All you need to know about Shakers and Shaking Cocktails

what's up guys welcome back to the educated bar flight today we are partnered up with bar fly mixology gear to talk a little bit about shakers and shaking cocktails it's been a while since we've done uh just a video on sort of beginning technique i wanted to get back to it and so today that's what we're going to be doing as you can see i have a bunch of different shakers laid out in front of me we're going to talk a little bit about each one the most common style shaker that you will see is a grand and a mini grand tin this is 18 ounces this is 28 ounces it fits into the tin at an angle like so so you have a straight line on one side and then it is a curved line on the other side you will notice that you've done it right because you have this little crescent moon shape right here and it locks so when you nest it in you give it a little tap like that and then it should lock in place and when you shake it won't explode all over yourself and then to release the tin all you have to do is hit it right there and pull it and you have released your tin the other type of boston shaker that you're going to see in bars is one with a tempered glass top again it nests in quite the same way it actually nests in a little bit more this glass should be tempered glass because you don't want it to chip or break although i gotta say that i have had chipping and breaking happen when i use these types of glasses and so i really don't prefer them again it locks and unlocks in much the same way the other thing about this is that i don't really like the heaviness of it and the way that it shakes as just for me it's just not my preference but you can use that if you want they are all grand and mini grand tins but they all have different features now this one is going to be your most common it's like a vollrath style shaker all of these shakers are weighted with these particular ones the weight is on the bottom and like this little cup that is welded onto the bottom of your tin you will see these are the most common and they're the lightest version of this tin this is like a very good beginning tin set it is very affordable after prolonged use and this hasn't happened to any of my barfly ones but after prolonged use this little cup tends to pop off and then your weight is gone in the tin that brings me to the next style here which is a vintage style you know it's got these nice little rings on it and then the weight is actually a cup on the bottom again this is going to be welded on i have put this through some very hard use and this has not popped off yet i really like the weight of this as well again it nests very nicely it comes apart very nicely one of my preferred tins that i use and then the last one is this one that they were calling the superfly shaker and what i really love about this is that it's very heavy but the weight is actually inside the tin so there's nothing to pop off and it's just very nice and elegant and it has this very nice weight to it so that when you're shaking you don't have to shake very hard to get a very hard shake if that makes sense all right this last shaker is called a cobbler shaker it was created in 1884 by a guy named edward houck and this shaker has become synonymous with japanese bartending in the japanese style and so it has become very very popular you will not see it in a lot of u.s bars although i have seen it used a little bit more and more especially for those bars who like to affect that japanese hard shake technique which we will talk about in a little bit i do not prefer the shaker because it tends to stick there's a lot of reasons why this cobbler shaker tends to get stuck together and i don't want to get into them here because that could be a whole another episode and it would be a rather boring episode so i'm not going to shoot that when it does stick together if you are working in a bar and you are making cocktails for service you are making cocktails for a patron and you have your cocktail stuck inside here it is very frustrating when you cannot get it apart there are two different styles of shaking a cocktail there is the american style and there is the japanese style the japanese shake was created by a guy named kazuo ueda he realized that when he had adopted this particular shake he got superior texture aeration and dilution of his cocktail so as the japanese bartending style became more popular western bartenders started to adapt to this and it became known as the japanese heart shake although in the japan it is not referred to as a hard shake marius asked me like what year the japanese heart shake sort of became synonymous with japanese bartending or the evolution of japanese bartending and i really can't speak to that because i haven't studied enough about it not to mention the fact that most things in the bartending in cocktail creation world people don't usually like put a date stamp on things that they create usually they're an evolution and so i'm assuming that this japanese hard shake is was also an evolution for its creator throughout the course of his career but i will say that in the mid 2000s when people started to notice the intricate ways that the japanese bartenders were creating their drinks and everything that went into drink creation it exploded and then the japanese heart shake became poster child for japanese bartending in general this kind of brings me to my next point though that shaking is a very singular thing and everyone will find their own style and i just want you guys to know that there is no such thing as a wrong shake but you are trying to do a couple of things i'm just going to show you very slowly what a japanese heart shake looks like because we've been talking about it so much although i have never tried to learn it really and i don't and i can't really do it although i know what it is so the japanese hard shake is a three-pronged shake that goes sort of in in an e pattern well first of all they hold their shaker kind of like this right when