Cocktail Directory

Your Guide to Cocktails, Sip & Garnish

A good drink starts here.

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A garnish is not decoration. In most drinks it is the first thing you smell and therefore a large part of what you taste. Get it right and a good drink becomes a memorable one; skip it and something is quietly missing.

What a garnish is actually doing

Three jobs, in order of importance:

• Aroma. You smell a drink before you taste it, and smell carries most of flavour. An expressed citrus peel puts a fine mist of oil across the surface — that is why the Old Fashioned asks for one and why a peel dropped in without expressing does almost nothing.
• A flavour you meet at the edge. A salt rim, a sugar rim, Tajín. The drink tastes different at the rim than in the middle, deliberately.
• Looking like someone cared. Last, not first.

The techniques worth knowing

Expressing a peel. Cut a wide swath of citrus with as little pith as possible. Hold it skin-side down over the drink and pinch sharply — you should see the oil spray. Rub it around the rim, then drop it in or discard it.

Slapping herbs. Put a mint sprig in one palm and clap once. That ruptures the oil glands without bruising the leaf. Muddling a garnish sprig instead makes it bitter.

Half-rimming. Salt the outside of half the rim only. The drinker chooses each sip, and no salt falls into the drink to keep salting it.

Placement. A garnish should sit where your nose goes, not on the far side of the glass.

The common mistakes

• Pith on the peel — it is bitter and it does not carry oil
• Dropping a twist in without expressing it, which wastes the entire point
• Muddling mint meant for garnish, which turns it bitter and grassy
• Salting the whole rim, so every sip is a salt sip
• Garnishing an espresso martini before the crema settles, so the beans sink

Browse drinks by their garnish at /garnishes/, or see the full recipe directory.