how to shake a cocktail
When shaking a cocktail you want to achieve three things; 1) chil the drink 2) dilute the drink 3) aerate the drink. 1) Chill the drink - this is achieved by adding the ice, the faster you shake and move around the ice the quicker the ice will interact with the liquid and chill it down. Pretty straightforward, its ice makes it cold, duh. 2) Dilute the drink - when you shake the ice the ice melts and sheds water, this ice cold water helps dilute the cocktail and that is a good thing. The melted water will actually make up about 10-15% of the finished cocktail and give the ingredients a bridge of flavor to balance each other out. An unbalanced cocktail will taste astringent and the water dilution helps create this balance. 3) aerate the drink - when you swirl a glass of wine you are not adding air to make the wine smell like air you are aerating the wine to make the wine taste more like itself. When we shake a cocktail the ice moves around and brings air into the cocktail. These tiny air bubbles help wake up the flavors and bring them together on your palate. As a rule of thumb you should shake any cocktail that has citrus in it. That's right James Bond had it all wrong. He was actually too perfect of a character when Ian Fleming wrote the novel. Ian Fleming wrote most of the first book of the James Bond series while drinking martinis at the famed martini bar Duke’s bar in London. This bar is a martini mecca and the traditional gin martini is served there as only a traditional martini should be, stirred not shaken. In Fleming's opinion, James Bond was too perfect of a character to be British, so he wrote a character flaw into the book that James Bond was unsophisticated not only by the way he treated women but also by his way of ordering the martini. A classic cocktail such as a martini, manhattan or old fashioned should never be stirred. You want to avoid the aeration and keep the silky texture of the cocktail. James Bond became so popular that the martini is now almost only ordered shaken not stirred.
