, just give it a couple of little spritzers of your pa. Take a small sip, and as you bring it to your mouth, don't use a straw. You get that really nice peat smoke on the nose, but then the drinks much more smooth. It's got that blended Scotch at its base, which is much less smoky. And each time it up, have a sip and they have a really delicious drink, kind of similar to a whiskey sour, Manyways with different layers of complexity added from the ginger, the Agarva or honey if you use that, and then the smoky whiskey and it's called a penicillin enjoy. 34. My Best Ever HOT TODDY! : Welcome back to Essential Cocktails. Everybody, today I'm gonna show you the ultimate cocktail if you're feeling a bit under the weather or if it's really cold, wherever you are. And that drink you might have heard of it is called the hot toddy. So the hot toddy is one of those really evocative drinks. Kind of like a hug in a mug, and whenever you drink a hot toddy, it reminds you of those times when you really want to be kind of warm through, given something really comforting, and it does a perfect job of that. So the hot toddy's got many different recipes. I'm going to show you my favorite. The simplest way to do this is literally to add all the ingredients into the glass, top it up with hot water, and you're ready to go. But the downside of that recipe is it's not super hot when you serve it. And I think a hot toddy, you kind of want to lean into, take some time, warm your hands on the mug, and if it's not super warm to begin with, you're not going to be able to do that. So this recipe, although it's a little tiny bit more complex, takes maybe 1 minute longer, just means the drinks really nice and warm when you serve it. And I think that's kind of worth the effort there. So the ingredients in a hot tati are really simple. Some kind of booze. I think most people choose whiskey, but you could choose brandy. Rum also works really nicely. Spiced rums really good because you get those nice kind of spiced warming notes really wintry. I'm gonna go with Monkey shoulder, but you could blend in a little bit of pet whiskey here just if you like those flavors, it might be even more warming. But this is a really good starting point, but pretty much whatever whiskey you have go with that. It's gonna be a really good drink. And then we're going to combine this with freshly squeezed lemon juice. Either honey syrup or a garve nectar. And I'm gonna go with the garve. So it's a little bit more vegan friendly, but if you prefer honey, go with honey. And then finally, I'd like to add a little bit of vanilla extract, which is very optional, but it just brings the drink really nicely together and kind of rounds out those kind of sharp edges, the sweet edges, and makes it a little bit more harmonious. So there are four liquid ingredients. We're also going to need some spices, and again, these can be whatever you choose. I'm going with clove cinnamon and also a little bit of orange peel as well. Just two kind of long peels, which will bring a nice citrus element to the drink, that nice orange aroma. So now we've got all our ingredients gathered, we can start building the drink. So to make our hot toddy really nice and kind of warming and that hug in the Uga I was talking about, we're going to build it in two parts. So on one side we're going to make essentially kind of a spiced tea which is going to bring those nice warm in flavors. And then in the second part to build essentially our liquid part of the hot toddy, which pretty much is a whisky sour. And if you think of a drink like a penicillin, this is very similar in flavor profile to this, but it's just the hot version, a kind of alter ego of that drink. And it's just completely different by serving it warm. So first of all, we want to make sure you're using boiling water and we're going to preheat everything that wants to be hot, essentially. Pour some water into our glass, pour some boiling water into our small tin. And this is just a normal Boston shaker just repurposed for making a delicious hot toddy. Give these a few seconds to warm up, and you want to make sure you use a nice thick glass that isn't going to crack. And then pour both of these carefully into our Biotin. And in this one we're going to make our spiced tea. And now in here we essentially have a little ban marie so that when we add these ingredients to it, it's going to be nice and warm. For our spiced tea, we're going to add two or three cloves. And just be careful you don't overdo this, because cloves can be very, very strong in flavor. It's tempting to add more because they're small, but that'll be probably a mistake that'll overpower the drink. We're going to go with one cinnamon stick, which you could crack into the drink and kind of break. But because we're going to be drinking this straight from the glass, you might end up with cinnamon in your teeth, which isn't ideal. And then we're just going to squeeze in for now those orange peels just like. So this is going to be the base of our tea. We're going to add our boiling water just about 34 of the way up. Maybe 150 grams, let's say. But again, this depends on the size of your glass. And then in our shaker Ban marie type thing, which is a nice warm environment, now we can start building the rest of the toddy, while this steeps and becomes our really nice infused spiced tea, which already smells delicious. So we're going to go in with 40 meals of our whiskey or spirit of choice. You could go a little bit more, but I think if you serve this hot, it becomes a little overwhelming because it's going to be quite intense on the aroma. We're going to go 20 meals, freshly squeezed lemon juice which gives it balance and that hint of vicidity without being too much. And then you're just going to move this onto the scales. Move your tea to one side, just being very careful because it is quite hot and we're going to add our agave or our honey. So if you're using honey, this has got a slightly different flavor to a gave. Perhaps a little more richness, but this has all that viscosity, kind of similar flavor profile. And this is also vegan friendly. So whichever one you choose, that's completely fine. But if you do go with honey, I'd bring it down two parts, honey to one part of water to get a similar kind of texture. And I'm going to go in with 15 grams of a gave, which would just bring balance to the drink. And then finally our seasoning, which I used quite often and actually made a full video about earlier in the course, which I'll link above, is going to be vanilla extract, which isn't designed to make the drink taste like vanilla. Although it does work with all the flavors, it's just designed to kind of soften those sharp edges because this doesn't want to be too much of a sweet and sour drink. It's designed to be wholesome and warming, which is exactly what you want it to be. So we just want to give this little stir together just to make sure it's fully mixed. And then we can combine the two together to finish off our hot toddy. So you can either leave the spices in the drink, which is kind of pretty but not the most practical to drink, or you can take them out. So I'm going to leave the cinnamon stick in there, because I think it actually looks really nice. Remove our peels, which you can even smell have done their job really nicely. Remove our cloves, and because we counted them going in, we know we've got all of them out and we have three. And then finally, just carefully take out your toddy mix from your little ban marie. Homemade ban marie. Just carefully do this because obviously it's very hot. There's our spiced tea, there is the rest of the drink. And then we have the most delicious warming, hugging a mug of a drink, which we call a hot toddy. So enjoy that one, and I hope you feel better if you feel in a bit under the weather. 35. How to Make Your Perfect OLD FASHIONED! : The old fashioned might just be the ultimate minimalist cocktail that stood the test of time for centuries. Spirit sugar bitters, garnish ice, that's all you need to make an old fashioned. But I do like to add one more ingredient in there, which I think takes it even further and really elevates the drink to the next level. So without further ado, let's make the old fashioned. So when it comes to making an old fashioned, there's actually a few decisions we need to make when it comes to each ingredient in the drink. And I'll talk you through each of these as we go through making it. So the old fashioned is pretty much always, and should always be a stirred drink. So you want to add this into a chilled mixing glass. And I'd like to start with 60 meals of our base spirit. A lot of recipes will call for bourbon, which I'm going with here, because that nice high corn content gives it a really complimentary flavor, which works with the other ingredients, kind of toffee like butterscotch, naturally sweet without being overly sweet. And a really nice depth of flavor which you get from the bourbon. But if you prefer a little bit more spice in your old fashioned, you could go for a rye whiskey. There's a world of flavor in scotch whiskey and all the global whiskies from all over the world. Taiwanese whiskey, Japanese whiskey, Irish whiskey, Scotch whiskey. These all bring completely different characteristics and even within those places, you get massive variety between the whiskies you find. So for example, an El whisky could potentially be kind of pet, almost saline in its kind of flavor profile, whereas the space side might be a little bit rounder and sweeter. But then you still get variation within those tiny areas. So whiskey is a world of flavor and you can make a decision. And this doesn't even have to be a whiskey based drink necessarily, although traditionally it would be. But you can get really delicious results using Rum. Even Mezcal works really nicely Tequila, If you use a garves, your sweetener, there's a world of flavor to explore in an old fashioned. And this is the perfect way to do it, because it really celebrates the core spirit at the heart of the drink. So now we've covered our base spirit. We need to start thinking about our sweetener. So actually covered a full episode all about different sweetness and the options you have earlier in the course. Which I'll put up here, which you can watch. But there are a few different ways of doing this. So some people like to put a sugar cube in here, muddle it with the bitters, to dissolve it into the bitters. But I find this quite inconsistent, difficult to measure and quantify. Whereas, if we use a sugar syrup A, it's easier to control how much we add, but also it actually speeds up. The process removes a few steps, and I think it gives better results. I don't really like to have crunchy sugar in my old fashioned, although I do understand some people like this. So I'm going to go with a two to one sugar syrup. This is from Mollin, which is their cane sugar syrup. And you can use different types of sugar in your sugar syrup, but I think in this recipe, keep it really clean, really simple, and let the whisky really kind of be highlighted. So white sugar here, but a brown sugar would work equally nicely. I'd like to add five meals per old fashioned, but if you prefer it a little bit sweeter, I'd say go up to ten meals. But I probably wouldn't go beyond this. I think it's gonna get too sweet. We don't want this to be an overly sweet drink, but equally we don't want it to be an overly boozy drink or an over bitter drink. So this is all about balance, which is kind of hard to achieve. But if you follow this template, I think you'll get a really good starting point. We also have a decision to make when it comes to bitters. And I like to keep things kind of classic here, so I like to go three dashes of aromatic bitters which bring a little bit of spice, those kind of warming, clovy cinnamon flavors. But you can go with any bitters you choose. Some people like to add a chocolate bitters. Orange bitters works really nicely. But I think keeping things classic here actually works really well. And then at the start of the video, I actually mentioned my other favorite ingredient to add to an old fashioned, which if you've seen other videos you might recognize. And that's going to be this, which is saline solution. This is made with one part salt, five parts of water. And don't be afraid of this, this can really bring those big flavors together. It won't make the drink taste like salt, but if we think of a chef, they're always going to season their food. And I think just a small amount of salt in an oldfashioned once again brings those flavors together so you can go really light on this. Not 0.5 grams is plenty, but I think this does make a really nice difference and really elevate the oldfashioned even further, in my opinion and my taste preferences. The final variable to think about is going to be your ice and your dilution. So you want to stir this drink down with plenty of ice. And contrary to what you might think, adding more ice will actually give you more control over the dilution and slow down the dilution process. And you want to stir this down for around about 30 to 45 seconds, depending on how fresh your ice is. If it's fresh out of the freezer, stir for a little longer. Whereas if it's start to melt, go for a little bit shorter of a stir. As I said earlier in the course of my episode about ice and dilution, you can actually measure how much water is added to your cocktail, which is a really easy thing to do. This is a really good way to kind of fine tune your favorite recipe when it comes to an old fashioned, we're just going to strain this over ice, or even clear ice if you have it, which is what I'm doing here. And this is just a fantastic looking, fantastic taste and drink which celebrates whiskey but isn't overpowered by it. And then finally, you want to make a decision on your garnish. So I like to go with the zest of orange because it brings a really nice kind of pithy citrus character to the drink. But if you prefer not to have this, you can emit it. You could also add a cherry, which is a really nice kind of sweetener. But because we have spirit, sweetness, bitterness, and a little bit of salt in here, I think the missing piece here is acidity. So just expressing your orange peel over the drink and around the rim of the glass is going to be the perfect way to finish off. So we'll just tidy this up into a really nice kind of ribbon for our garnish. Now we've expressed the oils out of it, and this just can live inside our beautiful, rich complex. Whisky forward and balanced. Oldfashionedo. Enjoy that one, everybody. Cheers. 