Kitchen Skills: Bartending Basics

Sadly, most people don't have a home bar, and are forced to conduct their amateur mixology experiments in the kitchen. This instructable will show you the basics of bartending by walking you through the process of making a classic whiskey sour.  I will outline the techniques I use to make my own sour mix, fresh lime and lemon juice, and simple syrup.  Then I'll teach you to shake up a drink, cut the garnishes for it and show you a quick trick to fancy up your home bar (or kitchen table). Read on to get started mixing your own cocktails in your kitchen!

Required tools:
Serrated Knife
Shaker set
Measuring devices 
Glassware

Ingredients for the whiskey sour:
Lemons
Limes
Whiskey (low quality is fine since we are mainly going to be mostly tasting the mixer rather than the whiskey) 
Sugar
Egg whites
Ice

Step 1 Making Simple Syrup

Simple syrup is exactly what the name implies, a very simple syrup. It is used to sweeten drinks without adding any additional flavors. Rose's lime juice is basically a simple syrup with lime flavoring and grenadine is simple syrup with cherry flavoring. When mixing drinks with either of these, the taste can quickly become overpowering and tends to be slightly artificial. It is much better to whip up your own simple syrup then add in fresh juices to suit your tastes.

The process for making simple syrup is very straightforward: 

1) Boil some water.

2) Dissolve a lot of sugar in the water. Basically keep adding in sugar until it stops disolving in the boiling water. 

3) Let cool and enjoy your simple syrup. 

For the batch of whiskey sours that I made I boiled two cups of water and added in about two cups of sugar. You can play around with this ratio but keep in mind that lower sugar to water ratios will be less sweet and less viscous and higher sugar to water ratios will be sweeter, more viscous, and slightly harder to pour.  

Comments

[barefootbohemian]

Congrats! You did a gret job!

[Penolopy Bulnick]

I never knew there was a "sour mix" that was used! Thanks for sharing!