The Art of Crafting Delicious Drinks: A Guide to Homebrewed Cocktails

Now we just need a little ice and a little salty crushed ice, it's a nice little experience it gets away from like this big clunky cube to more just like oh right, this is like almost a freaking dessert but uh yeah, it's just a really refreshing easy drinking. We're going to give it a little everbessence here, top it right off because I put like four ounces of mezcal in there, look at that, that looks nice huh? You put a little straw in there, if you want, got a little herby, little lemongrass, a little ginger. You know, it's not like you're sitting there in marvel at this thing, you want to go taking pictures of it or anything, but I tell you what, it's gonna do real nice, real nice. Oh that's nice, elevated little uh herby gingery minty uh lemongrass ranch water, mezcal ranch water, so cocktails I mean what's great about them and just like cooking is that you can bring it home, you can rip around on something that you were inspired by at a restaurant but before you know it, you got your own little dialed in personal cocktail like my spa ready ranch water. We're calling this the grapefruit refresher, angled towards summer drinking specifically I like fruity, I like sparkly, I like fun.

So today I'm making a non-alcoholic drink which I think is important to have those in your arsenal especially if you're having people over who don't drink or if you're like just like taking it easy. We've got this like acidic sweet but bitter grapefruit juice you've got the bright lime, I think the key for making a drink like this you want like a pretty punchy flavorful base and then you've got the secret ingredient which is preserved lemon paste, it's extremely salty preserved lemons are lemons that are cured in salt just like salt brightens up every ingredient when you're cooking it'll brighten up all of the components sort of make them shine and also like trick your palate into wanting more and feeling like it's quenching your thirst.

The other thing that's fun about this drink and I think summer drinks in general should air this direction is that it's batchable, we mix everything that isn't the soda in a pitcher and then one by one you just pour that over ice add some soda and add your garnishes and go, so that can be made and batched well in advance if you were to add mezcal or something to this that can be a part of what goes in the picture, the basic ratios are one and a half cups of grapefruit juice, a couple tablespoons of lime juice, and about a half teaspoon of preserved lemon puree. Grapefruit juice is really great here because of those like bitter undertones it's sweet it's got the citrusy vibes we'll make like a double-ish batch maybe more I just don't want it to look meager in the pitcher you know what I'm saying, citrus always goes really well together and I think the lime which is like very bright and acidic and the grapefruit which is like a little bit more mellow I think balance each other out really nicely.

And then we're gonna do just a little bit the preserved lemon puree, it's very salty it's bright lemony salty really good a little bit is going to go a long way, a lot of times people will put a pinch of salt in their cocktails but this is kind of doing the double duty of the lemon and the salt so we'll stir that up. Now we're gonna prep some garnishes just to be cute, a little lime wheel and then I'm gonna do a little grapefruit, I want really thin here because I'm going to line the inside of my glass with it ice is very important I mean when a cocktail bar has a good ice game you know that they have a good everything game because it means that they're paying attention to the details, I'm gonna fill it about halfway and then top top with soda, the like cleanness of sparkling water and violent bubbles almost hurts you so sparkly um I think that goes really well with these kinds of things.

