# Mixology, done by me. > Ingredients, extraction, spirits, and drinks I refused to leave alone. Source: https://agnaldoguerra.com/mixology/ This is the markdown edition of the page, generated from the page itself. Every page as markdown: https://agnaldoguerra.com/llms.txt ## Contents - [01. I hated mojitos, so I took one apart](#01-i-hated-mojitos-so-i-took-one-apart) - [02. White sugar is banned in my bar](#02-white-sugar-is-banned-in-my-bar) - [03. A sour has a hole in the middle](#03-a-sour-has-a-hole-in-the-middle) - [04. Citrus is not one ingredient](#04-citrus-is-not-one-ingredient) - [05. Forty cachaças](#05-forty-cachacas) - [06. Believe it or not, Vermouth Rosso is banned too](#06-believe-it-or-not-vermouth-rosso-is-banned-too) - [07. I hate fat washing, but milk washing is fine](#07-i-hate-fat-washing-but-milk-washing-is-fine) - [08. Shake the caipirinha](#08-shake-the-caipirinha) - [09. Oleo-saccharum is a tea technique](#09-oleo-saccharum-is-a-tea-technique) - [10. The espresso martini is a dessert and should be treated like one](#10-the-espresso-martini-is-a-dessert-and-should-be-treated-like-one) - [11. Yerba mate belongs in the syrup, not in the glass](#11-yerba-mate-belongs-in-the-syrup-not-in-the-glass) - [12. How far can you take a caipirinha before it stops being one?](#12-how-far-can-you-take-a-caipirinha-before-it-stops-being-one) --- ## Mixology notes All 12 notes follow in full. Each one is also a file of its own. --- ## 01. I hated mojitos, so I took one apart Keywords: Mint, Extraction, Mojito This note on its own: https://agnaldoguerra.com/mixology/notes/01-i-hated-mojitos-so-i-took-one-apart.md A customer asked for a virgin mojito. The standard version of that is sprite with a few mint leaves floating in it, which manages to be worse than the original. I spent the next two hours behind my own bar going at it. **Boiling the mint** gets you flavour, and it tastes like tea. Not bad. Not a mojito. **Slapping the leaves** gets you aroma and almost nothing else. The smell arrives and the drink underneath is empty. **Oleo-saccharum** pulls the oils out properly. Leaves, sugar, time, pressure. This is where the actual mint lives. **Throwing the mint at a blender with sugar** pulls too much. You get the oils and the bitter, astrigent stuff from the plant. **A high-proof tincture** gets a third thing again, sharper and longer, the part that stays after you swallow. Then the cultivar question, which nobody asks. Everyone defaults to _Mentha spicata_ because it is what the supermarket sells. _Mentha × piperita_ tastes radically different: colder, more menthol, more insistent. Sometimes a bit like toothpaste. What I ended up with is a syrup of 60% spicata and 40% piperita, extracted three ways in equal parts: one third oleo-saccharum with maceration, one third hot infusion built to 2:1 sugar to water, one third high-proof tincture. Long with soda for the virgin version. For the real one, 40ml rum and 20ml cachaça prata rather than straight rum, because the cachaça puts something grassy underneath the mint instead of letting the sugarcane sit politely in the background. It is now my favourite drink. I want it on record that I hated it. --- ## 02. White sugar is banned in my bar Keywords: Sugar, Balance, Texture This note on its own: https://agnaldoguerra.com/mixology/notes/02-white-sugar-is-banned-in-my-bar.md Not discouraged. Banned. The barmen have demerara, honey, agave, and whatever sugar the fruit brought with it. That is the whole list. The argument is simple: White sugar has been processed until the only thing left is sweetness. Everything that made it come from somewhere, say, the molasses, the mineral edge, the faint caramel note at the back, has been stripped out and sold separately. What you are left with is an industrial abstraction of sweet, and when you put it in a drink it does exactly one thing and contributes nothing else. Demerara still has the molasses in it. It arrives with a body and a slight caramel that gives the drink a floor to stand on. Honey brings its own perfume, complex flavours and a texture that changes how the drink sits in the mouth. Agave is clean, polite and harmonizes super well with tropical drinks, which is sometimes what you want. Fruit sugar comes attached to