The Best Cocktail Mixers to Mix With All That Booze You're Putting Out at Your Party
As we young-ish people make our way into full-on adulthood, our celebrations change: kegs are replaced by fridges full of craft beer; weird containers of whiskey are replaced by nice bottles of whiskey. Snacks evolve past bags of chips (or, at the very least, chips are dumped into serving vessels more aesthetically pleasing than their original packaging). Probably nobody is puking. Someone will bring a case of La Croix. But when it comes to serving liquor, your choices are often “make cocktails for 50 people” or just “put out the good liquor and let people do what they want with it”. The former requires a lot of frankly annoying work on the part of the host; the latter often ends with someone saying “I guess…..we need some orange juice?”
Mixers, as a category, are cursed by their straightforwardness: most of us just assume our options are a liter of Coca-Cola, perhaps a liter of Diet Coke, and whatever juice our local grocery store has, plus some seltzer and some tonic. Maybe a few slices of lemon if our guests are lucky. These choices can often feel regressive, particularly if you’re mixing them with fancy booze.
If you want to level up your cocktail mixers, skip the pre-bottled stuff sold at your local froo-froo grocery store and head to a juice bar instead. “Fresh juice is something that always really quenches the palate,” says Yana Volfson, beverage director at Atla, an ultra-hip all-day Mexican café in Manhattan. When considering mixers, Volfson says, juice should be your first move. “Fresh pineapple juice or fresh apple juice are great, plus club soda and bitters—those are nice things to have laying around if you want to add a special touch” to your spread of liquor. Consider the booze that you’ll be serving—do you have mostly dark liquor or clear spirits?—and purchase accordingly. Pineapple juice goes great with rum; citrusy things like blood orange are good when mixed with whiskey and soda water; vodka and gin love light, refreshing juices like lemon and lime.
If you want to go one step further, Volfson says, “Batch out an agua fresca or fruit punch made out of fresh juices—think of designing more of a nonalcoholic option and then adding alcohol to that.” You could go the classic watermelon route, but Volfson encourages a little more experimentation: for clear spirits, she likes jasmine-infused cucumber juice (try blending some cucumbers into water, straining it, then blooming some jasmine green tea in there ‘til it tastes good.) For brown spirits, she likes a mix of blood orange and pomegranate. And if you want to get really high-level DIY, set up a station for infusing and garnishing drinks. Things like cucumber slices, pink peppercorns, juniper berries, allspice, and dried chamomile will infuse their flavor into a drink in seconds; laying out a wide range of citrus with paring knives and peelers will let people add a spritz of juice or a twist of peel on top of the drink they’re building. All this means more creative freedom for your guests, and less stress for you, the gracious host.
If you want to put out a restaurant-level agua fresca that’s equally appropriate for spiking with booze, drinking straight, or splashing into seltzer, follow this recipe from Volfson: mix 3 parts blood orange juice and 1 part water, and infuse for an hour with a pinch of dehydrated licorice, 6 cloves, and 4 dried chilis de árbol. Then put out whatever brown liquor you’ve got, and call it a party.
