Blog 135

Ben

Ben, is a director of Bar135 in Bristol.

Introduction to Home Mixing

Why do people cook at home and not make cocktails at home?  Everyone uses the internet nowadays to look up recipes for their dinner but very few look up cocktail recipes to make at home.

I think there are two key differences between cooking and making cocktails that discourage people from trying it at home:

1. You have to cook most nights (when you’re not treating yourself to a takeaway or a restaurant dinner).  You don’t have to make cocktails every night.
2. No matter what ingredients you have, you can pretty much always make something to eat, albeit maybe not the best meal you’ll ever cook.  Whereas with cocktails you can’t make them because you often don’t have the ingredients.

These two differences are very much correlated.  In fact point 1 is possibly the cause of point 2.  Imagine if you made cocktails as regularly as you made food?  The knowledge you possess that you take for granted about food, you would also have for cocktails.  So does this mean that it is possible to whip up a cocktail out of random ingredients you have in your kitchen like you would a meal?

In this line of blogs I am going to try and offer up some recipes made up from ingredients that might just be lying around your kitchen and so you could potentially make at home without having to run out to get ingredients.  Obviously I don’t know what is in people’s kitchens so I have decided to stick to one rule and one assumption:

1. Avoid the use of perishables that aren’t used in regular cooking.  For example, limes go off fairly quickly and aren’t used too regularly in cooking, whereas I would consider cucumber as something that might be lying around your kitchen
2. Assume that every kitchen has a bottle of spirit and access to at least one tray of ice cubes as without this I can’t make a cocktail!