36. MANHATTAN: The Original and Some Suggested Riffs!: The Manhattan is one of the most popular and important cocktails of all time. Today I'm going to show you my absolute favorite recipe when it comes to Manhattan. I'd also talk about some variations that can take it in slightly different directions. So welcome along to essential cocktails. So the Manhttans act required an interesting drink. In a lot of classic cocktails like the Manhattan have kind of changed and morphed over the years and been really open to interpretation. Whereas the base rescue of Manhattan has remained much the same, it's broadly accepted that it contains two parts of spirit, one part of the move, and a couple of dashes of bitters garnished with either some kind of citrus peel or a cherry. And that recipe is pretty much timeless. And it just works really, really well. So when it comes to the whiskey base, a lot of people say, should I use bourbon or rye in my Manhattan? And personally, I'd say the answer is yes, whichever one you go with that one, I think a lot of people prefer bourbon, some people prefer rye. But whichever one you go with, it is going to be really delicious if you love that kind of whiskey. So we're not going to be too bound by tradition here. If you take a rye whiskey, it's going to be more spicy, a little bit more dry, perhaps a little bit more woody. Whereas if you go for a bourbon, it's going to be a little bit rounder, a little bit sweeter. And it's going to just have a slight impact on the final drink. You could blend the two together, that'll also be really delicious, or you could even ditch these altogether and use Scotch whiskey. Change the drink from being a Manhattan to being a Rob Roy. So today we're going to go with the rye whiskey 'cause that's my personal preference and kind of what I feel like right now. But you could use bourbon and it'd be totally delicious. And we're going to pair that with our sweet Vermouth. I'm going with Cocky Vermouth Diorino, which has got a really nice full body enough kind of natural sweetness without being overpowering. And a little bit of complex herbal note in there as well. And I'm going to go with regular aromatic bitters from scruffy bitters. But if you have angustora, that'll work really well as well. When it comes to the garnish, I actually like to add a little bit of orange zest to the drink, but I also like to use a cherry for our kind of visual garnish. And there we have our ingredients from the Manhattan. So we're going to be stirring this down and let's start building it now. So into our mixing glass, we're gonna start with 50 Mls of our rye whiskey, 88. And you want to have a look at the ABV of this. So if this is a 40% ABV, that's a slightly lower ABV than this, which is going to be 45% So you just need to factor that into your dilution and your staring. The higher the ABV probably, the more you're going to want to stir it down just to get a little bit more dilution. Otherwise, it can be quite a powerful drink. So 50 meals or two parts of our whiskey. If you use bourbon, it's going to be different. If you use Scotch, it's going to be very different again. So I don't underestimate the power of the whiskey because this really is the heart of the drink, and I'm going to pair that with 25 mils of your choice of vermouth. And I really like the cocky range. I think this is a really delicious vermouth. But experiment with different vermouths because the combination of the whiskey and the vermouth together is kind of the basis of this drink. So they do need to interact really nicely. And if you were to divide this one part, or 25 mills into 12.5 mills, each of a dry vermouth and a sweet vermouth. You'd be looking at what's called a perfect Manhattan. Which is not my preferred way to drink the drink, but it is some people. So you need to have that drink in your arsenal as well. We're going to get three dashes of aromatic bitters to bring a little bit of complexity to the drink. A little bit of spicy bitterness. And then we're going to stir the drink down over lots of ice. And when it comes to stiring, add in for around about 20 to 35 seconds here, depending on your ice. So if the ice is fresh out of the freezer, you're going to stir for a little longer. Also, if the ABV is higher in the whiskey, maybe stir for a little longer. Whereas if the ice has start to melt a little bit, or you've got a lower ABV in the whiskey stir for a little bit less time. And as I said in my episode about ice and dilution, which I'll link above, which is from earlier in the course, you can actually measure your dilution and work out exactly how much water you want to introduce to your Manhattan to get your perfect recipe. You can also experiment with different mouths in the recipe. So if you were to introduce avererna, this will make it into a black Manhattan, which is a really delicious mix. And you can actually bring in lots of other flavors, including coffee being one of them. And I actually explore this in full detail in this video above, we're going to strain into a chilled Nicanora glass or a coup glass. And then to finish the Manhattan, I'd like to go with a double garnish, one of which for aroma, one of which for kind of taste and visual. So first of all, I'll take a little orange coin just taking the zest off the orange. And we're going to express this over the drink, which is kind of optional, but I think this adds a little bit of freshness to the drink. Kind of lightens the richness a little bit, which we're going to get rid of. And then we'll finish the drink with a boozy cherry, which is another classic garnish for Manhattan. And there we have a whisky forward timeless classic of a cocktail which is called A Manhattan and everybody. 37. MARTINEZ: The Bridge from Manhattan to Martini!: Despite being one of the most important cocktails of all time, being said to have evolved from the Manhattan and eventually into the martini. The Martinez often slips under the radar of a lot of cocktail drinkers. This drinks absolutely delicious, so easy to make. And today I'm going to show you how. So. Welcome to Central Cocktails. Let's make a martinez. So if you're not familiar with a Manhattan, I'll put a video all about that drink just up here for you to watch. And I probably do recommend watching that first because then this drink will make a lot more sense. And that kind of lineage from Manhattan to Martinez to Martini, we'll just have a very clear path and you can see how one evolved into the other, evolved into the next. And that's quite an important chain of events really. There're three absolutely fundamental cocktails, despite two of them being a lot more popular than one. And the one we're going to talk about today, which is a bit less popular, although it shouldn't be, is the Martinez. So just like the Manhattan, we're going to have a spirit base which, rather than being bourbon or rye or some kind of whiskey, is actually going to be gin in our Martinez and this can be a lot of different types of gin. London dry gin has become very popular, mostly because it's readily available, but it does work really nicely in the drink. But traditionally this might be a Geneva, it might be an old Tom Gin, which is going to change the dynamic of the drink quite a lot, either with a more multi style or something a little bit sweeter. So I'm going to stick with London dry today because it is very readily available and it's really delicious. But play around with whatever you have and if you have different types of gin, get them in here. So once again, comparing this to a Manhattan, that drink contains vermouth and the Martinez is no different. So we've got our spirit base, we've got our vermouth, which is going to be a sweet vermouth, but we'll talk more about that in a second. But in the Martinez, we've got one extra ingredient, which is going to be a little bit of maraschino liqueur. So this is a cherry liqueur. It's going to bring a little bit of fruitiness to the drink and another layer of complexity which you perhaps wouldn't otherwise find. And then to finish off, we're going to go with our bitters in a Manhattan. You'd probably go for an aromatic bitters, but I really like it in Martinez to go with an orange bitters because we're leaning into the kind of more botanical notes, citrusy notes that you find in the gin, and then the more fruity notes that we find in the Maraschino. So this is a really easy drink to put together, four ingredients stirred down with ice and a garnish. And I'm going to show you how to put it together now. So some recipes I've seen from Martinez call for equal parts of our spirit and our mouth. But I prefer to go for a two to one ratio, which has become the more kind of popular way of doing things. And that's also in line with our Manhattan, which you've spoken about the similarities between these two drinks. So I'm going to go with 50 meals of our gin, 25 meals of our sweet vermouth. And I'm going with Cocky Diorino, which is a really delicious vermouth. You can experiment with other styles of vermouth and some recipes actually start calling for dry vermouth. So if we see how we've moved from an equal part spirit of vermouth recipe to a more spirit forward recipe of two to one. We've moved from a sweet vermouth to a dry vermouth. We've also got the bitters in there, which are sometimes in the martini. You can really see how this has evolved over time to be a real inspiration to the Martini itself. So to 50 Mls of gin, 25 mils of Vermouth. We're just going to go with a tiny amount of five meals of our Maraschino Liqueur just for a little bit of fruitiness in there and a little bit of sweetness. And then finally, three dashes of orange bitters, bringing that real bitter, sweet, zesty character to the drink. We're going to stir this down with plenty of ice until it's really nice and cold straight into a chilled Nicanora or Coop glass. And then we're going to garnish the drink with your choice of either an orange zest or a cherry. And I'm going to go with orange zest today. So you just want to take off a nice big peel, which we can express over the drink without getting too much pith there. You want it to be super bitter. Express that over the drink for that really nice citrus oil aroma, the glass. And then we just want to tidy this up and make a really beautiful looking garnish. This can just sit nicely on the rim of the glass, but equally, a cherry would also be delicious. And there we have a fundamental drink, which is perhaps underrated, despite being very important to the world of cocktails. Which brings really nice botanical notes of gin, really nice herbal notes of the mouth, and a little bit of fruitiness from the cherry and the orange. And it's called a martinez. If you haven't given that one a try, I strongly recommend that you do. 38. How to Make The Perfect MARTINI For You! : The perfect Martini doesn't exist, but the perfect Martini for you does exist. And today I'm going to show you how to find it. Welcome to Essential Cocktails. So the martini is not one of those drinks where you can just walk into a bar, order a martini, and get exactly the drink that you want. When it comes to ordering a martini, there are lots of things to consider, a lot of questions you'll be asked, and a lot of decisions to make. So today I'm going to talk you through those decisions and the top seven decisions you have to make in order to make your own perfect Martini. So the origins of the martini have a pretty clear lineage, which you can track, starting with a Manhattan. So a Manhattan is a very old drink which had a whiskey base and still does have a whiskey base, vermouth, and bitters. And then that kind of evolved over time into a drink called a Martinez. So a Martinez, rather than having the bourbon or the rye base, has gin. It also has Vermouth in there, still sweet Vermouth. And then a couple of drops of orange bitters and a little bit of cherry liquor. And then from there we have the Martini, which is what we're talking about today. So we have a spirit base, we have vermouth or a wine based, a peratif bitters sometimes, but not always, which we'll talk about today. And then we have a garnish, which we'll also talk about. So the seven considerations we're going to talk about today to help you find your perfect martini. Number one, the spirit base, number two, the ratio number three, Bitters or no bitters. Number four, the method number five, dilution