Batch, Bottle, and Freeze Your Negroni

An infinitely scalable, batched version of your favorite bittersweet cocktail. It's the BBF Negroni!

Negronis are incredibly easy to make. Just three ingredients! Three pours! Stir over ice, strain into a glass (over ice), then twist an orange peel over the top. Making one takes a minute, tops.

But you can make them even easier, by batching, bottling, and chilling them in a freezer for a few hours before you want to serve them. 

This produces an extra-chilly Negroni, and it’s a good way to make a lot of high-quality versions of the drink quickly.

Since it’s Negroni Week, that’s what we’re going to do.

Some cocktails—especially those involving juice or milk or other ingredients that spoil easily—are difficult to batch well. 

Cocktails like the Manhattan that use dasher-bottle bitters—think Angostura Aromatic or Regan’s orange—can be batched and bottled but sometimes need to be adjusted to account for the way that dasher-bottle bitters take over larger batches. 

Negronis, however, scale infinitely without any tweaks or modifications to the underlying ratio. All you have to do to make a batch is to apply the same multiplier to each ingredient. 

If you’re using an equal parts construction, with a single ounce for each ingredient, a 10x modifier leaves you with 10 ounces of each ingredient. 

If you’re using the 4:3:3 ratio I suggested earlier this week, a 10x construction leaves you with 10 ounces of gin and 7.5 ounces each of sweet vermouth and Campari. Just bottle the mix and put it in the freezer.

Making a batch really is that simple. 

Water of Life

Well. Almost that simple. 

There is one additional element: You also need to consider dilution—the added water that normally comes from stirring a drink over ice. Nearly every cocktail needs dilution.

Water smooths out the rough edges of boozy spirits, and it helps bring the elements together in harmony. In musical recording terms, you can think of dilution as a form of mastering—a final, overall adjustment to the character of the drink after the main mix has been set.

On the one hand, you can just dilute each drink as you serve it, pouring a few ounces from your batched bottle and then stirring a little bit as you normally would.

But that takes time. And part of the point of batching is to save time. That’s why I recommend pre-diluting the entire batch.  

There are significant disagreements within the cocktail community about exactly how much to dilute batched drinks. 

But for Negroni-class drinks that are intended to be served over ice, I prefer a fairly light dilution—just ⅓ of an ounce per single drink equivalent. So that 10x batch we discussed earlier would have 3 ⅓ ounces of water in the mix. 

The upsides to this preparation method are numerous.

• First, you don’t have to mix individual drinks on demand for your guests. Indeed, if you want, you can even have your guests pour their own drinks straight from the bottle.

• Second, batched drinks are much more consistent than individually prepared drinks; it’s all coming from the same mix, so every drink will taste exactly the same. (Relatedly, this means you can use very small tweaks to fine-tune the mix in a way that’s even more precise than a single-serve drink.)

• Finally, chilling a batched cocktail in the freezer for several hours will produce a drink that is colder than you’re likely to achieve via a conventional stir. 

For quick batches, I like to use emptied and cleaned Rittenhouse rye bottles. They’re a nice, basic, easy-to-grip shape, and they come with a plastic screwtop that works well for freezer storage. Just make sure to wash the bottle before you use it. (You can also use empty bottles of Old Grand-Dad and Old Overholt, both of which have screwtops and a similar shape.) 

The old Rittenhouse bottles are 750ml, which translates to 25.3 ounces. So we’ll use an 8x multiplier on our 4:3:3 drink to create a batch that definitely fits within those constraints: 

• ¾ ounce Campari x 8 = 6 ounces 

• ¾ ounce Cocchi di Torino sweet vermouth x 8 = 6 ounces

• 1 ounce Ford’s gin x 8 = 8 ounces

• ⅓ ounce water x 8 = 2 ⅔ ounces water 

This gives us a 22 ⅔ ounce recipe for a Batched, Bottled, Frozen (BBF) Negroni — like so: 

BBF Negroni  

• 6 ounces Campari

• 6 ounce Cocchi di Torino sweet vermouth

• 8 ounces London dry gin (preferably Ford’s) 

• 2 ⅔ ounces water

INSTRUCTIONS 

1. Combine all ingredients in a glass bottle with a sealable top. 

2. Close off the top, then store bottled Negroni in the freezer three to six hours before serving. 

3. To serve, pour into a rocks glass over a single large piece of ice. 

4. Garnish with an orange peel. 

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