And that is your grapefruit refresher, it feels very summery in a very good way. Oh the little saltiness is so delightful it takes like very few ingredients many that you probably already have and only one that you might have to seek out. I just think this is a really nice thing to be able to whip up in the summer when you want something a little more special um but not boozy, why is it called a ranch water oh man that's what they call it down in Texas Mexico you know like a spa water but you know down in Texas we don't have spas we got ranches so I think that's that's why that's my guess you might want to fact check that.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enif your cocktail has an umbrella you know it's gonna be a good time today we're in the test kitchen making our favorite cocktails you don't really need a ton of ingredients to make really great cocktails it can be as simple as a spirit and a citrus or as fancy and fun as like something blended in a coconut pick a fruit pick an herb you will be able to find something you love and that is why cocktails are so great yeah i drink about 25 of these i'm pretty much drinking cocktails everywhere i go one of my favorite cocktails is the pisco sour pisco is essentially just a distilled wine few ingredients nothing too fancy egg whites it adds this foamed aerated silky texture to a cocktail you have lime juice simple syrup the pisco itself and we also have the angostura bitters where the lime juice and the sort of acidity that you get from the cocktail might be like really biting on your tongue egg white kind of brings that down oh my god and we're serving our drink in a little young coconut basically want to create a nice opening that feels comfortable to drink what i like to do is make two sort of pilot holes that'll help for the water to drain properly if you have tools handy you can use a drill if you want to and really get in there you typically wouldn't drink the water of a brown coconut sometimes you'll open it up it feels like a little like fermented or vinegary but for younger ones it's totally a-okay so now the coconut is open i'm gonna fill with ice add all of my ingredients got my egg whites big fan of egg whites it's gonna make it nice and frothy and creamy we have two ounces of our lime juice we're gonna use one and a half ounces of our simple syrup and then we're going to add four ounces of our pisco to the shaker as well my lid goes on so i'm gonna shake you're gonna feel the temperature of your shaker change that's how you know the ice is working it's doing its job and so into the young coconut you can already kind of see the foam is sort of working its way to the top so that's cool too like the airy part kind of flow to the top then you have this really beautiful sort of cloud of foam on the top of your cocktail and now what we're gonna do is take our angustura and i'm just gonna do a little boop through so you get like a nice leaf pattern and then you have a pisco sour you took very little ingredients and made something that feels like really fun and cool for the summer super simple wow this is taking me to me and uh lindsay lohan and mykonos and we're dancing we're doing all the choreography together i'm actually just watching her i'm like sitting in my portrait and i'm like you go girl i don't drink so today i'm going to be making a honey berry kombucha spritzer using some blackberries herbs a little bit of honey and some kombucha to give us a really nice complex flavor for me a really good mocktail is like a little bit herbaceous a little bit fruity and it's definitely carbonated this would be like ideal if i was like hanging out by the pool um like in august when it's like swelteringly hot this would be perfect because it's super refreshing kombucha adds a lot to cocktails it's really nice and tart it's bubbly so tangy and there's so much happening that you can't really get from anything else lemon juice or lime juice alone won't give you that like fermented sour quality that kombucha has i'm gonna grab a glass and i'm gonna add about like an ounce of blackberries so that's like five to eight blackberries i just love blackberries so i thought they'd be super delicious but obviously go for whatever fruit you're into and then i'm gonna go in with like maybe the mint leaves from two sprigs that feels like enough basil would also be really nice like summer basil is like particularly sweet if you like that licoricey flavor thai basil would be super nice too and then i'm gonna go in with honey i don't like things too sweet but the kombucha is pretty sour so a good like two teaspoons is plenty for me but if you want to keep things more sour go with one i also like to add like a little pinch of salt that's going to help draw out some of the moisture from the berry so we get like a syrupy situation so i'm just going to muddle this together until like the blackberries are really syrupy and jammy already you can smell like the oils from the mint it smells super herbaceous and earthy it's really nice and then because i don't want to get rid of all the carbonation i'm just gonna stir it in and pour it down the spine of this you want like eight ounces when you pour the kombucha down the spine you sort of maintain the carbonation we don't want to like kill it just because i want to combine the flavors i'm just going to stir it together really gently the benefit to shaking is to aerate and dilute but since there's no like hard alcohol in here we don't need to dilute anything and because kabucha is carbonated we don't really need to aerate either so stirring is just easier and makes more sense i'm