number six, the glass. And then finally number seven, the garnish. And when you've worked out your preferences in all these sections, you'll be able to find your perfect martini. So the first decision you make, which is a really important one, is whether you go for a vodka martini or a gin martini with either vodka or gin at the base. And this is a big decision. If you're going to go for a vodka, I do recommend spending a little bit more money than you would otherwise for mixing, maybe for a potato vodka, which has that really nice, creamy body. But if you're going to go for a gin, choose the gin you love. All sorts of gins have different makeups of botanicals, and flavors, and ingredients. So whichever one is your favorite is going to make a really nice martini. But whichever you go for number one tip here is to keep this in the freezer. So this gin is a coal worth farm distillery, dry gin. And it's just got a really nice makeup of characteristics. And this has been in the freezer to get it really, really nice and cold. And just bear in mind because these are really high ABV, they're not going to freeze. So you can even keep these in the freezer to be ready to go whenever you want a martini. Something you can do here is blend the two together. So part vodka, part gin, a bit of keener Le, which is a classic wine based aperitif or even Le Le Blanc, which is a more recent version. And that's going to be your Vespa Martini, which is to some the perfect martini to others not so you can also experiment with that. So now we've chosen our base spirit, which today is going to be gin, but for you might be vodka. We can move on to point number two, which is our ratio. So now we've got our gin or our vodka ready to go. We need to think about what we're going to pair this with, which is going to be a vermouth or a wine based aperitif, depending on your preference. So I've got a couple here which I think are really good options. Martini, extra dry is a really kind of classic option, quite quite clean and readily available. So it's going to make a really good martini, but I really like these two which have a little bit more complexity, a little bit more body and kind of floral notes, a little bit more going on in there, which I think is really nice. So technically these aren't vermouth, they're both aperitif wines, but they're more than acceptable. And the martini, first of all, we've got cocky Americano. And then second of all, we've got lile. And what I recommend doing here, if you can, is to taste these, get an idea of what you think they bring to the drink. And then choose the martini based on the combination of the gin and the Vermouth or the Vodkra and the Vermouth. So now we've got an idea of what we're going to pair with our spirit. We need to think about that ratio that I was talking about. So this is kind of a slide in scale. There's no right and wrong here. Over here we have very dry martinis. Over here we have a wet martini, and within that there's kind of lots of variation. You can look at this as a ratio, you can look at it as dry, wet, whatever you want. But the easiest way to do this is to work out exactly how much spirit, exactly how much of your apart, fine, or your vermouth and then work out. I think the ratio here is the most important. So over here we have very dry martinis, which are really driven by our spirits. So this might be a 12 to 112 part spirit to one part of your vermouth. That could be a very dry martini. Whereas as we move through the spectrum, we get our dry martinis, we get our kind of wet martinis. There's such thing as a 50 50 martini which is 2.5 or you can even go for a reverse martini, or an inverted martini which leads with the Vermouth. So as I said here, there's no right and wrong. You might want a very boozy high ABV drink. You might want a more complex kind of floral, lower ABV drink. So if you're not sure where to start with this, I'd perhaps recommend starting with a four to one ratio. So four parts or 60 miles of your spirit. I'm going gin. You can try vodka to one part or 15 miles of your vermouth. You're aromatized wine. And that's a really nice starting point. It's got enough of the vermouth coming through to give it that kind of complexity, but also plenty of spirit to still be very much a gin or vodka based drink. So that's a good starting point. Work on that entire spectrum, make a decision, and then we can move onto our next point, which is going to be whether we have bitters or no bitters. So when it comes to adding bitters to a martini, I think we need to think back to that Martinez, which I was speaking as a precursor to the martini. So that had its gin base. It had Mouth, which was usually sweet, Vermouth, but then kind of became a dry mouth. And it also had Maraschino liqueur and orange bitters. And a lot of people like to add orange bitters to a martini. I think maybe it's a remnant of that kind of lineage working its way down to the martini. But my personal preference here is not to, we don't want the drink to be kind of a really bitter drink in my own opinion, but maybe you disagree. So if you like things to be a little bit more pithy, a little bit more kind of citrus forward, feel free to add a couple of drops. And if you disagree with any of this, or you agree with any of this, make sure you let me know in the comments. Because as I said, there's no perfect martini. But I want to hear about your perfect martini. So now we've decided in this recipe not to go for bitters. We can start thinking about the next point, which is the mixing method. So the question you probably think about when you order a martini is shaken or stirred, and it's actually a really important decision to make. If you shake the drink, which I think is not optimal, you're going to really liven it up, lose some of the kind of clarity and the transparency of the drink. But it will be more vibrant, a little bit more alive and kind of bubbly. Whereas if you stir the drink over ice, which is my own personal preference, you get a little bit more elegance in the drink. I think you get a little bit more clarity of flavor and whichever ingredients you go for really come through quite vividly. Whereas if you shake them up, they get a little bit all over the place and lost. So personally, we're going to be stirring this, but if you prefer it shaken, who am I to argue? James Bond likes it that way, so some of you might as well. So now we've covered how we're going to mix the drink together. We need to start thinking about a really important factor, which I think is often overlooked, which is the dilution of your martini. So when it comes to the dilution of your martini, this is a really important thing to think about. So if it's under diluted to your taste, it might be two kind of boozy, two spirit forward and not really that drinkable. Whereas if it's over diluted, it's going to be watery, a little bit thin, and perhaps not what you're looking for in that kind of intensity level when it comes to the martini. For my own taste, I really like a 25% dilution. So if you weigh the drink before you stir it down with ice versus the final drink after you've stared it down with ice, you've got 25% more liquid. And this is really easy to measure. In fact, I did a full episode about ice and dilution, which I'll put just here, which you can watch. But as a starting point, maybe 25% to 30% would be really good. But if you're stirring it down, wait until the ice kind of rounds out. Wait till the glass gets really chilled. And you're probably going to be roughly in that zone, so don't underdo, don't overdo it. But if you want to be really precise, you can measure it and repeat that over and over again every time you make a martini. So now we've made some big decisions about how the drink's gonna taste and how it's gonna feel in our mouth. We need to start thinking about how the drink's gonna look and how it's gonna be finished off, starting with the glass that we choose. So when it comes to choosing the glass for your martini, there are three things to think about. Number one, is it the right size for your martini? It shouldn't be too big that you're going to have, you know, 100 mills of vodka or gin to fill it. Number two, do you like it? Do you like the look of it? Do you like the feel of it? Do you like how it kind of carries the drink and brings the aroma to your nose? And then number three, not really a decision, more of a recommendation. It needs to be really, really cold. So whichever martini you're making, get that glass in the freezer if you can, if not put some ice in there, get it really, really nice and cold. And then that's really critical to this drink. A good martini is spoilt by not being cold enough. But if you want to get the very best out of your martini, it wants to be really, really nice and cold. So once we've got that, we can think about our final element, which is going to be our garnish. So when it comes to garnish and a martini, there are probably two primary options for a classic martini. Number one is going to be an olive. Number two, it's going to be a lemon zest twist. There are other options. You could do something like a pickled onion in a Gibson Martini, but that does stray away from our classic template and I really like to go for an olive. If you're familiar with this course or with this channel, you know, I'd like to add a little bit of season into my drinks in the form of either salt or something. That kind of brings a little bit of variation to the drink. Maybe vanilla, but I really like an olive because it brings that really nice kind of savory mouth fell a little bit of saltiness and umami. And I think in a martini that's really, really welcome. We've got all the complexity from the gin or the vodka, got all the complexity from the Vermouth. And that olive just makes you kind of want more and more of it. And these olives not sponsored, are the best olives in the world that I've ever tried. Perella olives give them a try if you can get hold of them. If you want to take this one step further, you can actually add a little bit of the olive Branchio martini to make what's called a dirty martini. But if you want a fresher take on the martini, you can just remove a little bit of lemon peel, express this over the drink, and just tie it up for a really pretty and kind of citric and fresh garnish. So now we've talked about all the seven things you can think about. I've kind of told you my seven preferences. I'm going to make my own perfect martini, which I think is going to be a really good starting point for you as well. So let's make a martini. Okay, so for this martini we're going to start with our chilled frozen gin. And I'm going to go with 60 mils of this, which is going to be four parts. And I'm also stirring this down in a nice chilled mixing glass, which really does help things along to get it nice and cold. 60 mils of that, we're going to go 15 mils or one part of my wine based aperitif, which is going to be cocky Americano. We're going to forego the bitters, but you'd add them now maybe two or three dashes. And then we're going to stir this down with plenty of ice. So we're just going to stir this down for around about 30 to 45 seconds, aiming for that 25 to 30% dilution. So now that's really nice and cold, I'm just going to strain this into my frozen glass. Very happy with that. And we have our martini, which we're just gonna finish off with an olive. And there we have what I consider to be the perfect martini, which may also be yours experiment. Let me know which one ends up being your favorite and enjoy. 