A Cocktail Time-Saver for Your Next Party
Photo: William Hereford
Making individual cocktails for people, one at a time, is an awful way to spend a dinner party. For entertaining large crowds, we fully support the practice of batching cocktails: premixing them to the extent possible a few hours ahead of time (or even the night before), then chilling the batch and making individual cocktails to order.
Most of batching involves simple math: Take a cocktail recipe, convert ounces to cups (or quarts or even gallons if serving a big crowd), mix, and chill. But there are a few rules of thumb to follow:
Proportions: If you’re preparing up to five drinks at a time, the balance won’t change dramatically and you can get away with simply multiplying the recipe. But when batching more than five drinks at a time, a funny thing happens with citrus and other acidic ingredients, the sweeteners, and especially the bitters: their effect on the cocktail is enhanced. So you need to use less of these ingredients, by proportion, than in the base recipe. Start with about half the amount called for when you multiply the recipe, then add more to taste.
Dilution: Don’t forget that roughly 25 percent of a cocktail is water. If you’re mixing ahead of time and refrigerating the batch, dilute it to taste with water just before serving, keeping in mind that any additional dilution might occur if you’re serving it over ice. A batch of stirred, boozy drinks can be diluted ahead of time and stored in the freezer; the alcohol will keep it from freezing. Shaken drinks should be batched without any added water and shaken with ice to order.
Bubbles: Any cocktail that gets topped with champagne or another sparking beverage is great for batching. Prepare the batch ahead of time without the bubbly ingredient, then add it just before you serve the cocktail to brighten it up.
Excerpted from Death & Co by David Kaplan, Alex Day, and Nick Fauchald, copyright (c) 2014. Published by Ten Speed Press, a division of Penguin Random House, Inc.
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