I have a friend who hated negronis until I made her one with a little extra gin. And a coworker who never drank martinis until he tried a Fifty-Fifty, and swiftly became obsessed. Which is to say, it’s worth your time to play around with classic cocktails at home, because there could be a version you adore right around the corner.
But maybe you’re ready to take your home drink-making toward Cocktail 201, where the drinks are a little more surprising, more bold, more funky, more quirky. Maybe you love Negronis but you have an oddball Italian amaro or a new bottle of mezcal you’d like to try. Maybe you bought some exciting new spices or you went to the farmers’ market and you want to make something a little more seasonally appropriate. Maybe you just want a drink to call your own.
If that’s the case, maybe you should keep reading.
Get to Know the Drink First
When I asked my longtime bar mentor, Michael Neff, who’s currently the bar director at Cottonmouth Club in Houston, how people at home can start to make their own variations on classic cocktails, he started with a warning: “Don’t make a riff on a drink you don’t understand.” If you want to play around with the Old Fashioned, or the Margarita, or the Manhattan, he said, don’t get weird right away.
So that’s the first step. Invite a few friends over, declare a drink of the night, and have them bring a bottle—if you’re making Negronis, they can each contribute a different gin; if you’re doing Old Fashioneds, ask them to bring whiskey. As you drink the Negronis or Old Fashioneds, you’ll start to develop preferences—I like my Old Fashioneds with rye, for example, or I like my Negronis with gins that have a real prominent juniper side. Try a Manhattan with Dolin Rouge and another with Carpano Antica. Try that locally-made vermouth, too. The differences may seem subtle at first, but making just one small change at a time trains your brain to tune in and have an opinion.
Now you can begin to zero in on your preferred recipe. You might find that you like many classic cocktails with a slight adjustment to the ratio, and while this is jumping ahead a bit, you may find that small changes can help you enjoy classic drinks without tweaking anything else. Many folks, for example, make their Negronis with an extra bit of gin, which lets the juniper-laced spirit shine and calms down the drink’s sweet and bitter side.
Keep in mind that each drink will change, too, depending on your exact ingredients: all gins don’t have the same punch, all vermouths don’t have the same sweetness and richness, and once you start playing around with substitutions for Campari, you’re really moving into an entirely new riff. Your favorite proportions may differ a little depending on which bottles you reach for.
And now, buckle up, because those little variations are just the beginning.
How to Start Riffing on Any Cocktail Recipe
I get into specific recipes that riff on classic cocktails over here, but first, let’s get familiar with five common techniques that you can try on your own.
Changing and twisting cocktail recipes too far can give you bad drinks. But there’s a hierarchy of danger. The safest adjustment is to add a delicate flavor from herbs, chiles, spices, or bitters.
Start with a baseline recipe for, say, a Margarita. Shake it with basil or cilantro or even peppery arugula from your garden. Shake it with a slice of muddled jalapeño or a few slices of cucumber. Try some muddled cardamom pods. You can’t go too far wrong. A small pinch of cumin or garam masala or ginger or turmeric will all work fine in a shaken drink, where the citrus keeps things bright and balanced.
In stirred drinks, you can play with warm, sweet spices—stir it with a split vanilla pod! Throw a cinnamon stick in a mason jar of whiskey and let it sit overnight!—but it’s easiest to call in bitters. You might find you still like Angostura the best in a Manhattan or Old Fashioned, but there’s a world of aromatic bitters to try, and at least five different good options for chocolate bitters.
Don’t fuss with syrups just yet. “If you want to put new sweet stuff into a cocktail,” Neff reminds us, “then something has to come out.” In other words, tread carefully when it comes to anything “that’s going to disturb the equilibrium of spirit, sugar, sour, bitter.”
And yet, this is a move that often works: Take a cocktail recipe and turn it upside-down. Maybe you’ve always had martinis that were 3 parts gin and 1 part vermouth. Try 3 parts vermouth instead, and just 1 part gin. (Has your bottle of vermouth been open for more than a month? Probably better to crack open a new one.) Try reversing your Manhattan, too.
Ever heard of a Kir Royale? While an everyday Kir uses still white wine and creme de cassis, the royal version is made with bubbly. That’s the whole trick, and almost any drink can benefit from a little added fizz. Try bubbling up your Sidecar, your Manhattan, even your Mint Julep. (It’s been known to work on tiki drinks, too.) Whatever recipe you’re working with, I’d recommend getting the chilled sparkling wine in the glass first—2 or 3 ounces will do it—so that it doesn’t sit on top while you sip. The rest of your cocktail ingredients are heavier, so they’ll sink through, automatically mixing into the drink if you add them last. You’ll want them properly chilled and diluted, so stir or shake with ice as you normally would, then add the mixed cocktail to your bubbles.
This is the big one that every home drink-maker should know, which comes to us thanks to bartender Phil Ward, formerly of Manhattan’s Mayahuel and Death & Company, now often seen shaking drinks at Long Island Bar in Brooklyn. Ward is perhaps the most prolific cocktail riffer we’ve got. (You can read about a few of his excellent drinks over here—riffs that have become so popular that many, many other riffers have riffed on them.) Ward’s signature technique is called Mr. Potato Head, after the popular toy, and the idea is pretty much the same as plugging a new nose or mouth on that jolly plastic tuber: Take a classic drink recipe and change one element out for another that’s more or less in the same category. That means spirit for spirit (swap your whiskey for tequila) or sour for sour (swap your lemon for lime). Try subbing one amaro for another, as long as they’re just about equally sweet. Sometimes small adjustments are needed later, especially as you get into sweeter elements of the drink, but generally speaking, Sir Potato won’t fail you.
Now we’re really getting into Cocktail 201. The Split deepens the complexity of a drink’s flavors by using two spirits where originally there was just one.
Here’s how it works: Take one (or more!) of the measurements in your recipe and divide it in half. You could keep one half true to what the recipe calls for (say, tequila), and replace the other half with something different (say, mezcal). Or go further, splitting your booze between two entirely new spirits. (For example, replacing an ounce of whiskey with a half-ounce each of cognac and high-proof apple brandy, or rum and mezcal.) In a vermouth-heavy cocktail, use a 50-50 blend of two vermouths instead of one—the flavor will be more well-rounded than it was before.
You don’t even have to keep the split even; you could use, say, 1 ½ parts rye and ½ part smoky Scotch, like we did in this modified Boulevardier. Things can get muddied if you slice your measurements too thin, but starting with a two- or three- part split will give your drinks the kind of intrigue that your home bar’s been missing.
