Video:Tips for Adding Fruit to Cocktails

Transcript:Tips for Adding Fruit to Cocktails

Hi, my name is Justin Noel, proprietor here at 1534 Bar, located in Nolita, New York, and I'm here for About.com to talk to you today about usage of fruit in cocktails, and how to use fruit in what kind of cocktails best utilize that fruit. 

Using Fruit Based on What Type of Cocktail You're Serving

What we've got here, is we have four distinct families of cocktails: we have a sour, a daiquiri, a bramble, and we have a cobbler.

It's always best to use fresh ingredients. Fresh ingredients obviously look better, taste better, and if you use fresh ingredients, it's going to be firm, it's going to look nice, it won't mush.

Using Fruit in a Sour Drink

We're using a sour, right here. We have a whiskey sour. Traditionally, what you want to garnish a whiskey sour with is a lemon wheel, or a half wheel, in this case we'll use a half wheel - and a cherry, we're using a brandy cherry. Now, we're using the lemon because, in the sour, which has egg white, it also has lemon juice, so traditional classic sour we got egg white, we got lemon juice, some sipple and some whiskey. So, the lemon with the lemon obviously goes very well together.

Using Fruit in a Sour Drink

The next drink is a daiquiri. We've got a classic rum daiquiri right here, and it's already got the lime juice in it, so why just garnish and use a nice lime wheel.

Using Fruit in a Bramble

And then we've got a bramble. A bramble is a drink created in England by a gentleman by the name of Dick Bradsell, and he actually muddles the blackberry in here, so continuing with that theme, we're going to use fresh ingredients, we're muddling some blackberry in here, we got some gin, lemon juice, some sipple - and we're just going to top it off with a couple of fresh blackberries like that.

Using Fruit in a Cobbler

And our final drink is a cobbler. Now, a cobbler is a family of cocktails created usually using a wine base spirit or aperatif wine. In this case we're using champagne. We have some fresh lemon peel, some fresh orange peel, some sugar, we're going to top it off. With cobbler, usually the definition is then you want to finish it off with some seasonal fruit. So, we have a little bit of an orange wedge to that, some blackberries, some raspberries - just because they look gorgeous and it makes the drink look nice and bright, we going to add a strawberry as well.

So there you have it, guys. Tips on using fresh ingredients, fresh fruit in your cocktails. For tips like these and other tips, please visit us at About.com.   Cheers!