39. NEGRONI: Origin, Recipe. Variations!: Welcome back to Essential cocktails. I'm damn fellows. And today we're going to make one of the most simple but beloved cocktails in the world called the Negroni. So when I said the Negroni is a simple drink, it really, really is. It contains three ingredients which are all completely different. But brings something to the final drink and works so well together. And if you want to trace back the origins of a Negroni, it's actually quite easy to see how this drinks developed over time, starting with a drink called a Milano Trina. So, Milano Trina is a really simple drink, the first ingredient being from Milan, which is going to be Campari, hence Milano. And the second is going to be from Turin, which is a vermouth from Torino. And I'm going with Cocky Starco Vermouth Torino. And if you combine these two together, you get that delicious drink called a Milano Trina. But it's quite thick, quite heavy, quite kind of syrupy. And although that's not such a bad thing, over time this drink got lightened and was topped up with soda water, or sparkling water trout drink called an Americano. So the Americano gained lots of popularity and understandably so, it's a really delicious drink, very refreshing, kind of bittersweet. But the story goes that in 1919, Count Camillo Negroni, who'd been traveling around the Americas and specifically New York, had grown really fond of kind of hard spirits and particularly gin. And he asked for his Americano to be strengthened with gin instead of sod water. And with that decision, the Negroni was born. So once again, going back to the simplicity of a Negroni, it really is very, very simple. And it's actually an equal part recipe traditionally. So I'm going to go with 30 meals of gin and this is going to bring plenty of those botanical notes, a little bit of citrus in there. But what you can do here is actually use different gins, Although I do recommend using a gin that's got plenty of those juniper flavors, kind of high intensity because it's going up against such big ingredients that if you didn't use a really high intensity gin, it would run the risk of being lost and that kind of damaged the Negroni. So as I said, this is 30 meals for a single serve, but you could do 30 meals. You could do 300 meals if you prefer. You can even pour a bottle of each of these into a big container, decant it back into the bottles, keep it in the fridge, and this is one of the most batchable drinks in the world. And once again, referring back to that equal parts formula. Some people like to change the amount of gin in here, increasing it to give a little bit more of the kind of booziness, bringing down the bitter, sweet and herbal characteristics, and making a slightly lighter drink. Whereas we're going to go 111, some people might go 1.5 parts gin to one part vermouth and one part campyre. Some people might even go two to 11. Experiment with this to find your own perfect ratio, but we're going to keep things kind of classic here. Equal parts is a really good starting point, so to 30 mils of our gin, we're going to go 30 mils of campyy. And this brings those really nice inherent bitter sweet notes, some kind of citrus in there. A little bit of kind of pithy peel and a little bit of rhubarb as well. But you can also experiment with other bitter sweet ingredients. Here you could use a marrow. But if you don't like that really high bitterness or the relatively high bitterness, you could go with something like Aperov, which is a lower intensity, lower ABV and slightly less bitter option. So keeping the kind of DNA of angronib, making it a little bit more approachable, a little bit less bitter, and probably suitable for people who aren't keen on that high bitterness in the drink. So that's one option. And then the second option we have is with your mu. I really like cocky, Storico. I think it's really delicious. It's got a nice balance of herbals and sweetness in there. But there are many other mouths on the market experiment. Find out which one you prefer and we're going to go 30 meals in this drink. So that's our base. Very simple, equal parts put together. This is a single serve, but if you've gone for a bigger batch size, keep it in the fridge, it'll keep forever in the fridge. And you've got an Agroni ready to go whenever you want it, so that's a good option. But now we're going to stir this down with plenty of ice for our single serve and negroni, So because these are quite high intensity ingredients and quite syrupy, you do want to get an adequate amount of dilution in here. And if you want to learn more about dilution, a link of video above which is going to cover all the kind of fundamentals of dilution, which you can watch at your leisure. But now we're going to serve up on the groaning. So serve the drink. I'm just going to strain this over a nice big clear ice cube, which I can teach you how to make above. But if you don't have this, you can use cubes, you can use a big block of ice, whichever works for you. And then to finish off the drink, it's going to take a nice big swath of orange peel, because that citrus really cuts through the kind of sweeter elements in the drink. And I'm going to express this over the top, around the rim of the glass. And then just give it a little tidy up just to finish off. So I just want to finish off by cleaning up those edges, making your garnish look as attractive as the rest of the drink. Drop that in there and there we have the most simple but delicious bitter, sweet and complex drink, which is an agroni. Enjoy everybody. 40. WHITE NEGRONI: The Ultimate Negroni Riff?!: The white Negroni takes the very Italian affair of a classic Negroni with Campari in Italian. Vermouth subs out the Italian ingredients and introduces some French ingredients including susa and leblanc, and creates something completely different. Flips the Negroni on its head, but also quite similar as well. So if you love a Negroni, I think you're going to love this. And today I'm going to show you how to make it welcome to essential cocktails. So somewhat ironically, the White Negroni wasn't created by a French bartender or an Italian bartender. But it was actually created by a British bartender called Wayne Collins. In 2001, I was actually visiting France and he wanted to create essentially a French inspired Negroni, taking out the Italian ingredients, bringing in some kind of French touches. And this is what we ended up with. So for our white Negroni, once again it's a three ingredient affair starting with gin, which is true in both drinks. I'm going with beefeater 'cause it's got those really nice kind of Juna Perford characteristics. But whichever gin you like, you can try. We've got Susa, which is a bittersweet Gentian based liquor which we're subbing in for the Campari. And although they're not the same, it does a similar job. So it brings that kind of bitter, sweet characteristic, a little bit of kind of herbal note in there as well, and it's very delicious, but quite intense. And then finally, le Le Blanc, which we're bringing in instead of sweet Vermouth. And this has those subtle floral characteristics which make this drink kind of light, kind of refreshing, and very different from a classic Negroni, whilst maintaining that classic DNA of bittersweet notes, herbal notes and botanical notes. So I'm going to build this now and this isn't usually an equal part formula. So the first thing we'll do is add our gin to the drink. So whereas a classic Negroni is usually an equal parts recipe of 111, a lot of people like to do a two part spirit, one part Susa, one part La Leblanc kind of variation on this. And I think that works really well in the White Negroni. This allows the gin to come through. And that Susa is a pretty big old flavor. So if you're adding this in equal parts to the gin, no matter how kind of intense and flavor forward the gin is, it's probably going to be lost. So I think this two to one to one ratio actually is perfect for this. So in this drink I'm going 50 mills. But you can scale this up as much as you need. You can make tons of this if you wanted to, very, very easily. But we're going to do 50 mills, 25 mils of Susa, which is quite powerful and it has quite a vivid color as well. So we don't want to lose our kind of almost white color, which is basically yellow, but don't tell anyone. And then finally, 25 mils of Le Blanc, which has those really nice floral notes and a little bit of freshness to balance out the bitter notes, the genti and base, like you're going to have plenty of ice and give this a little stir down over the ice. I'm going to strain this into our chilled rocks glass. Ideally with clear ice if you have it and you can see the color isn't white, but it's definitely not that vivid red that we associate with Negroni. To finish the drink, we're going to do something again, similar but different. This time we're going to go with grapefruit, which just has a slightly different characteristic to the orange and regular negroni. And you want to take a big, big swathe, because this really is kind of a key ingredient in the drink. It really needs acidity and freshness. You express that liberally over the drink and around the glass, tidy it up into a nice presentable swathe of grapefruit pop that in the glass for a little contrast of color. And there we have a delicious variation on the Negroni, which is the white Negroni enjoy. 41. Boulevardier: A Negroni for Whiskey Lovers!: For those of you who love Negrones and whiskey, Today we've got you covered in this episode of Central cocktails, We're gonna make a drink called a Boulevardier. Just like the classic Negroni, which the Boulevarder is a Riffon. It contains campari, it contains sweet vermouth. But the key difference we're going to make here is that we subbing out gin and introducing bourbon whiskey. And even though these drinks are very similar on paper, I think you're going to be surprised at how different they are in the glass. The classic Negroni is usually an equal parts drink, although people do kind of change around with the proportions. But in a boulevard we're going to go with a slightly different ratio. This is going to be a stirred drink, and rather than doing 30, 30, 30, or one part to one part to one part, I'm actually going to do 45 Mls of our bourbon and we're going to call this 1.5 parts. The reason for this is we do want this to be quite different to a Negroni and those kind of rich toffee like notes that we find in the Bourbon. Just really contrast the gin, the kind of deeper rounder, more kind of caramel, Whereas gin obviously has much more vibrancy and freshness. So 45 miles of our base spirit, you could even do 60 miles or two to 11. But I think 1.5 to 11 is a really easy ratio. It works really nicely and it doesn't overpower the campari in divermuth. With the campari, we're going to do one part which is going to be 30 miles, but this is a really easy drink to scale up once again, just like the Negroni. Just like the white Negroni, you could make even huge vats of this. You could even age this in a barrel, which would be quite nice, 30 mils of that. But you could do 300, you could do three liters. Depends how many friends you've got, depends how much you want to make. And then finally, we're going to go 30 miles of our sweet vermouth or whatever amount you want to make, depending on the baptize. Summarize this recipe. 45 miles of bourbon, or 1.5 parts, 30 mils of campari, or one part 30 mils of sweet vermouth. One part again. And we're just going to stir this down over plenty of ice. We're going to strain this into a frozen glass with a nice big, clear ice cube if you have it. Or cubes or a big block if you don't. And then we're going to finish the drink with a good zest of orange just expressed over the top of the drink. Garnish with your orange zest and there we have a delicious riff on the Negroni, which has deeper under more caramel gnoes called a bolavardier enjoy. 42. A Better Way to Make a Spritz! : Although the spritz has been around for over 100 years, maybe closer to 200 years, only in recent memory has it reached the global fever pitch that we see today. Where everywhere you go, particularly where the sun's shining, you'll see people drinking and enjoying Apol spritzes, campari spritzes, amaro spritzes, and they're super refreshing, super delicious. But one thing that people do is they tend to favor a three to two to one ratio, A Prosecco to Apol to soda water. But I prefer something different today. I'm going to show that to you. So the first thing we need to do with our spirits is to decide what we're going to build it around. A really obvious option would be aperol. Everyone knows the apparol sprits. It's a really good base for the drink, but you can also experiment with other bases. Things like campari work really well for a little bit more bitterness and a little bit more boosiness. You can also experiment with different Amari. Each amaro will have a kind of different flavor profile. Experiment with different bases. But two, our apparol, which we're going to go with today because it's really classic and works so well. We're going to need also some soda water and finally some prosecco. Most people really like that. 321 Formula three parts per secco. Two parts, one part soda. But I actually like to change this up a little bit and rather than get 321, I'd like to go 123 squeeze. And I'll explain the squeeze later, but we're going to just build this slightly differently to a classic aperol spritz just to maintain that really nice bubbliness, really nice piz and get as much kind of refreshing vibrancy in the drink as possible. So the first thing we need to do is grab a really cold glass to build the drink in, just like this one. And then rather than using a jigger like this one to measure the drink, I'm actually going to build it on scales directly in the glass. And the reason for this is that same reason, just to keep it really fizzy. So as I said before, 321 is popular. I'd like to do this slightly differently and do 123, starting with one part of our soda water. I'm going to do 25 grams of soda as our starting point. And then two parts of that is obviously going to be 50 grams of Apol. This has got those really nice citrus fruits in there, Fay. Refreshing a little bit, bitterness but not too much. And then before we mix the drink, I'm actually going to stir these two together. By doing this, we obviously don't use the jigger, which is going to give us more touch points. And each time we pour it into something, reduce the kind of fizziness of the liquids. But also build it on scales with just the first two ingredients. Means I can stir them, get them really nicely mixed, whereas the apparole wants to sit on the bottom. Now it's kind of mixed in with the soda water. So we can really get it all the way through the drink without having to stir too vigorously, particularly with a prosecco. So I'm going to tear my scales pop my prosecco because this is always a bit of a celebration. Right? And then to add our prosecco, we're going to add three parts, so 75 grams. And I recommend pouring this like you would in a champagne glass, just so really mix as nicely, or nearly 69, and then we can add our ice afterwards. So, with an Approl Sprit, you want to add plenty of ice and you want to almost be kind of vigorous with how you add it, because it will serve as another way just to mix the drink without having to stir it. So just give them a little push around and you want to get loads of ice and apparl sprits because it does want to be really refreshing. My final tip when I spoke about 123 squeeze refers to the orange. I really like orange with Aperol. I think it's a perfect combination. When I say squeeze, what I mean is take a really nice orange, a nice juicy orange. Take a really big wedge, maybe like a sixth of the whole orange. And we're just going to squeeze the whole thing into the drink. And this just brings that really nice kind of sweetness n acidity of orange, and adds that really nice fresh orange character. We're going to add a second slice of orange for our garnish, and this just makes the most delicious spritz. So there we have it. Refreshing bitter, sweet, dry, fruity, beautiful. We have a sprit. Enjoy. 