Hogwarts House Cocktails

A Self-Indulgent (and self-important) Adventure into Degeneracy

by TexansDefense

The Blue and Bronze

2oz Limoncello 1oz Blue Curacao 3oz Blueberry and Lemon Syrup

Shake with ice, then pour into a glass rimmed with coarse gold bronze sugar.

For syrup: Bring 2 cups water, 1 cup sliced lemon, and 1 cup fresh blueberries to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes. Mash up the fruit then add 1 cup sugar and ½ cup fresh rosemary, simmer until reduced. Stir occasionally throughout.

The Gryffindor Sour

1½ oz Aperol 1oz Bourbon 1oz Lemon juice ½ oz Grenadine Half of one egg white

Shake vigorously with ice, strain into glass. Allow the egg white foam to set up for a few seconds then sprinkle edible gold flakes on top.

Can be made with Campari instead of Aperol if you want, but I’d only do 1oz Campari and I’d add ½ oz Simple Syrup (equal parts sugar and hot water).

The Honey Badger

2oz Bourbon 1oz Lemon juice 1oz Honey 1-2oz Blackberry Syrup Soda water

Shake the first 3 ingredients vigorously with ice. Pour syrup into glass, then strain the rest over top. Add soda on top (please don’t shake carbonated liquid).

For syrup: Bring 2 cups water and 2 cups fresh blackberry to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes. Mash up the fruit, then add 1 cup sugar and ½ cup fresh mint leaves, simmer until reduced. Stir occasionally throughout.

The Basilisk Venom Shot

¾ oz Gin ¾ oz Coco Reàl Cream of Coconut ¾ oz Crème de Menthe Optional: crush up some chocolate sprinkles and add them on top or as a rim.

Shake Gin and Cream of coconut over ice, strain into shot glass. Gently pour Crème de menthe into glass. Chug.

Now that we’ve finally got the boring pictures and recipes out of the way, it’s time for me to pull the traditional food blogger move and talk about myself for far too long. There are 2 things that I love more than alcohol, and those are listening to myself talk and people actually thinking I’m cool for once in my life. What better way to accomplish both those things than teaching a bunch of teenagers how to drink alcohol? All jokes aside, I’m going to talk about what I think makes a good cocktail, what to look for when ordering off a cocktail menu, and how to approach making cocktails for yourself. Oh and I guess I should talk about the drinks themselves. Just a bit of a warning, everything I say here will be entirely my own opinions so take it all with a grain of salt. There is a weird amount of gatekeeping in the cocktail world and however you want to approach it is fully up to you. At the end of the day, the best cocktail is entirely subjective so just drink whatever you want, however you want. Now obviously I (as an extremely vain person) have a lot of opinions on this subject, so take what I say as suggestions to help level up your drink making rather than outright fact.

For those of you who want to know a little more about me, I’m a 30 year old bar manager and bartender. I work at a restaurant that is almost entirely known for its food and beer. We’re also located about 50 yards away from a fancy shmancy cocktail bar that we will absolutely never compete with in terms of mixed drinks. So ever since I was hired as a grossly unqualified bartender, I’ve been scrambling to learn as much about mixed drinks and wine as I can (Tex’s Sparknotes guide to sounding like you know wine: Beaujolais are a safe bet to call your favorite wine, Super Tuscans are secretly trash, and Champagne actually pairs best with fried chicken). But over the last 3-4ish years I’ve realized that I shouldn’t even be attempting to compete with them. The beautiful craft cocktails that people come up with are awesome and look great on your Instagram, but they don’t contribute meaningfully to a dining experience. So my bread and butter drinks have slowly evolved into ones that are, simply put, accessible. I am a huge fan of drinks that, aside from tasting and looking great, are simple in their execution. And that’s what I tried to channel into these 4 drinks, anyone should be able to recreate these drinks no matter how inexperienced they are with cocktail making.

