Stirring your drinks properly just got a lot easier!
Stirring a cocktail doesn’t sound difficult, but to stir a drink properly takes quite a bit more skill and practice than you might think, even with a bar spoon, assuming that even have a bar spoon. It’s not like stirring your coffee, or mixing your powdered aspirin drink in the morning to ease your hangover.
For stirred drinks, water an usually an essential part of a well-balanced cocktail, but rarely is water mentioned as one of the ingredients. That’s because the water comes from the ice as it’s stirred. The ice-cold water that melts from the ice cubes not only cools your drink, making it smoother to the palate, but it softens any harsh alcohol taste, mellows strong-flavored ingredients (like bitters), takes the sickly-sweetness out of sugars and syrups, and even helps to release subtle aromas that might otherwise be overpowered by the alcohol and other ingredients.
Unlike shaking a cocktail, which breaks off lots and lots of little shards of ice in the process (which, for example, help to mellow the tartness of citrus drinks), a stirred drink should, with exceptions, be chilled nicely, yet still crystal clear. Nobody likes a murky Manhattan or a cloudy Caruso!
How to use your stainless steel drink stirrer for perfectly chilled and balanced drinks:
- Add your drink ingredients to a mixing glass and fill about half way to the top with ice.
- Slide the ball end of the stainless steel drink stirrer down the inside of the glass (between the glass and the ice).
- Holding it like a fine paintbrush (rather than a sink plunger), and holding the glass with your other hand (if necessary), rotate the stirrer using only your wrist so that the ball constantly stays in contact with the inside of the glass as it turns. Don’t beat it around like you’re mixing a cake batter. The drink and ice spinning in the glass should be almost silent; if you hear the stirrer hitting off the glass as it turns, or the ice clinking around noisily, you’re almost certainly doing it wrong.
- Get to a speed you’re comfortable with and rotate the drink/ice for about 20-30 seconds.
That’s it! Your drink should be nicely chilled and appropriately diluted, ready to strain into your cocktail glass, but without ice shards or a sticky mess all over your counter or bar-top.
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