We want to answer the question, “why do you always strain your shaken ice over new ice in your cocktail glass?” The answer isn’t too hard, but we are sick of typing it so we created a video version of our reasonings. To summarize, using fresh ice in your cocktail gives you a few great benefits:
- Your drink becomes colder
- Your drink remains colder longer
- Your drink looks better
- Dilution is slower thus less watered-down flavor
While water dilution is great for cocktails, going overboard is just too much. You want water in order to bring out some of the great aromas in your spirits. When you shake your drink the ice in the shaker dilutes just the right amount while bringing down the temperature of your cocktail. If you use that same ice by dumping it into your cocktail you get smaller pieces of ice which melt faster (since they’re already partially diluted) and look fairly ugly in most drinks.
Lesson here: strain your cocktail to hold back the old ice and pour it over a fresh glass with ice. If you’re making martini-style cocktails, strain that chilled beverage into a chilled glass (from the freezer for instance).
7 Comments
Francois
April 22, 2012 at 12:01 pmYou didn’t talked about crushed ice. Sometimes it may be useful cause it makes your drink becoming chilled really fast, if you’re making a mojito, a blznded drink or something that you don’t shake. But the dilution is also fast. Dilution can ruin a good drink in a few minuts, so sometimes, I don’t use ice in the glass, but I put the glass into a bowl of crushed ice.
dschommer
April 22, 2012 at 12:13 pmYeah, I didn’t want to cover crushed ice because I didn’t want to confuse the message about straining with fresh ice. In some ways, utilizing crushed ice is a completely different method, very similar to using frosted martini glasses to keep a drink chilled. A separate video might be showing the chill difference in the different methods, including stirring for 30-seconds or so.
Francois
April 22, 2012 at 1:05 pmIce is an incredibly large subject. There are the most commons ways of chilling a drink, I mean crushed ice, shaking or stirring. But there are other ways such as Cuban roll or ice ball. I even heard that a bar uses liquid nitrogen to chill drinks.
Ice is also a problem for the common man, cause a single cocktails requires 6-7 ice cubes for shaking, then 6-7 other to keep the drink cold. If you’re hosting 4 guests and each guest have 3 cocktails, you’ll need more than 150 cubes. I got many ice trays in my freezer but its annoying to get back and there to get ice.
Hope you’ll understand what I mean 😉
dschommer
April 22, 2012 at 1:31 pmI also have ice balls and those things are awesome. When I have a party I buy five bags of ice plus any that I have in my freezer. If I have extra…so I have some for the show or for other things like iced tea. I find a reason to use ’em (smoothies with the blender for example). But, I also have an additional freezer so I have a place to put extra bags.
Francois
April 23, 2012 at 2:28 amOk, an extra freezer is still cheaper and more useful than an ice cubes maker.
Home bartending requires lots of space, to store ice, beers, spirits.. :/
dschommer
April 23, 2012 at 9:04 amYeah, I’ve got both 🙂
Mose - Tipsy Pilgrim
April 24, 2012 at 3:53 amThere are quite a number of things I love about this video, and your site in general; I dig all-out American drink geekery. Anyway I got my thoughts down here: http://www.tipsypilgrim.com/blog/america-week-pour-your-cocktail-over-fresh-ice-and-delve-int.html
I hope you don’t mind serving as a foil for my introduction to American drinking culture — I’m hoping to bring it to my mainly European readers. Keep up the great work on the blog and videos. I’ll be watching.