43. My Favourite (Easy) MAI TAI Recipe! : All right, welcome to Essential cocktails. Everybody, today we're exploring our first Tiki recipe. And some say this is the ultimate Tiki drink. I'm inclined to agree. So today we're going to make a Ti. Okay, so the my tie. This is a delicious drink which was created in the 1940s by Victor Bergeront, also known as Trader Vic, who's one of the pioneers of the Tiki revolution. Although there are some arguments to say that Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gunt, which is a bit of a mouthful of a name also known as Don Beach. From Don the beach coma created a drink which kind of inspired Victor Bergeron's Miti ten to 15 years later. Although Tredovick really strongly denies that and says anyone who says he didn't create the drink is a stinker. So although trade Vick clearly strongly denies any knowledge of Don's drink, there are two ingredients in common which a lot of drinks have in common to be fair, being Rum and lime. And then Don's drink was pretty different. It contained aniseed in the form of perna or absinthe, it contained grapefruit and it also contained velvet falin and none of those ingredients are in Tradavick's recipe, which has become the kind of synonymous, definitive miti recipe that we know love today. So since then, obviously a lot has happened, drinks tastes have changed, and in the kind of '80s and '90s, the Ti became this fruity, sweet, saccharine kind of abomination a lot of people would say, which completely misrepresented what a miti should be or its original form. So what we're going to do today is make a drink which is inspired by trade of Vic's recipe, which I think is really, really delicious. There's going to be no pineapple juice in there, because that wasn't in the original recipe. And we're going to need a few different things. So at the heart of every good miti is rum. And not one rum, potentially not two rums, but I'm going with three different rums today. So first of all, we're going to go with our aged white rum, which is going to be Eldorado three. We're also going to go with a Jamaican rum which is Appleton Estate, which has a little bit more age on there, a little bit more kind of funk coming through. And then we're going to finish it off with goslings, black seal rum. And the reason for blending rums is that Trader Vick originally made this drink with Ray and nephew 17, which was discontinued. And he was really searching for that flavor profile in his Ti and it's pretty difficult to know what that rum tasted like definitively. So this is the really exciting part of a Ti. You can blend rums, you could introduce rum agricul, which would be a little bit more grassy, particularly a younger one. You can introduce really funky hy esta rums, maybe some kind of really funky Jamaican rums. You can introduce darker rums, like goslings or even an overproof marea rum. The world is your oyster here, pick rums that you really like, Experiment with blending them together, and that's going to be our starting point for the ti, to our rums. We're going to add in some sweet elements and some sour elements. And the sour element is going to be freshly squeezed lime juice, as is common in a lot of Teiki cocktails. This is really popular in many Tiki drinks. So lime is going to be our acidity. And then we're going to have two sweeteners, one of which being a liqueur, one of which being a syrup. The liqueur is going to be quontro in our recipe, but you can choose your favorite orange liqueur, and this brings some kind of complimentary round, sweet, citric notes to the drink. And then second of all, we're going to go with orgat, which is an almond syrup. I'm using moni or chat syrup some people like to make their own, which is also a really good option, but this just brings a really nice kind of nutty character to the drink. And then the final ingredient is going to be a little bit of saline solution, which is not traditional. But if you followed this channel and this course for a while, you'll know I really like to bring big, diverse flavors together, like these, using a little bit of salt. And this does a really good job of that. So now we can start building our Miti. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of different Miti recipes. And there's no right and wrong here, just the one that you find balanced based on your kind of flavor preferences and your favorite rums. So this is a really simple recipe and we're going to go 20 meals. First of all, of our aged white rum, which is going to bring some of the kind of white chocolate, unripe banana notes, and a little bit of vanilla to the drink. Very delicious. I'm going to blend that with 20 meals in our Appleton Estate, Jamaican Rum. And these two work really nicely together without overpowering the drink. They just harmonized really well 20 meals again of our freshly squeezed lime juice. For the kind of acidity and brightness that you need in a lot of Tek cocktails. And then we're going to do 20 meal again of our sweetener, but it's going to be ten Mls of contro and ten Mls of our orch out syrup. So a really simple recipe to remember. 20 meals of each Rum, 20 mils of our lime juice, and then 20 meals of our sweetener divided into two being ten Mls of contro. And then finally, ten meals of our agate syrup, or some people pronounce this zat, and this is going to bring that really nice nutty character to the drink. Finally, we'll grab our optional saline solution, which I do really recommend. And I'm a big fan of seasoning cocktails, so the purpose here is to bring these really kind of wide, vibrant flavors together. And this is going to do that really nicely. Now, I'm going to add some crushed ice, which are freshly crushed for the drink. And if you don't have an ice rusher like this one, that's totally fine. You can just wrap it in a tea towel and give it a smash with a rolling pin. Obviously, being careful or even a mudder would work quite well. So that's around about 100 grams of our crushed ice. So we're just going to give this a really, really quick shake, no more than 5 seconds, just to mix it together. And then the reason for not shaking this any more than that, A, is because we don't want to emulsify the drink, is because crushed ice really chills the drink quickly. But also we don't want to over dilute the drink. So you can just open, pour this into our glass, can top this up with more crushed ice. We're going to go for a very traditional Tiki garnish, which is going to be a lime wheel and a big old sprig of mint, because we want to get that really nice fresh aroma on the drink. And I do recommend garnishing before finishing the drink, and we'll explain why in a second. We go with the line with a big old over the top sprig of mint, because this is Tiki after all. And we can embrace excess. Going to add our straw. And this isn't quite finished yet, so you can take this to the table or to your guest, or for yourself, as you'd like to. And then to finish the drink, we're just going to crown it with ten meals of a really dark rum, such as goslings. And this just brings that kind of richness, those kind of tree cool notes. And that finishes off our citrusy rummy, nutty, orangy delicious drink known as a miti. Enjoy that one, everybody. 44. A Simple, Epic HURRICANE Recipe! : The hurricane to me is the ultimate drink for a good time. At its heart, it's essentially a passion fruit, pomegranate and orange. Rum sour, which is a delicious drink. But over the years it's been kind of marred by overly sweet and synthetic takes. So today I'm going to show you my absolute favorite hurricane recipe, which might also be the very simplest. So let's have a look at it now. So the hurricane was embedded in the 1940s at Pato Brian's bar in New Orleans. And the story goes that rum was much easier to get hold of at the time than other spirits. So the bar set about cretin delicious drinks which contained rum, and this is a perfect example of that. So my favorite recipe for a hurricane really keeps things simple. And you'll see some recipes which call for, you know, 50 meals of this, 20 meals of that, 12.5 meals of that, two mils of that. And that's not really the way I want to approach this drink. I want to make it as easy as possible because being completely honest, I've been put off from making hurricanes for a long time because there are so many things you need so many different measurements. But I think this recipe, which is pretty much entirely equal parts, is as effective, if not more effective than any of the others I've tried. So I'm going to show you that. So to make this version of the hurricane, we're going to need three rums of your choice. Essentially, I'm going with Eldorado, three Appleton, eight, and also Goslings, Black Seal rum. And these three work really nicely together, bring in kind of rich vibes. The lighter rum kind of balances out the richer rum. The Jamaican rum brings a really nice kind of tropical fruit funkiness to the drink. And you can play around with these. Use whichever three rums you like. You could just use one rum, but triple up the amount you add in there, so you add the same amount as we would have the three and experiment here. This is all about experimentation. I really like this combination. There's a world of rum out there. And let me know the comments below, which is your favorite rum or combination of Rums for a hurricane. Two, our Rums, we're gonna need some acidity. This is going to be in the form of lime juice. We're going to need a sweetener which also has acidity, which is going to be freshly squeezed orange juice. And this really levels it up from using bottled. And then we're going to need a sweetener which is going to be grenadine. And I really like to add a little bit of saline solution because I really think these are big flavors. And bringing them together with a pinch of salt in the form of a few drops of saline works really nicely. Finally, a hurricane wouldn't be complete without a passion fruit, which is one of the key flavors of a hurricane. So we're going to use that later. So now we've got all our ingredients, we can start building our hurricane. So the hurricane historically is a really, really big drink. I'm talking huge, and I think actually way too big. So I'm going to build this in our shaker tin. But this recipe, as I said, is very simple, almost entirely equal parts. So you can really easily scale it up as much as you want. You could double it up and put it in a classic hurricane glass. That'd be completely fine. But just be mindful, you'd be drinking 90 mils of rum, which is quite a lot by anyone's standards. If you're going to do that, take it easy, drink responsibly. So first of all, we've got our white Rum in there already, 15 meals. Then I've got 15 meals in my Jamaican rum. And these work really nicely together. And then we've got those rich molasses notes from our black seal rum. And as I said, these are a really perfect base for experimentation. Use the rums you have. Try new rums. Experiment with different Rum agricole, different ages of rum, different styles of rum, different origins, wherever the rum comes from, we'll have a big impact on the flavor profile, as with the production method, aging, et cetera. Rum has so many variables, so many flavor notes you can find in there. So have a good experiment and find your own perfect blend for your hurricane 15 meals of each Rum. Once again, keeping things really simple, we're going to go with 15 meals of our lime juice for our freshness and zinc, which is really important in a drink which historically can be a little bit overly sweet bridge in our sweetness and acidity are going to go with our freshly squeezed orange juice. But this is perfectly intact. This is a really beautiful orange and there's a lot of flavor in the peels, which if you can maximize I do recommend using, you can use that in things like olio saccharum. You can use it as a garnish. So ideally if you've taken the peel off, you can use an orange like this for juicing. And that's going to be a little bit more sustainable, really maximizing the flavor we get from our oranges. So we're going to go in with 15 meals freshly squeezed orange juice. And as I said, using fresh just really levels up the drink. If you use bottled, it tends not to have that vibrancy and freshness of freshly squeezed orange juice. I'm going to go 15 meals of that. I'm going to go in with 15 meals of our sweetener, which is going to be grenadine. I'm using the modern grenadine syrup, and this is essentially a pomegranate flavored sugar syrup, which gives it that really nice red, vivid color that you often associate with the hurricane. And then optionally, I'm going to go in with 0.5 grams of our saline solution made with one part salt, five parts of water. Just to bring all those big flavors together and no hurricane would be complete without passion fruit. So I'm just going to cut this in half and add all of the pulp straight into the shaker. And give it that really nice kind of tart, sweet tropical flavor that we all know in love with passion fruit. Just going to ad round about 100 grams of crushed ice to this. Give it a couple of very quick shakes over ice, just to kind of mix it all together, but we don't overly dilute, so no more than 5 seconds then you want to open, pour this into a chilled high ball glass. I'm just going top this up with a little bit more crushed ice. And one thing to remember here is that because we're open pouring, we're going to get all of the passion fruit pulp in the drink. Some people really like this, you might prefer it out of there. And if that's the case, you can just shake this with cubed ice, fine strain it into crushed ice, and you'll get a really similar result. But you do run the risk of having a little bit more dilution and you don't get that really nice passion fruit pulp coming up the straw. So whichever way you go completely your call. I love passion fruit. I'll love that texture Is a little surprise, but make it your preferred way to garnish. I'm just gonna cut a little wedge of lime so you can adjust the balance of the drink if you prefer to. I'm going to pair this with a really nice boozy cherry and finish off with a nice wooden straw. And there we have my favorite version of a passion fruity rummy, tropical delicious drink called a hurricane. Cheers. 