Cocktail Inspiration 101
In our travels to find the best place for us to retire abroad, we enjoy sampling the food and drink that each locale has to offer. I’m no mixologist, but we have found several cocktail inspirations over the years. Cocktails are fun because they’re like an adult chemistry set…add a little of this, a bit of that, and Bob’s your uncle. I’m not a good recipe follower and I look at them as rough guidelines to get to the end result. However, the best food and the best cocktails find the perfect balance between salt, fat, acid, sweet, and bitter.
If you read any historical cocktail book, they typically divide cocktails into larger categorizations or families of drinks. I don’t claim to be a cocktail historian, but generally you find the old school drinks that contain a “strong” (i.e. the alcohol), some added flavor (like bitters), and some type of classy looking garnish. A fine example of this would be the classic Old Fashioned. Next, you see the sour family (which is long and distinguished), the spritzes, duos, trios, hot, beers, you get the picture. Serious Eats has a great blog article on this and you can find it here.
The best food and the best cocktails find the perfect balance between salt, fat, acid, sweet, and bitter.
A Happy Traveler
Ratios For Simple Creation
I’m a simpleton when it comes to cocktail experimentation, but I’ve had a few realizations after mixing a few of these. Most cocktails (at least the sour family), are a pretty solid and consistent ratio of spirit, sour, and sweet. For any type of sour (I’m a big fan of whiskey sours and you can find my recipe here), I use a 2:1:1 ratio. Two parts spirit, one part sour, and one part sweet. For spritzes, which we love in the summer as it reminds us of our Italian trips, I use a 3:2:1. Three parts prosecco, two parts spirit (like Aperol), and one part sparkling water. That’s it. You can make two dozen cocktails with those ratios and experiment up or down on each part to suit your own palate.
A flower by Any other name
Some of the best cocktails we’ve experienced come from the sour family. There are many variations of the them and some of them even have subcategories. The Cocktail Monkey has a great write-up on the Daisy cocktail. Basically, the daisy is a 3:1 ratio of spirit to liqueur. It just so happens that ratio works well with a variety of spirits, but we are big fans of Mexico, and tequila reigns supreme there. The liqueur commonly used is Cointreau which is an orange liqueur, with a generic brand found in Mexico called “Controy.” Want a simple margarita?…use 1.5 oz of a good tequila, .5 ounces of Cointreau (there’s that magic 3:1), add lime juice and a bit of simple sugar and BOOM, a quick margarita. Fun fact: Margarita translated to English is…you guessed it…DAISY!
