Cocktails
-
Alt // Spritz
The last year has seen spritz serves hit the 7th most popular cocktail in the UK*, and growing only behind the flavoured Martini in popularity...
-
Creating a Hit List
Creating a cocktail menu for your outlet can be a pretty personal experience. A lot of operators have worked their way up through bartending, making a cocktail menu refresh a pretty hands-on experience. Some prefer to let their bar team take on some ownership and create a menu between them, where some like to outsource entirely. There’s no real right answer here, just what works best for you and the time that you have available, but creating a cocktail menu always comes back to the same thing: balance
-
Bean Machine
Coffee cocktails have been on many menus for a while now, the espresso martini now an essential addition to every spirits-led bar. We ask Patrick Kempinski, Reserve World Class Bartender of the Year 2018 for Kenya, why his is so special
-
Highballing It
Tall, fast, profitable and unimaginably diverse - we're getting into it up to the highballs (and we promise that's it with the highball puns)
-
…and be merry
Not everyone reading this will be trying to present customers with complex cuisine, but with a focus on some simple standards you start to learn that most food can be enhanced with the appearance of some spirits. Here are a few very basic flavour suggestions that can cover popular fare from the kitchen, particularly at a time of year when food sales are crucial
-
The Daiquiri
Essentially a rum sour. The Navy had a big role to play in the Daiquiri, they were mixing lime with sugar spirits as early as the era of Sir Francis Drake in a bid to fight scurvy
-
The Old Fashioned
The Old Fashioned is a classic cocktail that should really adorn every cocktail menu.
Not content with a whole heap of history behind it, arguably more than any other classic, a competently made Old Fashioned is a reliable rubberstamp of quality for customers. If a bar can make an excellent Old Fashioned, chances are that the other drinks on the venue’s list can be deftly delivered too. -
The Martini
No other drink captures that moment, when the short arm strikes six (or indeed five if you’ve had a really horrible day) more magnificently. Staggeringly simple yet deceptively difficult to master, the Martini is unashamedly brazen in its booziness, transparent in both appearance and intention; clean-lined yet complex, a v-shaped salute to the tribulations, trudge and tyranny of modern life – and rightly considered as the king of the classic cocktails.