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All too often I am served drinks by bartenders who have decided to ignore the basic principles of good drinks making. I am sure that in many cases it is not the fault of the bartender, more instead the fault of the bar due to a lack, or quality of training.
Knowing the recipe is obviously important for good drinks making, but that alone does not ensure quality drinks time after time. In fact learning the recipe is the least important and simplest part of making any drink. Of course, knowing your recipes is essential for good commercial bartending, my point here however is not speed of service, but quality of drinks production. When you understand the fundamentals of good drinks making it should make no difference whether you know the drink off by heart or if you are reading it for the first time, you understand what makes a good drink. So what exactly prompts this line of conversation? Well for the most part recently it has been the use, or should I say ‘misuse’ of sugar in cocktails. This, it would seem, is due to the fact that the bartender is simply following a recipe rather than understanding how or why the drink should work, and therefore the importance of each ingredient in that recipe and how it interacts with the other ingredients in the recipe. Therefore I cannot continue without mentioning the most important, fundamental theory in good drinks making - Balance. It is an incredibly simply concept, and yet it is one that seems to be missed in training so often if you take the final drink as the fruit of any training that was given. For those who haven’t a clue what I am talking about I will give a brief explanation:
In most cocktails, classics especially, you can break the ingredients of that cocktail down into four basic elements, or ‘building blocks’. They are ‘strong’, ‘weak’, ‘tart’ and ‘sweet’. When a drink is in ‘Balance’ each of these elements will cancel its opposite out. ‘So you taste nothing?’ No, you taste everything. If the drink is out of balance, it means that one of the elements is overpowering the rest of the flavours in the drink, therefore all you taste is that one element, thus making the drink taste too tart, sweet, weak etc… A very simple example of this is the Daiquiri. Fresh lime juice = tart, sugar syrup = sweet, rum = strong and the ice it is shaken with will give the small amount of water to make up the weak. This then brings me back to my gripe about the way sugar is used in cocktails. If the bartender had been taught this simple theory, when he or she made, for example, a caipirinha then they would ensure that all the sugar had dissolved into the drink because they would understand the massive importance of this simple ingredient, rather than letting it sit at the bottom of the drink. Making the first three quarters of the drink lip puckeringly sour whilst the bottom quarter of the drink is tooth rottingly sweet. However I must steer away from blaming the bartender, for I am sure that the blame sits with the bar owner/manager, in the first case for making the recipe with large brown sugar cubes, which seem to be appearing in ever drink these days. And in the second case, for not ensuring that his or her staff have had sufficient training to be able to make good drinks. Unless crushed to a fine powder, which inevitably they are not, these sugar cubes break up and sit lurking at the bottom of your drink.
So when it comes to using sugar as opposed to sugar syrup, and there are times where I think only sugar will do. You must ask yourself the question, ‘how can I ensure that this drink is made right every time?’ Well firstly train your bartenders to understand balance, then hopefully they can think for themselves, understand the recipe and ensure that the ingredients are handled properly. Secondly, do not specify sugar that is not going to dissolve in a cold liquid. We could talk on about the correct shaking, stirring, handling of ice etc… all of which will contribute to the quality, or lack of quality of a drink. However, that is for another day. So if you own or run a bar, your bartenders may know all their cocktails, but how often do they, make a good drink? |