45. JUNGLEBIRD: Did I Create an Amazing Drink?!: Toda y. I'm going to show you a drink which bridges the gap perfectly between Tiki and a peratef. And it's called the jungle bird. And when you look at these ingredients, you might not immediately think that traditionally they're going to go together. But when you taste the drink, I think you'll be shocked at how amazing it really is. I'll also show you a riff on this recipe, which I think I created. And if I did create it, then it's one of my finest creations. So today let's make some jungle birds. So the jungle bird was created in the 1970s by Jeffrey G in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. And the drink takes its name from the bar in which it was created, which is inspired by which is the aviary bar. And it has those tropical notes as well as the bird theme. So Jungle Bird is a perfect name for the drink. The drink itself bridges together two very different styles, which are kind of tropical Tiki drinks and also para teeth style drinks. And it has a really nice balance of acidity and sweetness like a lot of Tiki drinks. But also those kind of bittersweet notes really refreshing in Chris that we associate with the parateeftyle drinks. So to make a jungle bird, we're going to need a black rum, such as goslings, black seal rum. Then we're going to need Campari. Even rum and Campari, slightly less familiar combination, but actually work really nicely together. I'm going to get our acidity from freshly squeezed lime juice, Our sweetness from a cane sugar syrup, or a white sugar syrup at a two to one ratio, and I'm using in. And then finally bridging together the acidity and sweetness. And also bringing a really nice kind of creamy foamy texture. We're going to be shaking this with pineapple juice, and this is a really kind of key flavor in the drink. So first of all, in our jungle bird, we're going to start with our black Seal Rum, which is going to be 45 meals. And this brings those really nice treacy, melassy flavors, given the really nice solid baste to the drink. If you used a lighter rum, I don't think it'd really cut through with Campari in particular being such a big flavor. So the darker the rum you can get, the kind of richer and more intense flavor you can find. That's what you're really looking for to our rum. We're going to go 15 Mls of Campari, which is a bitter sweet liqueur which brings those really nice kind of bitter, sweet, pithy notes to the drink, which are a little bit unexpected. And then our main source of acidity is going to be 15 more meals, freshly squeezed lime juice. I'm going to go ten Mls of our two to one white sugar syrup. And I'm using Monn cane sugar syrup as our form of sweetness. And this also helps the texture of the drink, bringing a little bit more viscosity, so you might want to add a little bit les of this if you really want it to be a nice dry drink. Because we are getting sweetness from the campari and the pineapple, but up to ten meals I think is a really nice balance in the drink. And then to finish off, we're going to go 45 meals, Good quality pineapple juice. And if you can squeeze your own, or juice your own even better but with store, but it still works really nicely. So now I've got our classic jungle bread, ready to go, ready to be shaken. I'm going to start talking about a drink that I think I might have created, although I might not have done as well. Although I've never seen it done before and I can't find any references to it on the Internet. So if it's not on the Internet, maybe it doesn't exist. But what I'm talking about here is if we think back to a Negroni, you also have a white Negroni where you make substitutions which do change the characteristic of the drink and very much the look of the drink, whilst also maintaining the kind of DNA of the core drink. So what we can do here with our classic jungle bird, we can make a few little tweaks which change it from being kind of rich molasses forward and also quite a dark, deep red color to be in a white version, which isn't clear, isn't necessarily a white completely, but it's a much lighter version which has similar but also different characteristics. So the first substitution we're going to make to go from a classic jungle bird to a white jungle bird is to lose the goslings black seal rum, which obviously is a much darker, richer color and characteristic, and replace it with an aged white rum, Eldorado three, or your favorite white rum. Then we're going to substitute out the campari and bring in another bitter sweet element which is going to be Susa, which is a bitter sweet. Gentium base, liqure. We're going to keep the lime juice. I'm actually going to change our classic cane sugar syrup. Something slightly different, which is going to be a monn coconut syrup. And this slightly changes the flavor profile of the drink. Bringing a little bit more kind of tropical notes, a little bit more like a Pina Colada, but very different as well in with the coconut. And then we're going to finish with our pineapple juice. So I'm going to build this again using exactly the same proportions, Which is going to be 45 mils of our Eldorado three he white rum, 15 mils of our sua gentian based liqueur, 15 mils of freshly squeezed lime juice, ten mils of coconut syrup, and then 45 mils of our good quality pineapple juice. So we're going to shake up our classic jungle bird, first of all. And then the white jungle bird, given a really good shake, to really whip up the pineapple juice and get that really nice, creamy texture. I'm going to fine strain these over a cube ice into a nicely chilled glass. Then you get that really nice cascade and look at the pineapple juice. And then again with the white jungle bad fine strain and out. The classic jungle bread is going to be a little bit more of a classic bit of sweet flavor profile coming from that campari with a really nice rich molasses forward rum. And then the White Jungle Bird is going to be a little bit more herbal, a little bit more pinacol adri in the flavor profile from the pineapple in the coconut. And then they both can be garnished with a really nice big slice of dried pineapple. So we have the classic jungle bird and the white Jungle bad enjoy. 46. The Best PINA COLADA I've Ever Tasted!: There aren't many drinks as evocative as a Pina colada. It's got the power to take you from whatever you're doing immediately on holiday, sitting on a deck chair, sipping these in the sun. And there are so many bad Pina Colada recipes, but I do think that this one is the best I've ever tried. So without further ado, let's get onto our holidays. Close your eyes, take yourself to a happy place, and let's make some peanut coladas. So the Pina Colada is a ridiculously well known cocktail. But I do think it often gets away without being quite perfect, because it's always enjoyed in good locations by the pool, on a sun lounger, having a great time, and you're in a good mood. So you might excuse the fact that this drink is either too sweet, too, kind of artificial, almost like liquid sun cream or kind of a slushy rather than being a cocktail because you're having a good time and that's totally fine. But if you add a great drink on top of that experience, it takes it to a whole new level. And this recipe I'm going to show you today, I think is on point, and I'm really, really happy with it. So for our Pinualda, we're going to need a few things, the first of which being rum. And with rum, you can choose a rum that you enjoy. If you don't love rum, you can perhaps go for a white rum or an aged white rum, which is going to be a little bit more mild. Allow the pineapple and coconut to really come through. Whereas if you really like rum like I do, you can go for a slightly more aged rum, which has a bit more character and a bit more intensity. So, I'm using Appleton Estate eight, which is a really nice balance of kind of, a little bit of funk in there. Some kind of tropical notes, a little bit of roasted, pineapple and banana, right through to the more round kind of dark sugars. So a little bit of butter, scotch and caramel. So this is going to be my basis. And then we're going to need the two key ingredients to a peanut colada, which are going to be pineapple in the form of pineapple juice, and coconut in the form of cream of coconut. Ideally, Cocoa Lopez, cream of coconut, which is a really authentic choice. You can use regular coconut milk if you can't get hold of this. And then we're going to build around these flavors. First of all, with a bit of acidity, using freshly squeezed lime juice. And then I like to add a little bit of salt to this in the form of saline solution. This just brings it all together really nicely when it comes to making our pinularda. I'm actually going to build this on scales because we're going to be blending the drink and jiggers are a little bit difficult when it comes to things like the cocoa Lopez and particularly with the saline. This is a really finely balanced drink and I'm really happy with exactly how it turns out we want to be quite accurate with this, and scale is the perfect way to do that. First of all, we're going to start with our Rum and I'm going 40 grams here and this is going to be our spirit based of the drink. I'm going to get 100 grams of good quality pineapple juice. You can use store bought and you get really good results. But if you want to go to the next level, you can use freshly strained pineapple juice, either through a juicer or by blending it up and then straining it. And if you didn't know peanut colder actually directly translates as strained pineapple, hence the inclusion of pineapple in the drink. If you want to use strained pineapple delicious with the cocoa Lopez, you want to give this a really good stir together. Because it does kind of separate in the can. And then when you've done that, we're going to add 50 grams straight into our blender cup. And it looks a little bit glopy, but fear not because in the final drink, this just brings that really nice creamy texture and lows a coconut flavor as well. So Cocoa Lopez is actually really quite sweet. So we do need some acidity to balance this, and I like to go for freshly squeezed lime juice, which just balances out the cocktail really well. And then finally, actually quite a lot of saline solution, much more than I usually add, which is going to be 2 grams made with one part salt, five parts of water. And this just stops the drink feeling overly sweet and sour, and it brings it all together really nicely. So I think a lot of recipes now, we'll just call for you to blend this up with ice, pour it into a glass, and you brought your Pina Colada. But when ice is such a critical ingredient in this drink, either being the difference between a kind of really thin drink versus a really kind of thick, almost edible slushy. We do want to be quite precise for this, so I recommend adding 60 grams of ice here to get that perfect texture, which is drinkable but also rich and premium luxurious. If you don't have a really high speed blender like a neutral bullet like this, or if you're stick blending, then I would actually recommend using the smaller ice, so maybe crushed ice. But because this is going to be really rapidly blended, it's going to chill down nicely. And the difference here is if you use really big cubes, it's going to take a long time to break them down and chill the drink, so you're actually going to add some heat as the liquid kind of gets the friction rose. If you use crushed dice, it's going to be really efficient in chilling the drink. And also blend up really easily. So I'm using cubes because this is a pretty high speed blender. But ideally, if you want to use crushed dice, that's going to make things a little bit easier for you in your lower power blender. We're just going to blend this up until it's all mixed together. You can actually hear when it's ready because the ice stops kind of clicking inside the blender. You