people do it right and you shake up and then in the middle you twist and then you come back down and so you have this you know kind of it's sort of like two triangles like that and you just do it really fast the american style shaking is literally just a two-prong shake and you're going in a triangle pattern so you're going like this now there are a couple of things to keep in mind about proper shaking and this has everything to do with just taking your body into consideration and nothing to do with what's like bad or good all right so first things first when you shake you want to have if you're a beginner at it i like to tell people to put their hands on the bottom of their shaker like this and put their hand on the top shaker like that just in case any pressure builds up in there like if you have egg whites in there you don't want to get cocktail all over you and that's going to control that secondly you don't want to be shaking up here because what happens is that you start to strain this muscle and that can lead to a rotator cuff injury now that is usually what's called a repetitive strain injury although i will say this that i have seen people hurt themselves and people have never shaken cocktails hurt themselves so although this is considered a repetitive strain injury and so you don't want to do this repetitively you can hurt yourself on just one go the other thing is that you don't want to shake down here for similar reasons you're just putting extra strain on your back and on your arms and so what i like to do is tell people to shake from the heart right here and then you want to shake in this area like this and then the other thing is that like shaking is not just about function it's not just about aeration it's not just about dilution and texture it is about those things but it's also about kind of a show right so when you're bartending whether you're bartending for somebody or whether you're bartending at a bar you're kind of creating a little bit of a show you're showing people the effort that you're going through there is this thing that i have mentioned a lot on this channel it is a way of approaching your cocktail it was taught to me by a good friend of mine fellow bartender danny symbol who was taught this by his bar mentor and passed it along to me and that is that when you're shaking you should keep in mind the italian word sprezzatura that literally translates to taking something technically difficult and making it look very easy a very good example of sprezzatura while you're shaking is looking at not me because i always have this weird grimace on my face that makes me look like branch from the trolls movies take a look at steve the bartender that sort of ease and smile that he has when he's bartending makes it look not like it's a very difficult straining thing to do but very pleasurable and then also very easy to do i haven't officially said what's happening inside this tin although i've mentioned it quite a bit in this video but let's get into the specifics so what you're doing inside this tin is chilling diluting and then not more importantly but very importantly aerating the cocktail and aeration is one of the key things that separates shaking a cocktail from stirring a cocktail so what you are doing is you are circulating air inside this tin and what that air is doing is whipping the cocktail into a froth so things like lime juice and to a lesser extent lemon juice have a foaming quality in it that when you run air through it they get really nice and foamy and you get this very nice kind of frothy milkshake style texture to your cocktail so the other thing that's very important about aerated cocktails is that the aeration creates these tiny little bubbles and those tiny little bubbles smooth out the cocktail and take away the harshness of the alcohol and so you have something that is very it's properly diluted right everything is combined nicely and then on top of that you have smoothed out the cocktail and you have made it something that you're not gonna get a lot of alcohol burn you're not gonna get that ethanol flavor all right now i put some ice in this i'm just gonna show you guys how i shake we're gonna be doing that like american style shake so this last little piece before i get to actually shaking just this last little piece of thing it's just very helpful to think of your hands and this as like one unit as sort of like a piston right going back and forth so you're going like that right that'll sort of give you a sense of the rhythm of it and you want to do it in kind of a rhythmic pattern not just because that does anything practically for the cocktail or anything but just because it just looks nice and it just kind of adds to the show of it so here we go so so you just do that if you do set that or something similar to it and you just make sure you do that for 8 to 10 seconds then you have shaking your cocktail properly the better you get at it the harder you shake you're gonna start to notice that there's more aeration on your fresh citrus juice in your cocktail the other thing that i should mention just you know wrapping this thing up is that if you don't happen to have a shaker but you have a mason jar you can shake with that and if you don't have a mason jar but you have a tupperware you can shake with that and these actually work really well for shaking cocktails surprisingly well i guess that's it for shaking cocktails i hope you guys go out there and shake some drinks and enjoy them

Channel: The Educated Barfly

Views: 141,414

Keywords: easy drinks, drink recipe, easy cocktails, easy cocktail recipes, best cocktail recipes, simple cocktails, cocktails at home, homemade, how to drink, drinks, easy, quick, tasty, nice, binging with babish, cocktail chemistry, easy recipe, top 10, top 5, steve the bartender, masterclass, master class, cocktail, cocktails, educated barfly, cocktail recipes, anders erickson, anders bartender

Id: s0J2KaHjFVw

Length: 9min 51sec (591 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 21 2022