A Note on Cocktailing

When grabbing shakers and glasses for building cocktails, dilution is something to keep in mind.  Jim Meehan’s Bartender Manual clearly lays out what you need to consider.

Ultimately, dilution has the potential to alter the flavor of your recipe-the added water brings down the ABV of the mixture, and also reduces the perceptible sweetness of syrups, fortified wines, and liqueurs.  In Liquid Intelligence, Dave Arnold adds that “our perception of sweetness is radically dulled by cold”; for sweet drinks like the Negroni, this can mean that dilution makes drinks more palatable.  And remember, the colder (or hotter) a drink is, the less you can taste it, so chilling a drink to be as cold as possible isn’t necessarily your ultimate goal.

Drink recipes you encounter behind the bar include a set amount of ingredients that go into them.  But the amount of dilution for them is completely up to you.