can feel this is really, really nice and cold and it's going to be perfectly diluted. Pour this into a nice chilled glass. Oh my God is the best drink ever. Serve it with the straw garnish and some really nice dried pineapple for a nice elegant presentation. And that, for me, is the perfect Pina Colada. Enjoy it. 47. ZOMBIE: Less Confusing and Damn Tasty! : The Zombie isn't a drink for the faint of heart, as you can probably tell from all these ingredients in front of me. And there are quite a lot, it contains a lot of booze, a lot of fruit, some really nice seasonings. And if you bring all these things together, you can actually make a really delicious drink. But it does contain a lot of booze, so be careful. So let's make some zombies. So the zombie was created in the 1930s by Don Beach of Don The Beach Coma. And he was one of the kind of pioneers of the entire Tiki movement. I'm not exactly sure what he was thinking when he brought this many ingredients together and thought, I think that will all go really well together. But it turns out he was right, and this drink is really delicious. So what we're doing here is creating quite a simple template, because the zombie can be quite an overwhelming drink. Not only does it have a lot of ingredients, it can have a lot of very specific ratios, proportions. But we're going to keep things quite simple here. So I've actually chopped this into three parts. The first part being our booze, of which there is a lot, which is going to be rum, Rum, Rum, velvet, falarum. And I'll talk about each one as I add them. We've got our juices, which are going to be pineapple, grapefruit, and lime, And then we've got our kind of seasonings which bring balance the drink and just bring it all together. So we've got Grenadine, we've got some kind of anaseed forward flavor which is going to be absinthe, but you could also use Perno. Then we have some bitters and some saline solution. So this recipe isn't designed to be a recreation of the original recipe. It's designed to bring all the elements of a zombie that I really enjoy, and I think you might enjoy into one drink in a kind of balanced way. So there's going to be lots of variation and lots of kind of tweaks from the original. One thing that is missing is going to be cinnamon. We're adding falarnum, but if you really want to introduce the cinnamon even more so you can actually infuse cinnamon into one of your rums, I recommend just breaking them up, leaving them in the bottle till you've got enough cinnamon flavor and then straining them back out again. But because we're trying to keep things really simple and really repeatable on the course, I'm just going to grate this over the top of the drink, and that will give us a really nice cinnamon aroma, which will finish off the drink really well. So with all the other way, let's start building our zombie. So as I mentioned before, the zombie is a pretty busy drink. It's got a lot of ingredients, but we can kind of bunch them into three parts. The first of which being the booze, then the juices, then the seasonings. And in the booze category, we're actually going to keep things kind of simple. And doing it this way just makes it really easy to keep up with what we've added to the drink already. 11 ingredient drinks can be quite complex, it's very easy to miss something. But here we're actually going to get equal parts. So the three rums are up to you. Which three you go for historically. This might be a Jamaican Rum, a Puerto Rican rum, and then some kind of overproof rum. Maybe a demo Rum, But whichever you go for is going to have a big impact on the drink since it has a lot of rum in it. So first of all, I'm going to go to 20 miles of our Eldorado three aged white rum. But as I said, definitely experiment with this. We're going to go 20 miles of a Jamaican rum. And I'm going for Apple tonight, which has got a little bit of funk in there, but also some nice kind of caramel notes as well. I'm going to go 20 miles of an overproof dema, rump. And this is going to bring really rich kind of molasses characteristics and a lot of booze. To be honest, this is 57% So take it easy, This one's woods and whichever of the rums you decide to infuse with the cinnamon, it's going to take on some of those spice flavors and it shouldn't take too long to infuse. So if you get down that track, obviously it will bring a little bit more spice. But what we're going to do here is add 20 meals. Again, a velvet falernum from John D Tailors, and essentially this is a spiced liqueur with cane sugar, lime, clove, and almond. And this is going to really kind of do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to the spice along with bitters at the end. So I don't think it really Mrs. too much of the cinnamon, but you can always add it in through the infusion. So that's our booze. 20 meals of each rum, whichever one you go for, 20 meals of our falerum. We can now move on to the juices. So when it comes to the juices, we've got our three pineapple grape fruit in lime. And we're going to start our kind of slide and scale down to finish in our zombie now. So we're actually going to get 25, 2015 mils moving down the scale of our juices. Starting with the sweetest, which is going to be pineapple, followed by grapefruit, which is a little bit more acidic, followed by our line, which is the most acidic. And these are just ways to kind of remember the recipe. So 25 2015, starting with our pineapple juice. And the pineapples going to bring some of those kind of classic sort of ki notes. And if you can use freshly juiced pineapple even better, but storebouts going to do a good job here. 25 mils of that. Then we're moving down our sliding scale and we're going to get 20 mils of grapefruit juice. I am using freshly squeezed here because I think it really does add something. But again, if you use stobouht, you will get reasonable results. So 20 mills straight into our jigger, We're going to go 15 mils of our most acidic juice and our least sweet, which is going to be the lime juice, and this will be our primary acidity in the drink. So we've moved through the scale 20, 2015 and now we can move on to our kind of seasonings which bring balance the drink. So in our seasoning section, we're kind of finishing off the drink, bringing it all together and balancing out what currently is essentially boozy juice. And this wouldn't be that delicious to drink yet. So these are going to really kind of finish it off nicely, and we're going to carry on with our sliding scale. So in the juices we had 25 ml, 20 mill, and 15 mil going from sweetest to most acidic. Here, we're going to carry on with our kind of sliding scale. So we're going to go ten mills, five mills, two dashes 1 gram. So the first ingredient is going to be ten mils of grenadine, which is going to bring a little subtle pomegranate character as well as lots of sweetness. I'm going for five mils of absinthe, but this is pretty overpowering, so be careful with this. And I'd actually say up to five mills is probably what you want to go for no more. Otherwise it becomes a little bit too anisedy, which isn't really what the drinks all about. It does have an element of it, but think of this more like a season than a flavor, so go really, really easy on this. You could also use Perna, which would be a little bit less intense but still has lots of and the seed flavor. And then we're going to go two to three dashes of aromatic bitters. This is also going to bring out a little bit of the spice again, so really trying to recreate cinnamon without directly adding it necessarily. And then finally, there's a lot of ingredients. We're going to go 1 gram of saline solution, which is my go to when I have lots of ingredients in a drink, just because it brings them all together really nicely. Now we're going to add 100 grams of crushed ice, just to chill it down and really mix it together. So 100 grams is just a good scoop of crushed ice. 103, That's pretty accurate and as soon as the ice is in we're want to move quite quickly. Just give this a really quick shake, no more than 5 seconds just to chill it down and the crushed ice does a really good job of that. So that's actually plenty. It just livens the drink up a little bit. We're going to open, pour this into our chilled high ball glass it up with a little bit more crushed dice. If you need to grate on a little bit of cinnamon, just so you've got that nice spice on the nose, I'm gonna garnish with a nice big mint, brig. And there we have my interpretation of a delicious, teaky, classic cocktail called A Zombie Enjoy. 48. My Ultimate PORNSTAR MARTINI!: All right, welcome back to Essential Cocktails, everybody, today we're making a drink that I think deep down, pretty much everybody loves. Even if they pretend they don't, I'm actually really, really happy with the end result of this recipe. So today let's make a porn star martini. So the porn star martini was credit in the early 2000 by a bartender called Douglas Ankra in London. And the core flavor that we're really looking at in here is passion fruit. So to start our porn star martini, we're going to need two passion fruits. And I kind of hear the argument that this is going to add some cost to the drink, and I do agree with that. But we're going to substitute out a bottle of liqueur. We're going to use fresh, really nice, delicious passion fruit rather than any kind of alternatives. So it's going to give a really natural flavor to the drink. And this is really key. So two of these we're going to start with, we're also going to go with vodka. You can choose to use a vanilla infused vodka, if you prefer, you can buy vanilla vodka. You could infuse a stick of vanilla into a bottle of vodka, but because we're going to ad, vanilla syrup later, we actually don't necessarily need to. And vodka, although delicious, can quite easily overpower a drink, which we don't want to do. So I'm going with straight vodka. So now we need to think about our acidity, and for that I'm going with freshly squeezed lime juice. To balance this with sweetness, I'm going to go with the Monn vanilla syrup, which is going to bring really nice balance to the drink and kind of underlying vanilla flavor. And then something you don't often see in a pawn star martini is something that bridges acidity and sweetness together. And I've got a few ways of doing this. So first of all, I'm actually going to add pineapple juice, which isn't called for in a lot of recipes, but because it works really nicely with all the other flavors in the drink, Vanilla passion fruit. It's actually a really nice bridge between those big flavors and pulls them all together. As an added bonus, because we're not adding any kind of purees or any egg white or aqui fiber into the drink. Shaking this up with pineapple juice is a really natural way to get that really nice foam on the drink, given a really nice kind of creamy texture and that luxurious feel that we're looking for. And then finally, again, breaking from tradition, we're actually going to season our pawn star martini using two things, the first of which being orange bitters, and then the second being a 15 salt to water saline solution. And I'll talk about these more as I add them. So first of all, we're going to prepare our passion fruits. And this is actually really easy to do. Just want to cut them in half, and you can see all the lovely passion fruit inside with both of them. And then we're just going to scrape out the seeds from three of the passion fruit shells, reserving one Falta for garnish. So in total, adding one on a two passion fruits worth of the seed and pulp, which is where it gets so much, that lovely flavor to this, we're going to go 50 mils of good quality vodka. I'm going with a potato vodka, which has really nice, kind of creamy body, but whichever vodka you have will work really nicely. We're going to go 25 mils of freshly squeezed lime juice. For that zestiness that we know in the porn star, we're going to go 20 meals of our vanilla syrup as a sweetener. This is perhaps a little bit more than I'd usually add, but because passion fruit has a lot of acidity, it really does add a little bit of kind of tanginess to the drink, so you can get away with a little bit more sweetness. And I think a lot of people who enjoy porn star martinis tend to enjoy that vanilla flavor. So we're going to really push that through here. So now we've got our base, we're going to start adding our own kind of touches and flares to this. First of all, we're going to go that really good quality pineapple juice. Obviously, fresh is best if you can have it, but if you have store bought, this will work just as well. So far, we've obviously got acidity and sweetness as well as some booze from the vodka, but something we don't really have in our porn star Martini usually if ever, is any bitterness. And I really like to add some kind of pithy, zesty bitterness. And I'd like to do this with a little bit of orange bitters. So I'm just going to go in with three dashes of this, which is around about 1.5 grams. That was 1.6 so very close. And then another element I'd really like to introduce to our acidity, sweetness. And now bitterness is a tiny amount of salt. And what we're doing here is just kind of building a more complete flavor profile. And I think Porn Star can be delicious, but a little bit one dimensional or perhaps two dimensional with acidity and sweetness. But adding the kind of bitterness and a little bit of salt for drink just makes it so much more complex, so much more lad. And rather than being very wide and kind of sweet and sour, it becomes more kind of focused on the vanilla and passion fruit, which is what we really want to celebrate in the drink. So before we shake the drink, I'm just going prepare my prosecco, which lives on the side. And this is a really nice addition, because the drink, as I said, has that brightness, has that sweetness. And now the bitterness and salt as well, this just brings a really nice kind of crispness to the drink. And you can either sip this on the side, you can pour it in if you want a little bit of fizz, But it's just a really nice addition and it kind of takes it to the next level. So I'm going with Prosecco, but you can choose your sparkling wine of choice. Ideally something quite dry so that it kind of offsets the sweetness in the drink. So now we're going to give it a really good shake over ice to really kind of emulsify it. And whip up that pineapple juice for the creamy texture. We're going to find strain into a nice big coup glass and you can see it's got that really nice foamy texture. Without the need to add egg white aquafaba or any form of pure, we're going to garnish with our other shell of half passion fruit. And there we have a really delicious passion fruit forward. But also really well balanced porn star martini with vanilla coming through, a hint of bitterness, salt, just bringing it all together and that really lovely texture served alongside Prosecco. I think that's my favorite version of the porn star martini. So give that one a try, I'm really, really happy with it and, and enjoy. 