Recipe

• 2 parts Passoã

• 1 part Galliano (or maybe sambuca)

• 1 part lime juice

Shake together with ice, strain into a cocktail glass, and add two chunks of melon as a garnish.

I made this one up, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.  The famous Pornstar Martini pairs Passoã with vanilla, and while I wasn't pleased with my attempt, I figured there was something in the idea.  Enter Galliano, the liqueur I've been enjoying so much recently (see Yellow Bird and Barracuda), which has a noticeable vanilla aroma along with its main flavour of anise.  Using this as the "sweet" part of a three-ingredient sour cocktail, and going easy on the Passoã to avoid overpowering the whole thing, we arrive at the recipe above.  We were having melon for pudding, and I thought it'd go nicely.

The whole thing came together beautifully!  The flavours balance each other pretty well, resulting in a nice fruity drink, with lime to stop it getting sickly, and subtle anise to give it some depth and make it more interesting. The cool, gentle sweetness of the melon counters the tangy passion fruit and lime nicely, with the chunk of melon actually being one of the best bits after it had soaked in so much of the cocktail.

I'll definitely make this again.

Recipe

• 4 parts white rum

• 2 parts triple sec

• 1 part lime juice

• 1 part Galliano

Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

Note the different recipe from last time, simply increasing the amounts of spirit and the triple sec.  This makes the sourness of the lime juice much more manageable, without making it all too sweet. Definitely an improvement, and a delicious cool drink for a sunny day.

Note that the quantities are like the margarita recipe I've been sticking to, with the Galliano standing in for syrup (doubled since it's not as sweet).  I'll be making a special post about these ratios soon. Even more enjoyable while listening to the song Yellow Bird.

1. Use tons of ice

Use more ice than you're using.  More than that.  Even more.  That's about right.  Whether you're using a shaker or a glass, you should aim to have it totally filled with ice, right to the bottom, with ice standing up above the level of your drink.  If the ice is floating, you need more of it.

People are reluctant to use lots of ice because: a) making ice takes ages and it feels like a waste; b) it feels like bartenders fill your glass with ice to short-change you on the actual drink; and c) you don't want it to melt and dilute your drink.  Well, relax: a) you can buy a massive bag of ice from a supermarket for like 50p and keep it in your freezer (this also allows you to grab a big handful of ice when you need it instead of screwing around with those plastic trays and getting frostbite); b) you're making your own drinks at home and if you want to you can just use a bigger glass; and c) counter-intuitively, the more ice you put in your drink, the less meltwater you're likely to get, since the large quantity of ice straight from the freezer can absorbs a lot of heat energy from the drink before it reaches its 0°C melting point.

2. Use cold ice

As mentioned above, ice straight from the freezer is really cold: maybe –18°C.  This means that it can cool your drink down a lot before it starts melting, and in ideal circumstances it can get your drink down to 0°C or lower before it melts at all – if you have the ice in your glass, this means you can sip slowly for an hour or so without the drink getting badly diluted, a nice feature if you're having something like a Negroni. If you remove the ice from the freezer in advance, and leave it out for a party or something, it'll quickly reach 0°C, and when you put it in the drink it'll add much more water than necessary, won't get the drink as cold, and will melt in minutes rather than hours.

3. Strain the ice

If you're using a cocktail shaker, you'll be pouring the drink into another glass, likely a cocktail glass, and you don't want any ice coming with it.  On this blog, I use the phrase "strain into a glass", and I mean that seriously.  Even if you've got one of these shakers with small holes you pour it through, you should something else as well, to avoid weird shards of floating ice or chunks of lemon flesh in your pristine, beautiful drink.  I use a simple tea strainer, and the amount of ice and fruit that it catches shows how necessary it is.  Costs a fiver at most.

4. Chill the glasses

This is important if you're not putting ice into the drink itself.  You can chill your drink perfectly in the shaker, but if you've got a big thick glass it'll warm the liquid up a lot before you even get to drink it.  I keep two cocktail glasses in the fridge at all times, which is no more weird than keeping them in a cupboard if you think about it.  I find the salad drawer is a good place.

5. Just use normal ice

People love going on about different kinds of ice, whether it's extra-large premium ice cubes, or weird accoutrements to make ice spheres for the optimal surface area–volume ratio.  In the perfect generalised world of spherical cows where we can model cocktails as points in a frictionless vaccuum, these discussions make sense.  In the real world, these cause more problems than they solve.

If you've got one giant sphere of ice, it barely touches the bottom of the glass, and so it fails to cool the drink efficiently at the most important time: as you get towards the end.  I've actually tried the giant ice cubes you can get, and while they looked cool, they pack really badly, violating rule 1, they cooled the drink much more slowly, and when I was nearly finished this giant thing kept sliding out and punching me in the nose.

6. Shake or stir?

The accepted wisdom seems to be to shake it if it's got syrup or fruit juice, and stir it otherwise.  I've heard some real crap about "binding the ingredients", but I can testify that if you're using honey or agave nectar you really do need to shake to get it to dissolve properly.  The advantage of stirring is that you break up and melt the ice less, so maybe that's worth it.  Just be aware that if you're stirring, it takes much longer to get cold, so do it for ages – 30 seconds or a minute should do.  Shaking only needs about 15 seconds (I reckon).

However...

