all things mixed up
Bad drinks are easy to find, but truly memorable disasters are few and far between. Here are cocktails that go beyond “poorly conceived” and cross squarely over into Hindenburg territory. Utilizing a combination of bad planning and wildly misplaced enthusiasm, we concocted each of these top 3 liquid attrocities:
Photos and recipes along with Kate Carter’s interview with designer Tony Conigliaro, the bartender applying the techniques of molecular gastronomy to cocktails. Unbelievable.
he first mention of a cocktail was somewhere around 1800. Ever since then, the cocktail has gone through various changes and today bartenders use all kinds of ingredients to serve the most fascinating mixtures. Online there is a wide range of cocktail recipes, with or without alcohol, satisfying the tastes and preferences of every Internet user.
This is perhaps the most famous party cocktail of all, and probably the best tequila cocktail ever made. Appealing, fresh, and vibrant, the Margarita is perfectly balanced. The taste of the tequila is tempered by the other ingredients, so that the hit is not of alcohol, but of something much more delicious and complex. The effect is boosted by the salt on the rim of the glass, which reinforces the flavours of the cocktail as you sip, and takes away the sharpness of lime, leaving only a thirst-quenching citrus taste.
For a long time, the unspoken rule of drinking has been to avoid anything your grandparents might have drunk. The Brandy Alexander and the Pink Gin lost their place on the menu to Sex on the Beach or other absurdly named (and, frankly, foul-tasting) concoctions.
Create your own cocktail and try for a high score in bartenderific games before your try your skills on real liquor and real thirsty folks.
The Caipirinha is Brazil’s national cocktail. And the land of buxom brunettes, itsy-bitsy bikinis and unbridled sexcapades can’t be wrong.
Philosophically, there are two ways to think about the oxymoronic but generally attractive idea of a healthy cocktail. You can be conservative and go for something that attempts to minimize the harm — something like what General Jack D. Ripper drinks in Dr. Strangelove, a mixture of “grain alcohol and rainwater.” The other approach is to see that your drink supplements the C2H5OH (pure alcohol) with an array of other beneficial organic compounds. Who knew drinking cocktails could be so good for you?
This great chart will come in extremely handy whenever you have to calculate amounts of alcohol - it’s millilitres, oz and so on, check it out - great for every European barkeeper who’s not used to anglo-american measurements.
In Columbus, Ohio, McCormick & Schmick’s restaurant is testing a new list of historic cocktails ranging from the Basil Grape Smash to the Hemingway Daquiri and they are a rediscovered treasure. If you like to drink, this is killer.