Cocktail Questions: Focusing Your Cocktail Journey

It’s been too long. Let’s catch up on another Cocktail Question.

In this edition:

• A class-and-family guide to cocktail recipes?

Do you have a question about cocktails, bars, booze, home bartending, or something else related to the topics discussed in this newsletter? Send your pithy, clear question to me at cocktailswithsuderman@gmail.com

Focusing Your Cocktail Journey

Help, I need some focus in my cocktail journey! I’ve subscribed to your newsletter from the beginning (enjoy it immensely; thank you!), and I now have access to a vast library of cocktail wisdom and large dogs. But I’m all over the map! The recipes are so wonderful, I get distracted along the way. I would love to be able to progressively master (that’s an overstatement) cocktails in each major family.

Would you consider publishing a guide to your recipes (original and linked), by family, in increasing order of difficulty? This would help us easily distracted newbs feel like we’re levelling up our cocktail game as we unlock each achievement.

P.S. thanks for badgering me into trying Cynar, it’s now my favorite.

Cameron

Thank you so much for subscribing, Cameron. Glad you like the Cynar. There will be more coming very soon.

This is the sort of request I receive throughout the year: Is there some sort of centralized, patterned-and-searchable way to order, organize, and access all the recipes in this newsletter?

Currently, there is not. But I am aware that there is demand for this sort of overview product. And I’d very much like to fulfill it at some point. A guide organized around cocktail families and progressions is a good idea.

The thing is that organizing the hundreds of recipes in this newsletter—or even a large portion of them—essentially amounts to putting together a book, or publishing an app, or at the very least spending a long time messing with infographics and spreadsheets.

And I have a long-running, highly idiosyncratic, deeply personal dispute with spreadsheets. I understand that they are useful tools for organizing information, and I know that much of our world is built on quality data organization. But I am quite averse to maintaining spreadsheets myself. I’d rather drink vodka, with expired sour mix. It’s a personal problem.

I agree, however, that some sort of organizational system and tool would be a good idea. And a book, in particular, is something that appeals to me. I enjoy cocktail books almost as much as cocktails themselves, and wouldn’t mind making my own contribution to the genre. But books do take time to package and produce.

Cocktail Families, Cocktail Books, Cocktail Flowcharts

I realize that, in the interim, this is not helpful. So let me make some suggestions that you can use right now.

First, if you’re looking for an existing, at-a-glance, visual guide to cocktail families and their iterations, there are existing options.

My favorite comes from the folks at VinePair. It’s an infographic that lays out the six root drinks in Death & Co.’s Cocktail Codex in the form of an infographic that shows the relationship between those drinks and their various iterations. I have this in poster form on a wall near my bar, and guests tend to enjoy examining it, since it usually provides some context for whatever they are drinking.

Second, if you want to see cocktail relationships in book form, you already have some excellent options:

• Cocktail Codex is probably the most sophisticated recent attempt to develop a Unified Theory of Cocktails.

• David Embury’s Fine Art of Mixing Drinks also attempts a similar sort of classification system.

• Somewhere in between the two, there’s Gary Regan’s Joy of Mixology, which does a great job of establishing and organizing cocktail families. He even organizes drinks by ingredient, laid out on a spreadsheet—no vodka Martini required.

More Ways to Focus

If you’re looking for a focusing strategy, let me suggest picking one simple drink and making it your drink of the month, or even your drink of the season.

Spend May or June, just for example, making Margaritas. Start by making a Margarita—just a plain old Margarita, and then adjusting both the specs and the preparation until it’s perfect. Play with small changes to the underlying structure, adding a little more tequila or a little less lime, shaking a little longer or with different sizes of ice. You want to make good drinks, but in the process, you should also want to make some mistakes, learning how small adjustments to recipe or technique change a drink. Once you’ve mastered a basic version of the drink, move on to variations—spicy Margaritas, batched Margaritas, or batched spicy Margaritas. You can proceed however you like, but the key is to start with the basic form, learn its ins and outs, and then expand to more complex iterations.

Finally, I would just note that although I don’t typically make it explicit, this newsletter is itself organized in a way that I hope provides at least some of this guidance. I think of each year as a series of about 10-15 units organized around a drink family, an ingredient, and/or seasonality.

So early in the year, when it’s cold, there are Manhattans, and then as it warms up, there are Martinis, and once we move into late spring and summer there are lighter shaken drinks—Margaritas, Daiquiris, and various gin sours—and during the dog days of summer we look at easy-drinking highballs and juicy tiki drinks. These units don’t always take a straightforward progression from simplest to most complex, but I do hope that spending a few weeks at a time on a cocktail style or a specific ingredient (like Cocchi Americano) helps readers understand the relationships between these drinks. It’s obviously not comprehensive. But until I have time to produce a book, an app, or (shudder) a spreadsheet, it might provide some focus.

Huckleberry Is Focusing on Learning How to Make Friends at the Dog Park

This week was his first visit. He’s still a little unsure of himself, but he’s planning to be a regular.