gonna put some ice in this glass and i'm just gonna strain it through i don't mind the blackberry bits like the seeds add a really nice texture but the mint leaves i don't want to get into the final drink garnish with a little bit of fresh mint cute it smells so good and the color is so beautiful the blackberries give it this like deep like very cute super good the kombucha is really tart and so you're getting that like acidic quality and sourness and then the berries gave it a little bit of flavor and sweetness and then the mint just sort of like lands everything it's really gorgeous whether or not you drink alcohol i think you can still have a lot of fun with drinks i really love how creative you can get this one hits all the right notes for me um and yeah it's super delicious margaritas for me are an incredible kind of refreshing cocktail to drink i feel like anything with tequila is going to be a great day this one for me is even more special because of the pog in it this is pog i drank this growing up so there's definitely a lot of nostalgia with this but it's passion fruit orange and guava nectar in a can it makes the perfect vessel for a summer cocktail and then this special bag it's called li hing moi powder if you ever had tamarind candies growing up where it's like very sour very acidic and then a little bit salty outside this is what you would find in powdered form i don't want to have a bunch of like mint leaves all smashed in my glass so i made a mint simple syrup super easy to make it's one part sugar to one part water and just let your mint steep in it cut a little bit of lime and we're gonna rim our glass on the top so that we can put a little bit of leahing powder on the rim the best way to rim your glass is to put it on a plate and then you can just kind of turn type of glass that we're using today is a hurricane glass this is going to be a really bright beautiful cocktail you get to see everything in it we're going to add some lime juice for a little bit of brightness i'm going to add mint simple syrup and then for the spirit we're going to add tequila i think the best running joke at our restaurant is do you really know mel if you haven't had tequila with mel so here it is we're choosing a silver tequila this one gets accentuated by the things that you're using with it adding an ounce and a half of tequila and then the same amount of pog all right and then i'm just going to add some ice cubes and we're going to shake it um the reason why we're shaking this cocktail is because we want to make sure that all of the flavors of the tequila the pog the lime get equally distributed through if i was gonna make a stirred cocktail it's more to keep the integrity of the spirit um without having the water dilute it oh the perfect amount don't forget your umbrella there is your summer pogarita oh my god i can probably drink like five of these it's not too sweet at all the mint syrup comes out but it isn't overpowering either i might be here in the test kitchen but this feels like i'm on a beach in the philippines somewhere i'm a big tequila mezcal guy in the past uh three years or so a lot of them tend to have smoky notes to it but then also kind of like a vegetal uh that i can't quite put a finger on it's like a little riff on a ranch water which is a tequila or a mezcal uh mixed with seltzer we're gonna jazz it up a little bit with some aromatics and uh that's it it's my drink it's what i'm drinking all right and it's gonna start with a little bit of ginger all right so i'll take like a little disc you know what would we say that is half inch thick depending on what side it is three eighths a chubby three-eighths and we'll put that right in there same thing with the old lemongrass nice little primo section oh that's good i'm gonna put that right in there nice we'll put a little tarragon for muddlage too and we'll do a little bit of mint in there for the muddlage okay i'm a juice of one lime guy i like it a lot of citrus in there so i do the juice of one lime per serving muddle that up crush that ginger not too much i don't want it to be like filled with all different particles i just want to bruise it up open it up let those aromatics and oils be released oh and then we'll give it a good old sandra lee pour an ounce or two that's good now we just need a little ice and a little salty crushed ice it's a nice little experience it gets away from like this big clunky cube to more just like oh right this is like almost a freaking dessert but uh yeah it's just a really refreshing easy drinking we're going to give it a little everbessence here top it right off because i put like four ounces of mezcal in there look at that that looks nice huh you put a little straw in there if you want got a little herby little lemongrass a little ginger you know it's not like you're sitting there in marvel at this thing you want to go taking pictures of it or anything but i tell you what it's gonna do real nice real nice oh that's nice elevated little uh herby gingery minty uh lemongrass ranch water mezcal ranch water so cocktails i mean what's great about them and just like cooking is that you can bring it home you can rip around on something that you were inspired by at a restaurant but before you know it you got your own little dialed in personal cocktail like my spa ready ranch water we're calling this the grapefruit refresher angled towards summer drinking specifically i like fruity i like sparkly i like fun so today i'm making a non-alcoholic drink which i think it's important to have those in your arsenal especially if you're having people over who don't drink or if you're like