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!