CYOC :
Craft Your Own Cocktails By Emily Hingle
Never-made-before cocktails can be born from all sorts of ideas, memories, events, or senses. For some, the idea of a new cocktail is inspired and guided by color. Christoph Dornemann, bartender manager at Arnaud’s and the French 75 Bar, explained, “If I want to make a green or yellow or purple cocktail with natural ingredients, I have a set of limitations that guide me to what will go into the drink. Sometimes, it’s a seasonal focus that makes me think of what flavors are right for the time of year and what cocktail customers are expecting to order.”
Bartender Joey Laura of Compère Lapin, which reopens November 11th, echoed the sentiment. “I find the idea sticks best when the ingredients tell a story—there’s a reason that they’re paired together,” he said. “I like to think of cocktail builds as ‘color maps.’ Building a drink with all brown ingredients (bourbon, chocolate, vanilla, dark sugar) might be tasty, but it’ll be very straightforward. Once I start to think about the complexities of what our palates can handle, I like to bring flavor profiles from all over a color map: Green could be the grassy and vegetal flavor of mezcal, brown could be dry and savory chocolate bitters, yellow could be lemon or a blanc vermouth for brightness, orange could be a large peel of tangerine. The options really are limitless, so we owe it to our curious selves to expand the possibilities of flavor combinations.” Every sense can come into play while crafting cocktails, which is why every element of the drink needs to be considered. “Imagine a mind-blowing cocktail that smells good and tastes great, but it has a muddy color, or the dairy in it started to separate into curds,” Laura added. “Your cocktail doesn’t have to be a standalone work of visual art, but it needs to look appealing if you want to pique someone’s curiosity enough to ask, ‘Ooh, what’s in that?’” Another important aspect of the drink is how the flavor changes as time goes on, such as the ice melting as you sip. “One thing that is important is tasting a cocktail from the first sip to the last. A cocktail can change significantly by the end of it,” said Dornemann.
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Spirits Guide | Where Y'at Magazine
The basic building blocks of cocktails begin with the type of taste you want to achieve. Dornemann explained, “Will it be boozy (spirit-forward)? Citrus? Light and refreshing? Spiced and rich? Then, for me, I think of what classic style of cocktail will inform the build of the drink. For example, will it be like an Old Fashioned, manhattan, martini, colada, sour, tiki-style, or cobbler? Once that is figured out, the builds follow familiar formulas but will be tweaked and modified; based on the ingredients.” “Classic cocktails will inform ratios, styles, and balance, so I always recommend starting with the basics. My first cocktails were not balanced, needed editing, but were definitely creative,” he continued. “Eventually, after years of learning more classics and their formulas, I could turn these experiments into something viable. Pure creativity doesn’t mean a cocktail will be good on a menu or even sell well. A simple but creative riff on a classic is much more likely to succeed and impress.” Laura also endorses getting to know the classics in order to strengthen your cocktail-creation game. “Even if you’ve mastered the classic cocktails, it’s still useful to go back and revisit them, see them with new eyes, and continually challenge yourself,” he said. “If Orson Welles could watch John Ford’s Stagecoach every night before going to bed; while making Citizen Kane, we can all afford to revisit a Sazerac, martini, or cosmopolitan and reflect on what it does so well.” Once you have an idea of what to make, you need the right tools for the job. “A cocktail shaker, strainer, bar spoon, and jigger are the essentials. A vegetable peeler