just like taking it easy we've got this like acidic sweet but bitter grapefruit juice you've got the bright lime i think the key for making a drink like this you want like a pretty punchy flavorful base and then you've got the secret ingredient which is preserved lemon paste it's extremely salty preserved lemons are lemons that are cured in salt just like salt brightens up every ingredient when you're cooking it'll brighten up all of the components sort of make them shine and also like trick your palate into wanting more and feeling like it's quenching your thirst the other thing that's fun about this drink and i think summer drinks in general should air this direction is that it's batchable we mix everything that isn't the soda in a pitcher and then one by one you just pour that over ice add some soda and add your garnishes and go so that can be made and batched well in advance if you were to add mezcal or something to this that can be a part of what goes in the picture the basic ratios are one and a half cups of grapefruit juice a couple tablespoons of lime juice and about a half teaspoon of preserved lemon puree grapefruit juice is really great here because of those like bitter undertones it's sweet it's got the citrusy vibes we'll make like a double-ish batch maybe more i just don't want it to look meager in the pitcher you know what i'm saying citrus always goes really well together and i think the lime which is like very bright and acidic and the grapefruit which is like a little bit more mellow i think balance each other out really nicely and then we're gonna do just a little bit the preserved lemon puree it's very salty it's bright lemony salty really good a little bit is going to go a long way a lot of times people will put a pinch of salt in their cocktails but this is kind of doing the double duty of the lemon and the salt so we'll stir that up and this is when you died your spirit if you wanted to do that yup delightful okay now we're going to prep some garnishes just to be cute a little lime wheel and then i'm gonna do a little grapefruit i want really thin here because i'm going to line the inside of my glass with it ice is very important i mean when a cocktail bar has a good ice game you know that they have a good everything game because it means that they're paying attention to the details i'm gonna fill it about halfway and then top top with soda the like cleanness of sparkling water and violent bubbles almost hurts you so sparkly um i think that goes really well with these kinds of things and that is your grapefruit refresher it feels very summery in a very good way oh the little saltiness is so delightful it takes like very few ingredients many that you probably already have and only one that you might have to seek out i just think this is a really nice thing to be able to whip up in the summer when you want something a little more special um but not boozy why is it called a ranch water oh man that's what they call it down in texas mexico you know like a spa water but you know down in texas we don't have spas we got ranches so i think that's that's why that's my guess you might want to fact check thatif your cocktail has an umbrella you know it's gonna be a good time today we're in the test kitchen making our favorite cocktails you don't really need a ton of ingredients to make really great cocktails it can be as simple as a spirit and a citrus or as fancy and fun as like something blended in a coconut pick a fruit pick an herb you will be able to find something you love and that is why cocktails are so great yeah i drink about 25 of these i'm pretty much drinking cocktails everywhere i go one of my favorite cocktails is the pisco sour pisco is essentially just a distilled wine few ingredients nothing too fancy egg whites it adds this foamed aerated silky texture to a cocktail you have lime juice simple syrup the pisco itself and we also have the angostura bitters where the lime juice and the sort of acidity that you get from the cocktail might be like really biting on your tongue egg white kind of brings that down oh my god and we're serving our drink in a little young coconut basically want to create a nice opening that feels comfortable to drink what i like to do is make two sort of pilot holes that'll help for the water to drain properly if you have tools handy you can use a drill if you want to and really get in there you typically wouldn't drink the water of a brown coconut sometimes you'll open it up it feels like a little like fermented or vinegary but for younger ones it's totally a-okay so now the coconut is open i'm gonna fill with ice add all of my ingredients got my egg whites big fan of egg whites it's gonna make it nice and frothy and creamy we have two ounces of our lime juice we're gonna use one and a half ounces of our simple syrup and then we're going to add four ounces of our pisco to the shaker as well my lid goes on so i'm gonna shake you're gonna feel the temperature of your shaker change that's how you know the ice is working it's doing its job and so into the young coconut you can already kind of see the foam is sort of working its way to the top so that's cool too like the airy part kind of flow to the top then you have this really beautiful sort of cloud of foam on the top of your cocktail and now what we're gonna do is take our angustura and i'm just gonna do a little boop through so you get like a nice leaf pattern and then you have a pisco sour you took very little ingredients and made something that feels like really fun and cool for the summer super simple wow this is taking me to me and uh lindsay lohan and mykonos