The Golden Ratio

When discussing the Devil’s Own I briefly touched upon the golden ratio. It’s a system that has been put forth by Jamie Boudreau. Why not let the man explain the system himself:

Before we continue, a little quiz: do you recognize the bottle that he is holding at the beginning of the clip? It has seen some coverage in this blog.

Okay, so on the golden ratio.

Jamie is talking in ounces, but basically it comes down to a 6:3:1 ratio for spirits, aperitif and modifier. If you are using centiliters, you probably don’t even have to do some math: 10 cl sounds fine for most cocktail glasses.

This golden ratio is a starting point. It’s a bit risky to say it will work 95% of the time. And even though some recipes might work, that’s not the same as mixing a legendary recipe. It will require some thinking and experience to balance the flavors, certainly if you’re in the mood for a specific kind of cocktail. Even if you stumble upon something memorable, it might still pay off to tweak around a bit with the ratio or the bitters.

Don’t forget that Jamie mentions that you can add bitters to taste. Bitters are the magic wand of the bartender. We only have Angostura at the moment, but we will be adding more later. It’s that kind of finishing touches which can make a cocktail truly shine.

Apart from freeform mixing, when you are trying out new combinations, the golden ratio will be very useful in the following situations:

·        You are mixing somewhere else without access to your bar and have to make do with the stuff that happens to lay around (just pray they have some vermouth).

·        You are not satisfied with the way a vermouth cocktail tastes, and want to play around with the ratios. The golden ratio could be your choice alternative.

Just don’t go in blindly. In this forum someone tried a combination of tequila, Lillet and Drambuie. Well, the Lillet is not the problem here (it will probably never be, actually). But Drambuie is honeysweet whisky liqueur and tequila is the most outspoken, harsh, hard-to-mix spirit you could ever choose. There’s a reason there are not many cocktails with Drambuie and not many (good) cocktails with tequila: they tend to make problems with other ingredients. I can’t even start to imagine how these could work together in a drink.

There’s still something useful to gain from the forum page, though. As you can read there, the golden ratio isn’t the only ‘standard ratio’ or ‘no fail ratio’ that’s being used out there. And of course, not every cocktail has aperitif wine as an ingredient.

But go ahead and play around with the idea. Who knows, maybe you’ll stumble upon something brilliant.