Alright, let’s start off by talking about cocktails in general. If you’re like me, you probably started your drinking career by just consuming whatever you could get your hands on, no real preferences or attempts at making it taste good. Then you progress to drinking whatever beer is cheapest and pouring plastic bottles of vodka into huge coolers with some Fruit Punch or Gatorade. Or was that just me? Anyway, no matter what your first experience with cocktails is, it’s never too late to learn more. Hell, after 6+ years working in bars I still have to google drink recipes for customers. So the most basic thing to learn about cocktail making is how to… make the drink. The traditional way to make a cocktail is to pour the ingredients into a metal shaker with some ice and mix it by either shaking or stirring. If you’re looking to start mixing up drinks yourself, you can buy cocktail shaker sets online for like $15 which comes with a long bar spoon/stirrer and a jigger (double sided measuring cup). Just make sure you get a metal shaker, I’d recommend not using glass or plastic. When you shake a cocktail, you’ll want to tightly cap the shaker and just Shake Weight the hell out of it. Then you strain the drink out into a waiting glass with fresh ice already in it. Stirring, on the other hand, is hopefully self-explanatory. Now I’m going to say something sacrilegious here so please hold your gasps or curses. If you want to just pour ingredients into a glass and give it a brief stir, go right ahead and do it. As I said above, there’s some serious gatekeeping from bartenders and “mixologists” (I can’t stress enough just how hard I roll my eyes at this term) who will tell you that you have to “properly” shake, stir, or build your cocktails and if you don’t you’re not actually making a cocktail. They’re self important idiots if they tell you this, and Bacchus knows I’m the only self important idiot allowed around these parts. I put the term “properly” in quotes because, while not truly necessary, shaking and stirring cocktails does actually serve a purpose that you don’t really get with simply pouring things into a cup. The two main reasons behind properly mixing cocktails are to both chill and dilute the drink. When mixing a drink with ice, the ice starts to melt as it brings the other liquids down to a lower temperature. While it might sound like a bad thing to have more water in there, the water actually helps bind the ingredients together and smooths out any rough edges in the drink (namely the bite from the liquor). Have you ever taken a drink of a cocktail and thought, “Wow I can’t even taste the alcohol!” Well it’s not because they screwed you on the amount of liquor in it, they just properly mixed it. Mixing it in a shaker also gets it down to a temperature that won’t melt the fresh ice that you pour the drink on top of, which helps keep the drink from being too watered down as you get to the bottom. Also, in the case of shaking specifically, it can outright change the texture of the drink by aerating the liquid. If you’re wondering when to shake or stir a drink, the conventional wisdom generally boils down to how much of the drink is non-alcoholic. The more varied the ingredients, the more you need to shake it with a simple rule of thumb being to always shake if there’s citrus in the drink. Oh and don’t shake or stir carbonated ingredients, those just go straight into the glass on top of the rest of the drink. Frankly speaking, I shake like 95% of cocktails I make even if I’m not “supposed” to, it’s more fun.

Since everyone now knows how to mix a drink, allow me to segue into some general tips on how to improve the drinks you make. The first, and most important, piece of advice I can give is to use fresh and high quality ingredients. If you can, please stop buying margarita mix from the grocery store and make your own sour mix. For whatever size batch you want to make, mix 3 parts lime juice, 1-2 parts simple syrup (depending on how sweet you want it to be), 1 part lemon juice, and ½ part orange juice. Fresh squeezed is obviously preferable here, but store bought juices that you then mix yourself are still going to taste better than that $10 bottle of Jose Cuervo mix. Obviously time, money, and effort are factors that need to be considered when preparing to make mixed drinks, but fresher is always better here. Next up is to experiment with things like syrups and infusions. While they sound super fancy, these are all simple things to make, you just have to take the time to actually try them out. The two syrup recipes above are both extremely easy to make and easy to adapt to different flavors if you want. Infusions are even easier, just drop some cinnamon sticks in a bottle of cheap whiskey and try it in a couple days. Third, include different textures in your drinks. I know it may sound weird, but adding things like syrups, honey, and soda water all give some complexity and body to an otherwise flat drink. Seriously, add some soda water on top of your next (non-frozen) margarita, it adds a nice bit of effervescence that you didn’t know you were missing out on. Finally, start garnishing your drinks. From orange peels to salt rims, from lime wedges to fresh herbs, garnishing a drink is the easiest path to getting your well earned oohs and aahs for your drink-making prowess. Not only are they visually appealing, but garnishes add a huge amount of aromaticity (aromaticness?) to your drinks. Next time you make a vodka soda, slap a sprig of rosemary a few times and stick it at the top of your drink next to a lime wedge, trust me. Oh and slapping your herbs is a very real technique called bruising that helps release their oils and scents.

