Cocktail Secrets

With summer officially here, blended drinks - also known as frozen drinks - are just the thing to cool you off on a hot summer afternoon. But the trick with blended drinks is that you have to get the balance of ice and liquid ingredients just right. Too much liquid ingredients and you get a runny drink that won’t stay cold for long. Too much ice and you’ll have to spoon your drink out of the glass.

To blend the drink properly, start out with what the recipe recommends. For the best results, use store bought crushed ice or mini ice cubes. Once you’ve blended it, try sloshing it around. If it’s moving too freely, like a big pitcher of water with a few bits of floating ice, then you need to add more ice and blend it again. If you try sloshing it around or pouring it and it’s one big frozen ice ball, you’ve added too much ice and you’ll need to add some liquid ingredients. Try to use to the same proportions the recipe calls for so that you don’t inadvertently throw off the flavor.

A perfectly blended drink is consistently icy - no liquid parts - yet it still moves very much like liquid. You can easily pour it from the pitcher to the glass and it can be drank easily with the first pull on the straw.

If your blended creation still has chunks of ice too big to go up a straw after 45 seconds or more of blending, then it’s likely you have a problem with your blender and you may want to invest in a new one. Cheap blenders are notorious for not being able to blend ice to a silky smooth consistency. For quality blender than can blend almost anything, check out Will It Blend. The videos of the things they blend from cans of coke (still in the can) to iPods to tiki torches is not to be missed!

The Webtender, which you can find at www.webtender.com has been online for 12 years now, going all the way back to 1995. It’s a huge database, featuring over 6000 cocktail recipes from nearly 4000 contributors!

On the positive side there are a lot of recipes to choose from and you can search or browse in many different ways. For example you can browse by name of the cocktail or by an ingredient in the cocktail or by category or even by the glass the cocktail is served in. You can also search directly for specific cocktail or ingredient. But perhaps the best way to find cocktails you can make is to use the “In My Bar” feature to tell Webtender what ingredients you have on hand and it’ll give you a list of cocktail you can make.

You’ll also find resources on how to become a bartender, a forum to ask questions and interact with the bartending community as well as fun little items like a drinking games.

On the negative side, as I mentioned Webtender went online in 1995 and it still looks very much the as it did a decade ago. You’ll find an unattractive gray background and a no frills experience. Pop-ups and banner ads still assault the eyes. But somewhat more problematic than the ugliness is that the database doesn’t have any quality controls. Anyone can submit a cocktail and it might be correct and it might not be. Often you’ll find multiple versions of many recipes and it’s left to you to decide which one to try.

While it does have it’s flaws, the Webtender is still a valuable resource and can help you find cocktails to mix. The “In My Bar” feature is quite useful, but you’ll have to wade through over 400 ingredients and maintain your list as you add new ones and use up old ones.

Mixology has its own language which can be confusing if you’re reading a recipe and it wants you to float a splash of this or add a dash of that. So here’s the skinny on these bartending terms.

Dash: This is the tiniest common recipe measurement. It’s generally considered to be equivalent to 1/32 oz. However most measuring devices don’t measure that small of a quantity. Basically just a few drops is all you need for a dash. Be sure not to confuse dash with its big brother, splash. A splash is over eight times as much!

Splash: A splash is an imprecise measurement left to the discretion of the mixologist (that’s you!). It is quite a bit more than a dash, but generally considered to be less than 1/2 oz. 1/4 oz. is a safe amount to splash.

Float: This is when you hold your breath and lie on your back in the water, this is opposed to a floatie, which is something floating in your drink that is not supposed to be there. All right, really, a float is a final ingredient poured carefully on top of the other ingredients of a drink. Usually the other ingredients will have been shaken or already stirred before you pour your float because floating is the last step before completing your cocktail with garnishment. Depending on the ingredient, and how carefully you want it floated, you can just pour the ingredient in slowly; or you can pour it over the back of a spoon, or down the handle of a barspoon.

I’ve had more bad Long Island Ice Teas than I’ve had good ones. And that’s somewhat understandable. The Long Island Ice Tea is a very challenging cocktail to mix correctly. With 5 different liquors (rum, vodka, gin, tequila and triple sec) and a host of different manufacturers for each liquor there’s 9,757,237,539 different combinations of Long Island Iced Tea possible!

Given all of this, I wasn’t expecting too much from Desert Island’s pre made cocktail mix. It’s just too easy to screw up a Long Island Iced Tea. But when expectations are low, that’s when you get the most surprises. And you guessed it - Desert Island is quite decent. So much so that many of the bars where I’ve ordered a Long Island Iced Tea should quietly pick up a bottle of Desert Island and stop embarrassing themselves.

In addition to the bottle of Desert Island, you’ll need to pick up some Sweet & Sour mix and some Coke. The recommended recipe is 2 oz of Desert Island Long Island Iced Tea Mix, 4 oz of Sweet & Sour mix and 2 oz of Coke. It’s a decent starting point, but do experiment. I personally found 3 oz of Desert Island, 3 oz of Sweet & Sour and 1 oz of Coke to better suit my tastes. Your milage may very, but feel free to experiment.

Feel free to try Desert Island Long Island Iced Tea Mix by itself over ice. It’s actually quite good all on it’s own. With summer time fun just around the corner, this is one cocktail mix you should have in your cabinet. The cocktails are quick to make and have an enjoyable taste and pack a respectable bit of alcoholic punch.