and we're dancing we're doing all the choreography together i'm actually just watching her i'm like sitting in my portrait and i'm like you go girl i don't drink so today i'm going to be making a honey berry kombucha spritzer using some blackberries herbs a little bit of honey and some kombucha to give us a really nice complex flavor for me a really good mocktail is like a little bit herbaceous a little bit fruity and it's definitely carbonated this would be like ideal if i was like hanging out by the pool um like in august when it's like swelteringly hot this would be perfect because it's super refreshing kombucha adds a lot to cocktails it's really nice and tart it's bubbly so tangy and there's so much happening that you can't really get from anything else lemon juice or lime juice alone won't give you that like fermented sour quality that kombucha has i'm gonna grab a glass and i'm gonna add about like an ounce of blackberries so that's like five to eight blackberries i just love blackberries so i thought they'd be super delicious but obviously go for whatever fruit you're into and then i'm gonna go in with like maybe the mint leaves from two sprigs that feels like enough basil would also be really nice like summer basil is like particularly sweet if you like that licoricey flavor thai basil would be super nice too and then i'm gonna go in with honey i don't like things too sweet but the kombucha is pretty sour so a good like two teaspoons is plenty for me but if you want to keep things more sour go with one i also like to add like a little pinch of salt that's going to help draw out some of the moisture from the berry so we get like a syrupy situation so i'm just going to muddle this together until like the blackberries are really syrupy and jammy already you can smell like the oils from the mint it smells super herbaceous and earthy it's really nice and then because i don't want to get rid of all the carbonation i'm just gonna stir it in and pour it down the spine of this you want like eight ounces when you pour the kombucha down the spine you sort of maintain the carbonation we don't want to like kill it just because i want to combine the flavors i'm just going to stir it together really gently the benefit to shaking is to aerate and dilute but since there's no like hard alcohol in here we don't need to dilute anything and because kabucha is carbonated we don't really need to aerate either so stirring is just easier and makes more sense i'm gonna put some ice in this glass and i'm just gonna strain it through i don't mind the blackberry bits like the seeds add a really nice texture but the mint leaves i don't want to get into the final drink garnish with a little bit of fresh mint cute it smells so good and the color is so beautiful the blackberries give it this like deep like very cute super good the kombucha is really tart and so you're getting that like acidic quality and sourness and then the berries gave it a little bit of flavor and sweetness and then the mint just sort of like lands everything it's really gorgeous whether or not you drink alcohol i think you can still have a lot of fun with drinks i really love how creative you can get this one hits all the right notes for me um and yeah it's super delicious margaritas for me are an incredible kind of refreshing cocktail to drink i feel like anything with tequila is going to be a great day this one for me is even more special because of the pog in it this is pog i drank this growing up so there's definitely a lot of nostalgia with this but it's passion fruit orange and guava nectar in a can it makes the perfect vessel for a summer cocktail and then this special bag it's called li hing moi powder if you ever had tamarind candies growing up where it's like very sour very acidic and then a little bit salty outside this is what you would find in powdered form i don't want to have a bunch of like mint leaves all smashed in my glass so i made a mint simple syrup super easy to make it's one part sugar to one part water and just let your mint steep in it cut a little bit of lime and we're gonna rim our glass on the top so that we can put a little bit of leahing powder on the rim the best way to rim your glass is to put it on a plate and then you can just kind of turn type of glass that we're using today is a hurricane glass this is going to be a really bright beautiful cocktail you get to see everything in it we're going to add some lime juice for a little bit of brightness i'm going to add mint simple syrup and then for the spirit we're going to add tequila i think the best running joke at our restaurant is do you really know mel if you haven't had tequila with mel so here it is we're choosing a silver tequila this one gets accentuated by the things that you're using with it adding an ounce and a half of tequila and then the same amount of pog all right and then i'm just going to add some ice cubes and we're going to shake it um the reason why we're shaking this cocktail is because we want to make sure that all of the flavors of the tequila the pog the lime get equally distributed through if i was gonna make a stirred cocktail it's more to keep the integrity of the spirit um without having the water dilute it oh the perfect amount don't forget your umbrella there is your summer pogarita oh my god i can probably drink like five of these it's not too sweet at all the mint syrup comes out but it isn't overpowering either i might be here in the test kitchen but this feels like i'm on a beach in the philippines somewhere i'm a big tequila mezcal guy in the past uh three years or so a lot of them tend to have smoky