Ok so to finish up the general section, I’m going to let you all in on the biggest secret of how to make a good cocktail. Y’all ready? Wait for iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit. Balance.

That’s it, and it’s kind of boring isn’t it? You can make the fanciest craft cocktail in the world, but if it’s not well balanced then it’s just going to taste like crap. This is the biggest thing that you need to keep in mind when making cocktails yourself or trying to pick out a drink from a cocktail menu. Every good cocktail needs to have a good mix of spirit/liquor, something bitter/ aromatic, a little bit of tart/brightness, and some level of sweetness to round out the flavor. Look up the International Bartenders Association’s official cocktail list and tell me what you see on just about every single drink on that list. Alcohol of choice, citrus or bitters, and sugar of some kind. The flavors and presentation vary wildly, but that’s all a cocktail is at the end of the day. When you’re cooking yourself dinner, you would never just cook up three different cuts of chicken and call it a day. You need to compliment that chicken with some starch and veggies, then you’d want to incorporate some acid and fat or richness to it (among other things but trying to keep this somewhat brief). Meals and drinks alike should all be well rounded and seasoned, you just need to go about them in different ways. And honestly you can make damn near any flavor combination work in a drink as long as it contains a well balanced flavor profile.

Now it’s time to finish this long (and probably incoherent) ramble by talking about the drinks themselves. Overall I wanted to create four unique drinks that incorporated both of the colors for each house. I could’ve easily just made a red, blue, green, and yellow drink and called it a day, but including the secondary colors added an extra challenge to this that I really enjoyed. The secondary color is also what’s going to cause the most problems for you all if you try to make these at home (cough Hufflepuff drink cough). The Blue and Bronze was by far the easiest to come up with, it’s almost an exact copy of a drink that I had already created for work, I just tweaked things to give it a better color and then rebalanced it for flavor. The Gryffindor Sour, though, is one that I had to completely change direction on while developing it. Initially, I was dead-set on making one of these drinks a layered drink and the Gryffindor colors lent themselves to that pretty well (red mixed drink as the bottom half and then a golden/amber colored beer as the top half). Unfortunately most of my attempts at this either tasted good or looked good, but never both. Eventually I got sick of wasting beer and scrapped the idea. The final drink came together pretty quickly when I decided I needed at least one riff on a classic cocktail here. Slamming together a Whiskey Sour and an Aperol Spritz ended up working pretty well for both color and ease of garnishing to add the gold. I will say that if I were making this for myself I would use Campari instead of Aperol, but it has a very strong flavor so be careful with it. Oh and for those of you who are weirded out by the egg white, it’s just in there to make the pretty foam on top when you shake it. You can substitute aqua faba if you’re vegan, or just don’t want eggs in your drink, or even leave it out completely. The Basilisk Venom was a drink that I had wanted to make as an actual cocktail initially, the silver and green mixing together in a hazy swirl sounded extremely cool. Ultimately I just couldn’t get it quite right. I tried using Apple Pucker, Green Chartreuse and even tried to make my own bright green syrup, but it just never worked out how I wanted it to. But when I decided to switch gears and make it into a shot, it came together fairly quickly and now is more or less a Grasshopper as a shot, and it tastes like a York Peppermint Pattie (especially if you add the chocolate sprinkles, just make sure to crush them up a bit). The Honey Badger was similar to the Slytherin and Gryffindor drinks because I knew what I wanted from the beginning, I just had to make it work. The main problem that I ran into (and you all will as well if you make these yourself) is that the blackberry syrup just immediately mixes into the drink, turning the whole thing a weird red color. Trying to thicken the syrup up by cooking out some of the water didn’t work, so I tried using cornstarch to mild success. Getting pretty desperate at this point I made a new batch with unflavored gelatin, put it in a squeeze bottle, and left it in the fridge overnight. So yeah, the picture above involved a whole lot of movie magic (and by this I mean blatantly cheating) to get it to look like that. If you’re going to make these for yourself or for a themed party, I wouldn’t bother going to this length to make it look perfect, just make the drink and then pour the syrup on top after.