27: Become A Good Amateur Bartender

For some reason I put this is on my '30 things to do before I turn 30' bucket list and I've been scratching my head about it ever since. How exactly do you measure this goal? What metric should I use?

Happily, I've found one: The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks by David Embury. Embury picks six basic cocktails that everyone should be able to master: the Martini, the Manhattan, the Old Fashioned, the Daiquiri, the Sidecar and the Jack Rose. This seemed like a perfect place to start- after all, if you can't master the basics, you can't really call yourself a bartender much less a good amateur one. (For the record: thinking about it, I think this made the list because floating around at the back of my mind, 'opening a really good bar' seems to be a 'someday, maybe' life goal of mine.)

So I started with a drink I hadn't attempted before. The Manhattan:

Embury's preferred recipe is as follows:

Manhattan
5 parts American whiskey
1 part Italian (sweet) vermouth
dash of Angostura bitters to each drink
Stir with ice, strain into a cocktail glass and serve garnished with a maraschino cherry.

However, I simply went with a 2 parts whiskey, 1 part sweet vermouth ratio and got satisfactory results. Mother Cigar actually enjoyed this- which was a first as she's not a fan of the whiskey and it was only after 2 of these that I realized that I hadn't been using the Angostura Bitters at all so one more was had to see if the bitters made any difference. I certainly couldn't tell- if they were there, they were subtle.

I enjoyed the heck out of these- I had in a fit of random holiday experimentation attempted a dry Manhattan sometime last year (the Cigar Parentals don't usually have Sweet Vermouth kicking around their joint. Everything else, yes, sweet vermouth, no) and it was, well, gross. The real thing more than made up for it.

So this will be my metric. Mastering these six cocktails... stay tuned for next month's offering and if you imbibe, happy drinking to you!