49. COSMO: A Misunderstood Drink!: The cosmopolitan is actually a bit of a misunderstood cocktail. It isn't just that drink which is overly sweet, bright neon red and ordered 'cause people have seen it on sex in the city. Or at least it doesn't have to be. So today I'm going to show you my favorite version of this drink, which not only nods to the past and takes inspiration from something that is a precursor to the cosmo to really elevate the drink. But it also brings it up to date. It gives a really balanced drink, which isn't overly sweet and I think is really, really delicious. So let's make a cosmo. So when it comes to the origins of the cosmo, there are a few different schools of thought here. Some seem really definitive, some seem a little bit more murky and complex. But the general consensus seems to be that the drink, the cosmo, was originally created by a bartender called Toby Cecchini in the 1980s. But then it was really kind of refined, defined, and popularized by a bartender called Dal de Graff, who's one of the most famous bartenders of all time. And he really pushed it into the spotlight partly in the Rainbow Rooms in New York. But then the drinks spread all over the world. Really kind of defined in an era. So before this, there is actually other drink which we need to think about which was also called a Cosmopolitan, or a Cosmopolitan Daisy. And this drink was sort of similar in a way, but also different. And it included raspberry syrup, it had gin instead of vodka. And it wasn't quite the same drink, but it does bear some resemblance. So we need to kind of consider that when I make my cosmopolitans. I'd like to kind of reference the 1934 cosmopolitan by introducing something which I think really elevates the drink. Just a couple of raspberries, because we've got the really tar and dry flavor from the cranberry. Raspberries bring a really nice welcome, sweetness and juiciness. And these are the base of my cosmopolitan. It looks very simple, but two raspberries make a big difference. So these raspberries are obviously to replace the raspberry syrup in the 1934 cosmopolitan. And then around this, we're going to build a more familiar template, often kind of referred to as the classic Cosmopolitan. And it's going to be four ingredients and we're going to get 10203040 mils. First of all, the ten mill is going to be our citrus, which is going to be lime juice. We're going to add more citrus to this, whilst also bringing the sweetness in the form of Quantro 20 mills. I'm going to go 30 mils of cranberry juice. Historically, this will be ocean spray, which was a really popular brand. But you can use whichever brand you like. Ideally, something with a little bit more sweetness if you can, or what I even like to do here is actually add pomegranate juice, which is what this is because it has a little bit more roundness, a little bit less dry tartness. And I think it just rounds out the drink working really nicely with the raspberries. And then finally, as with most cocktails in the 1980s, we're going to have vodka as our base spirit so quickly to build the drink. Ten mills of our lime juice for our citrus. 20 mills of quantro, or your favorite orange liquor, which is also going to be our sweetener. 30 mills of cranberry juice or even pomegranate juice, if you feel alittle bit more fruity, 40 mills of a really good quality vodka. And you could choose a citrus vodka here if you like. But we are hitting a few citrus notes with the lime juice in the quanto. So I don't think it's a necessary step, although it does add a little bit more citrus to the drink if you like. And then there we have a really easy template for a Cosmo 10203040 Lime Quantro cranberry vodka. And what we're looking at here is essentially a riff on a sour. So we have the spirit, which is our bay spirit, which can be vodka. We have our acidity, which is our lime juice. We have a sweetener which is the orange liquor. And we're just going to lengthen that with a little bit of our cranberry or our pomegranate, which kind of bridges the acidity in the sweetness. So this is kind of a drink that does make sense, and these proportions really give you a nicely balanced drink. And then now we need to give this a good shake over ice. So you'll notice I haven't actually modeled the raspberries just because it's not necessary. The ice is going to really kind of mix into the drink really well, so don't bother wasting your time with that. So now we can find strain out our cosmo just to remove any flex of ice in there. And you can see it's got that really nice kind of pinky hue. It's not over the top. And we haven't added any sugar to this, so we're really getting a nicely refined, crisp, but also well balanced cosmo, which I think works really nicely. To finish the drink, we have an iconic garnish, which is going to be a flamed orange zest. And you just want to take a little coin from your orange. And then what we're going to do is just carefully light this over the drink and express it onto the liquid. Just very carefully burn the oil just to warm it through. And then when you're ready, zest rim the glass and you got that really nice orange citrus aroma. And then we have a delicious drink with a nod to the past in there as well, which I think really levels it up. Called a cosmopolitan. So enjoy my friends. 50. My Ultimate Easy ESPRESSO MARTINI Template!: I honestly couldn't make a 50 video course like this one featuring some of the most popular cocktails in the world without featuring a video on the one and only espresso martini. So if you've followed my channel for a while since before the Essential Cocktails course, you'll know I'm all about coffee and cocktails. And bring the two together in really interesting, creative ways. And I can't think of a more iconic example of this than the espresso Martini. So today what I'm going to do is show you the most simple, easy, effective, and delicious formula which you can take away, adapt, twist, and put your own spin on to make your own perfect espresso martini. And it's actually really, really easy to make. So without further ado, welcome to the final episode in this huge essential cocktails course, which I really hope you've enjoyed. We're going to make an espresso martini. So the espresso martini was created in the 1980s by one of the greatest and most influential bartenders of all time, **** Bradshal, at the request, supposedly, of a supermodel who asked for a drink to wake her up. And her up, if you want to delve much deeper into the history of the Espresso Martini and where it came from, I actually spent time with B. Bradsell, ****'s daughter in this video here, which you can click on to learn all about the story of the Espresso Martini and the truth behind its ingredients. So for this simple espresso martini, it's going to be a four ingredient drink with a few tips and tricks along the way. So first of all, we're going to need espresso, which can be freshly brewed, or you can even pick this up from a coffee shop if you don't have access to an espresso machine. And then we're going to add three ingredients to this to really focus in on the coffee. The first of which being a frozen spirit, which is in the freezer. I'm going with a frozen aged white rum. But you can choose your favorite spirit here. For sweetness, I'm going to go with a cane sugar syrup. I'm going with min, but you can use different sugar bases. You can use different flavored syrups and try different sugars. So again, a really simple starting point which you can adapt to your favorite flavor profile. And then finally, I'm going to go a little bit of our saline solution, our trusty old friend, one part salt, five parts of water, which are just going to bring those big flavors together and slightly reduce our perception of any bitterness in the drink. Just rounding it all out to make it really, really delicious. So into our shake in, we're going to start with our espresso, which I recommend brewing hot if you can, with 18 grams of coffee for a 40 gram yield. And there's much more content about the Espresso Martini on my channel. So if you're want to deep dive into any element of the Espresso Martini, there'll be a playlist at the end that you can click on. As you know, coffee can have a huge spectrum of flavors which you can explore. Everything from tropical fruit and really kind of ripe, deep fruit flavors, right through to tea like notes, delicate notes, florals, and then the more traditional kind of chocolate and nutty notes. All of these can be an espresso martini. You just need to kind of adapt the other ingredients to make sure that it's really celebrated and balanced Then to our hot espresso. Ideally, you want to choose a frozen spirit. And the reason for this is we don't want to over dilute the drink. So adding 40 Mls of our frozen aged white rum, which historically would be vodka. But I just think the rum brings a bit more depth and ties them with this really chocolatey coffee. So this is going to balance out the temperature. So obviously by using a hot espresso. If we were to shake this drink over ice without adding any cold ingredients, it dilute too quickly, we probably wouldn't get the same texture we're looking for. But by counterbalancing that temperature with our chilled spirit, it just brings down the temperature again to a more neutral temperature. Just like we would with shaking any other cocktail. So that's kind of a pro tip there. Freeze your spirits, change your spirits, shift into other categories. Vodka's obviously more classic choice. Things like brandy are really nice. Rum of course, really, really great. And there's flavor spectrums within these, which are so huge you can tie them in really nicely with the coffee. And then you need to balance this out. So I recommend going with 20 meals of a two to one sugar syrup of some kind. And all the syrups in the Monn range come to this level of sweetness. So you could use any modern syrup here. You can make your own flavored syrups, you can use different sugar bases. I've actually explored a whole range of sweetness in the course, which I'll link in the video above, just here. And then to finish this off, we're going to go with 1 gram of our saline solution. Just to really bring everything together nicely. I'm going to shake this, have lots of ice to really whip it altogether and get that nice, creamy texture, whilst also chilling it down and slightly dilute in the drink. As always, we're going to strain this into a chill glass and I actually like to find strain into this really nice coup glass and you can see it's got that really nice foamy texture. It's going to have loads of body, loads of really nice coffee character coming through being surrounded by the other ingredients in the drink. And this is an absolute winner. So there we have one of my favorite cocktails in the world, which is going to be an espresso martini. Cheers everybody. This drink is a perfect example of bringing really good quality coffee, really good quality cocktails, pushing the two together and creating something even more delicious. And that's something I'm really, really passionate about. Throughout this course, we've learned huge amount of information. Hopefully a lot of it's been valuable to you. I've really enjoyed sharing it with you. So if you want to level up your coffee, your cocktails, or even your coffee cocktails, it'd be amazing if you could subscribe to the channel where hopefully we'll get lots more information about both those categories and how to combine them. And I'll put a couple of playlists here. This one all about variations on the espresso martini, of which there are many. So finally, thank you once again for watching from the bottom of my heart. I really appreciate it and I really hope this course, the central cocktails, as well as the rest of the channel, will help you make better drinks, which is what it's all about. So I'll see in the next video. Cheers everyone.