Archives for 2014/12 (Blog)

David Embury classifies cocktails into two distinct groups: sour cocktails and aromatic cocktails. I've written in the past about sour cocktails but have been mostly silent about aromatic ones.

Until NOW, that is! It was an omission that just had to be rectified. Right? RIGHT?!

Aromatic cocktails are flavoured by some kind of aromatic wine, spirit, or bitters. Based on my (limited) experiments, I broadly categorize these drinks into:

But really, there's no real rule here. You basically take a base spirit and you flavour it with some combination of flavouring agent(s). Pretty simple.

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I've posted before about sour cocktails, but I felt that the subject deserved a bit more elabouration. The material here, as before, is quite heavily inspired by (some might say stolen from) David Embury's classic taxonomy from The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks.

Embury's basic approach was to define a sour cocktail template. In his mind, a sour cocktail consisted of:

Different combinations of spirits and sweeteners lead, of course, to different cocktails. The exact ratios obviously depend on your personal taste and the actual ingredients you decide to use. My preferred ratio matches Embury's:

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