The Best Cocktail Shakers for Beginners and How to Use them.1

AH, THE COCKTAIL SHAKER.

It’s the quintessential image of a bartender: Cocktail shaker in one hand and bar towel in the other. But?what is the story behind this fairly specific bar tool, and how do you choose the best cocktail shaker for you?

THE BASICS: WHAT’S A COCKTAIL SHAKER?

While we’ve probably all seen a picture of what a cocktail shaker looks like, (if not – you’re in luck, there are a lot of those images in this post!), it’s worth taking a second to go over the basics.?A cocktail shaker is a special tool designed to do Three things:

IT THOROUGHLY MIXES COLD BEVERAGES:

If you’ve ever tried mixing sugar into your iced tea, you’ve probably noticed you had to stir?for-ev-er?before it’d finally dissolve. That’s a problem bartenders face all the time – cold ingredients take more effort to mix together.?The cocktail shaker evolved as a great tool to expedite the stirring process behind the bar?and (let’s not forget) look pretty awesome while doing it.

The reason? All of that ice in the shaker acts a bit like a “blender ball”. As a result, your liquid moves around a whole lot more than it would with just a spoon. More movement results in faster mixing.

IT WILL CHILL A DRINK SUPER FAST:

While you’re stirring away on your iced tea, that bartender has already finished three cocktails and probably cleaned the bar as well.?Cocktail shakers are extremely good at making lukewarm ingredients (like booze) really cold and really fast.

Why? While that ice is acting as a blender ball to help mix ingredients together, it’s also chilling down the ingredients as they pass by. Shaking the cocktail makes the ingredients pass over the ice much more frequently and the ice breaks into smaller pieces, offering more cold surface area. The result? One very cold drink, and very quickly!

IT HELPS TO QUICKLY DILUTE THE DRINK

Wait, what? Like, on purpose? Yep, it’s a little known fact that?cocktails actually?need?to be diluted in order to taste right. In fact if you followed a cocktail recipe exactly and excluded the ice, mixed it all together really thoroughly and put it in the fridge to cool down, you’d find it probably tastes much too strong.

That’s because every cocktail recipe assumes 25-40% water dilution as a result of shaking.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE COCKTAIL SHAKER

If you think of a cocktail shaker as a “container used to mix a liquid” then you can argue that they have been in use for thousands of years. “The cocktail shaker can be traced to 7000 BCE in prehispanic Mexico and South America, where the jar gourd was used as a closed container.” (Source) But as a tool behind the bar, it’s much more recent.

Until the mid 1800’s, bartenders often mixed drinks by pouring them between who cups. Rumor has it an Innkeeper decided to make “a bit of a show” by placing a smaller cup inside the larger and shaking. The new method became much more common throughout the remainder of the 19th century and spurred quite a few patents related to this new style of mixing drinks. (The first I could find is this?lovely “apparatus for mixing drinks” by W. Harnett?– dated 1872.

Novelty cocktail shakers became popular in the early 1900’s, but not surprisingly their use dropped dramatically during prohibition, and again during the war effort of the 1940’s (as metal production was all but reserved for the war effort.)?After the 1950’s, cocktail shakers regained popularity and became much more commonplace in the home.

NEXT:HOW TO CHOOSE THE BEST COCKTAIL SHAKER FOR YOU?

(This article is reproduced from https://abarabove.com/cocktail-shakers/, browse the webpage in advance to learn. )