Cocktail Secrets

With summer officially here, blended drinks - also known as frozen drinks - are just the thing to cool you off on a hot summer afternoon. But the trick with blended drinks is that you have to get the balance of ice and liquid ingredients just right. Too much liquid ingredients and you get a runny drink that won’t stay cold for long. Too much ice and you’ll have to spoon your drink out of the glass.

To blend the drink properly, start out with what the recipe recommends. For the best results, use store bought crushed ice or mini ice cubes. Once you’ve blended it, try sloshing it around. If it’s moving too freely, like a big pitcher of water with a few bits of floating ice, then you need to add more ice and blend it again. If you try sloshing it around or pouring it and it’s one big frozen ice ball, you’ve added too much ice and you’ll need to add some liquid ingredients. Try to use to the same proportions the recipe calls for so that you don’t inadvertently throw off the flavor.

A perfectly blended drink is consistently icy - no liquid parts - yet it still moves very much like liquid. You can easily pour it from the pitcher to the glass and it can be drank easily with the first pull on the straw.

If your blended creation still has chunks of ice too big to go up a straw after 45 seconds or more of blending, then it’s likely you have a problem with your blender and you may want to invest in a new one. Cheap blenders are notorious for not being able to blend ice to a silky smooth consistency. For quality blender than can blend almost anything, check out Will It Blend. The videos of the things they blend from cans of coke (still in the can) to iPods to tiki torches is not to be missed!

The Webtender, which you can find at www.webtender.com has been online for 12 years now, going all the way back to 1995. It’s a huge database, featuring over 6000 cocktail recipes from nearly 4000 contributors!

On the positive side there are a lot of recipes to choose from and you can search or browse in many different ways. For example you can browse by name of the cocktail or by an ingredient in the cocktail or by category or even by the glass the cocktail is served in. You can also search directly for specific cocktail or ingredient. But perhaps the best way to find cocktails you can make is to use the “In My Bar” feature to tell Webtender what ingredients you have on hand and it’ll give you a list of cocktail you can make.

You’ll also find resources on how to become a bartender, a forum to ask questions and interact with the bartending community as well as fun little items like a drinking games.

On the negative side, as I mentioned Webtender went online in 1995 and it still looks very much the as it did a decade ago. You’ll find an unattractive gray background and a no frills experience. Pop-ups and banner ads still assault the eyes. But somewhat more problematic than the ugliness is that the database doesn’t have any quality controls. Anyone can submit a cocktail and it might be correct and it might not be. Often you’ll find multiple versions of many recipes and it’s left to you to decide which one to try.

While it does have it’s flaws, the Webtender is still a valuable resource and can help you find cocktails to mix. The “In My Bar” feature is quite useful, but you’ll have to wade through over 400 ingredients and maintain your list as you add new ones and use up old ones.