When entertaining, crafting cocktails à la carte for guests can be a hassle, especially when you’re focused on the food or other details. Instead, break out a pitcher or punch bowl and learn to embrace the premade, prebatched cocktail.
Whether a classic springtime punch or pulling bottles of made-ahead Martinis straight out of your freezer, mixing cocktails ahead of time can save you time, energy, and effort. There are, however, a few rules to keep in mind for doing pre-batched cocktails correctly. Read on for advice from the pros.
Freezer Martinis, Manhattans, and More
If you’re hosting a small gathering, you may want to keep a bottle of a premade cocktail in your freezer to pull out and pour on the spot. This approach works for spirit-forward drinks that would ordinarily be stirred: think Martinis, Manhattans, Old Fashioneds, and the like. “I keep a liter bottle of Manhattans and one of Martinis in my freezer at all times,” says Sother Teague, the proprietor of New York City’s Amor y Amargo.
This type of premade large-format cocktail has many advantages: It’s easy to make, elegant to serve, and the ingredients’ high ABV means the mix has a near-infinite shelf life. As long as you stick to mixing nonperishable spirits and liqueurs, you can batch drinks days, weeks, or even months in advance, saving yourself effort and stress on party day.
“It’s just mixing nonperishables together and creating a larger nonperishable thing,” says Teague.
How to Scale Up Your Favorite Drink
In most cases, you can simply scale up your favorite recipe. “Converting a single cocktail recipe to large format is pretty simple; you just do math,” says Tom Macy, a bartender and the co-founder and CEO of Social Hour ready-to-drink cocktails. An easy formula, he says, is to change the ounces stated in a recipe to cups. For example, a Martini calls for two ounces of gin and one ounce of dry vermouth, so simply expand to two cups of gin and one cup of vermouth. This formula allows you to quickly make eight servings of a drink from one single-serving recipe, as there are eight ounces in a cup.
Macy advises holding back on any bitters, at least at first, because they can come through more strongly in a large-format cocktail. Start with half the usual amount, taste the drink, and adjust as necessary.
QUICK TIPS TO BATCH LARGE-FORMAT COCKTAILS
When prebatching drinks to be stored in the freezer, dilute the alcoholic ingredients with 20–25% water, to compensate for water that would have been added through stirring the drink with ice.
If scaling up recipes with bitters, start with half the recipe's usual amount and increase to taste.
To avoid exploding bottles, monitor cocktails kept in the freezer, and move to the refrigerator if you see ice crystals forming.
Citrus-based and lower-ABV cocktails tend to work best as punches.
When batching citrus cocktails, try to prepare them only a day or two in advance of serving, to avoid oxidation.
Adding one large block of ice to a punch bowl, rather than smaller cubed ice, will allow it to last longer without getting watered down.
Don’t Forget to Dilute
Water is a crucial component of every cocktail, particularly when prebatched. Once you’ve scaled up your recipe, a bit of additional math is needed to calculate the correct dilution and compensate for what water would have come from stirring or shaking a solo drink at room temperature. Without adding water, you end up with an unpalatably strong drink whose flavors become muted.
“It’s important to realize it’s not just a matter of how strong a drink tastes,” says Rafa García Febles, the beverage director at Hav + Mar. “Dilution changes which flavors come forward or are in the background. It really changes the flavor profile, so it’s an important step.”
When making individual cocktails, stirring a drink’s ingredients with ice provides the necessary water for dilution. Prebatched cocktails are generally kept in the freezer, so there is no need to stir them with ice, and doing so may result in a drink that’s too cold. Since the freezer will do the job of chilling the drink, you need to dilute your mixture with water beforehand to create the right balance.
Stirred drinks aren’t particularly forgiving of significant over- or under-dilution, so it’s important to calculate how much water you’ll need to add. The most precise way is to make yourself an individual serving of the drink you’re batching and measure its weight on a kitchen scale once before stirring the drink with ice and once again after; the difference between the two is the dilution ratio.