7. Dilution isn't always bad

A lot of advice above is based on the idea of cooling a drink down without getting any water into it.  But diluting hard alcohol is sort of the whole point of cocktails, and I think that a bit of meltwater can smooth out a drink a lot.  In fact, water is essential in bringing out flavours in spirits like whisky or absinthe.  So don't panic about getting some water in your drink – just make sure it's cold.

Stay tuned for more tedious advice in future posts!

Recipe

• 1 part Pimm's No 1

• 3 parts lemonade

• Strawberries

• Oranges

• Cucumber

• Mint

Chop up the fruit and put it in a glass.  Pour over the Pimm's, then the lemonade, stir gently, and fill with ice.

It's actually warm outside at last, and that has to mean Pimm's.  This drink is a beautiful cool oasis on a hot day, and goes down very nicely, glass after glass, preferably outdoors in the afternoon sunshine.  I actually drank this one alone, which was pretty sad, but I look forward to drinking plenty more with friends over the next couple of months.

Consider using a pint glass. Don't go crazy – you only need perhaps 60ml Pimm's/180ml lemonade, but a pint glass leaves plenty of room for ice and fruit.  Better still, make a hell of a lot more, in a big jug, bring it into the garden and pour it into small glasses as needed over a few hours.  If there's leftover fruit in the jug, you can totally use it again a couple of times if you want to refill the jug without chopping new fruit.  But if you want to keep it overnight, put the whole jug in the freezer to keep it sort of fresh.

Eat the fruit as you go, it goes all carbonated and amazing.

Recipe

• 45ml golden rum

• 60ml pineapple juice

• 15ml Galliano

• Almost no lime juice

• 45ml sparkling white wine

Shake the first four ingredients vigorously with ice (aiming for a good foam from the pineapple juice), strain into a cocktail glass, and top up with the sparkling wine.

This is wonderful!  All the different flavours can be detected, with the strong rum and sickly pineapple juice tempered by the dryness of the wine and the tartness of the lime juice, all of it brought together by the soothing yet exotic Galliano, which also lends a beautiful colour.

The exact amount of wine you can fit in may depend on the size of your glass.  A little more would be fine, but I wouldn't go beyond about 75ml.  So even if you've got one of the small 200ml bottles, you should manage 3 or 4 drinks – and you'll want another one if you're anything like me!

Recipe

• 8 parts lemon vodka

• 4 parts triple sec

• 2 parts lemon juice

• 1 part sugar syrup

Cut halfway through a lemon, and run it around the rim of a cocktail glass.  Then run the rim through some sugar, and leave it to dry (possibly by a short stay in an oven at 50°C).  Chill the glass.  Shake the four ingredients together in a cocktail shaker and strain into the glass, then add a thin lemon slice.

Disappointing.  I followed the 8:4:2:1 recipe of the margarita and the embassy of previous posts, but what resulted was pretty bland and uninteresting.  I think it may be due to the heavy focus on lemon vodka, which is superb in a cosmopolitan, but doesn't do much on its own.

It looks pretty snazzy, though.

Recipe

• 3 parts vodka

• 6 parts orange juice

• 1 part Galliano

Pour the vodka and orange juice into a wine glass, stir, fill with ice, add half an orange slice and a cherry to the glass, put another half an orange slice on the rim, and then gently pour the Galliano to float on the top.

Rubbish.  Vodka and orange has never been a great drink (vodka doesn't taste of anything, and orange juice is a bit harsh and boring on its own), and adding the Galliano only makes it briefly interesting. This whole floating charade just means in practice that the first few sips are a bit interesting (though badly balanced) and then the rest is just vodka and orange. A waste of all three ingredients.

Recipe

• 2 parts white rum

• 1 part triple sec

• 1 part Galliano

• 1 part lime juice

Shake together with ice, and strain into a cocktail glass.

I bought a bottle of Galliano recently on a whim, and it's quite something. It tastes like sambuca, an anise liqueur, but with a little vanilla hug at the end making it all nice and yummy.

This cocktail is supposedly a classic, and I wasn't disappointed! The sweetness and anise of the liqueur come through nicely, and balance well with the other flavours – sort of like a special daiquiri. I'd have liked more sweetness though, as with other sour cocktails, so maybe I'll use more of the liqueurs or add some syrup next time. Good colour!

Recipe

• 3 parts gin

• 2 parts lemon juice

• 1 part sugar syrup

• 5 parts soda water

Shake the first three ingredients thoroughly with ice (making a frothy head) and pour into an old-fashioned glass. Add the soda and fill up with more ice.

Definitely better than last time, mainly due to the extra sugar (just a little more than the IBA recipe recommends). Claire called it "grown-up lemonade", which captures it pretty well. Nice for a slightly longer drink, and nice with a pizza.

I didn't bother with garnish, but lemon peel and a cherry would've gone well.

Recipe

• 1 part peach purée

• 2 parts sparkling white wine

Pour the purée and wine into a Champagne flute, and stir it up.

I'm not exactly sure what peach purée is.  I had a couple of blended peaches left over from the previous night's American Rose, so I just sort of threw that in after an ill-fated attempt to strain it.  The result was a sort of fizzy smoothie, which was a bit weird to drink, but actually tasted pretty great! It's probably worth blending peaches on demand rather than doing a batch and keeping it in the fridge – look at how badly the colour of the purée changed in one night since the American Rose.  Actually, I wonder if tinned peaches would be better.