notes to it but then also kind of like a vegetal uh that i can't quite put a finger on it's like a little riff on a ranch water which is a tequila or a mezcal uh mixed with seltzer we're gonna jazz it up a little bit with some aromatics and uh that's it it's my drink it's what i'm drinking all right and it's gonna start with a little bit of ginger all right so i'll take like a little disc you know what would we say that is half inch thick depending on what side it is three eighths a chubby three-eighths and we'll put that right in there same thing with the old lemongrass nice little primo section oh that's good i'm gonna put that right in there nice we'll put a little tarragon for muddlage too and we'll do a little bit of mint in there for the muddlage okay i'm a juice of one lime guy i like it a lot of citrus in there so i do the juice of one lime per serving muddle that up crush that ginger not too much i don't want it to be like filled with all different particles i just want to bruise it up open it up let those aromatics and oils be released oh and then we'll give it a good old sandra lee pour an ounce or two that's good now we just need a little ice and a little salty crushed ice it's a nice little experience it gets away from like this big clunky cube to more just like oh right this is like almost a freaking dessert but uh yeah it's just a really refreshing easy drinking we're going to give it a little everbessence here top it right off because i put like four ounces of mezcal in there look at that that looks nice huh you put a little straw in there if you want got a little herby little lemongrass a little ginger you know it's not like you're sitting there in marvel at this thing you want to go taking pictures of it or anything but i tell you what it's gonna do real nice real nice oh that's nice elevated little uh herby gingery minty uh lemongrass ranch water mezcal ranch water so cocktails i mean what's great about them and just like cooking is that you can bring it home you can rip around on something that you were inspired by at a restaurant but before you know it you got your own little dialed in personal cocktail like my spa ready ranch water we're calling this the grapefruit refresher angled towards summer drinking specifically i like fruity i like sparkly i like fun so today i'm making a non-alcoholic drink which i think it's important to have those in your arsenal especially if you're having people over who don't drink or if you're like just like taking it easy we've got this like acidic sweet but bitter grapefruit juice you've got the bright lime i think the key for making a drink like this you want like a pretty punchy flavorful base and then you've got the secret ingredient which is preserved lemon paste it's extremely salty preserved lemons are lemons that are cured in salt just like salt brightens up every ingredient when you're cooking it'll brighten up all of the components sort of make them shine and also like trick your palate into wanting more and feeling like it's quenching your thirst the other thing that's fun about this drink and i think summer drinks in general should air this direction is that it's batchable we mix everything that isn't the soda in a pitcher and then one by one you just pour that over ice add some soda and add your garnishes and go so that can be made and batched well in advance if you were to add mezcal or something to this that can be a part of what goes in the picture the basic ratios are one and a half cups of grapefruit juice a couple tablespoons of lime juice and about a half teaspoon of preserved lemon puree grapefruit juice is really great here because of those like bitter undertones it's sweet it's got the citrusy vibes we'll make like a double-ish batch maybe more i just don't want it to look meager in the pitcher you know what i'm saying citrus always goes really well together and i think the lime which is like very bright and acidic and the grapefruit which is like a little bit more mellow i think balance each other out really nicely and then we're gonna do just a little bit the preserved lemon puree it's very salty it's bright lemony salty really good a little bit is going to go a long way a lot of times people will put a pinch of salt in their cocktails but this is kind of doing the double duty of the lemon and the salt so we'll stir that up and this is when you died your spirit if you wanted to do that yup delightful okay now we're going to prep some garnishes just to be cute a little lime wheel and then i'm gonna do a little grapefruit i want really thin here because i'm going to line the inside of my glass with it ice is very important i mean when a cocktail bar has a good ice game you know that they have a good everything game because it means that they're paying attention to the details i'm gonna fill it about halfway and then top top with soda the like cleanness of sparkling water and violent bubbles almost hurts you so sparkly um i think that goes really well with these kinds of things and that is your grapefruit refresher it feels very summery in a very good way oh the little saltiness is so delightful it takes like very few ingredients many that you probably already have and only one that you might have to seek out i just think this is a really nice thing to be able to whip up in the summer when you want something a little more special um but not boozy why is it called a ranch water oh man that's what they call it down in texas mexico you know like a spa water but you know down in texas we don't have spas we got ranches so i think that's that's why that's my guess you might want to fact check that\n"