acid and aroma, which is the most useful form of all. Every time someone reaches for white sugar, they are choosing to add one dimension to a drink that could have had three. It is not a mistake. It is a missed opportunity, repeated a few hundred times a night. The obvious defense of white sugar is that sometimes you want neutrality. You want sweetness without another ingredient trying to become the drink. Fine. Use demerara. Demerara is already almost offensively polite. It is beige. It is mild. It tastes mostly like sugar, with just enough molasses and caramel left to remind you that sugar cane was once a plant. If that amount of character is enough to ruin your cocktail, the sugar is probably not the problem. Brown sugar is stranger. Much of what gets sold as brown sugar is refined white sugar with molasses added back into it, which means we took the cane apart, removed the interesting bit, purified what remained, and then tried to reconstruct the original idea afterward. I would rather just not commit the first crime. --- ## 03. A sour has a hole in the middle Keywords: Sours, Aromatics, Structure This note on its own: https://agnaldoguerra.com/mixology/notes/03-a-sour-has-a-hole-in-the-middle.md Spirit, citrus, sugar. Three things, all of them loud, all of them pointing the same direction. It works, which is why every bar on earth serves one, and it is also why most of them taste like a solved problem. The hole is in the middle. You have brightness at the top and sweetness at the bottom and nothing in between doing any thinking. Aromatics go in the hole. A strawberry lime vodka sour is fine. Strawberry, lime, sugar, vodka: it tastes like strawberry, and then it stops. Put pink peppercorn and Martini Bianco in it and the berry is suddenly one voice among several. The peppercorn is not heat, it is a mild, faintly floral top note that sits exactly where the drink was empty. The Bianco brings vermouth's herbal spine and a clean finish that keeps the fruit honest. The drink is not more complicated. It is the same three moves with something occupying the space they left. This is most of what I have learned about sours: if the structure is right the fruit is rarely the problem. The silence around the fruit is the problem. --- ## 04. Citrus is not one ingredient Keywords: Citrus, Acidity, Aroma This note on its own: https://agnaldoguerra.com/mixology/notes/04-citrus-is-not-one-ingredient.md Bars treat lime as a unit of acid. Pour it, move on. It is the laziest ingredient decision in the room, and it is being made a thousand times a night. Limes are aggressive. They can also taste very one-note, and that note is _sour_, arriving fast and leaving fast, very refreshing, very tropical. Lime's acid attack often dominates its aromatic contribution in a finished sour, and making it milder can allow the lime's aromatics to bloom. Lemons are rounder and slower, more perfume, less attack. Put them together and you get an acid with a shape to it: the lime opens, the lemon holds the middle. Two thirds lime to one third lemon in most things that ask for lime. **Lima da Pérsia** is the interesting one and nobody uses it. Almost no acid at all, and a floral, almost soapy perfume that is completely unlike either. It cannot carry a drink. Used as a fraction of the citrus, it perfumes the whole thing and drops the total acidity, which is useful when you want aroma without another point of sourness. **Orange with lime** is the split for anything sweet or spirit-forward. Orange contributes body and sugar and a bitterness in the oils, lime does the actual acidifying. It gives it more to say without making it more sour. The rule underneath all of it: acid and aroma arrive in the same ingredient, and you are allowed to source them separately. Once you notice that, one citrus per drink starts to feel like a decision nobody made on purpose. --- ## 05. Forty cachaças Keywords: Cachaça, Wood, Split bases This note on its own: https://agnaldoguerra.com/mixology/notes/05-forty-cachacas.md At one point I had more than forty labels on the bar. Cachaça is the most misunderstood spirit in its own country, and the only way to argue about it is to have some of it in front of you. **Prata**: unaged or rested in neutral wood. This is the raw material: grassy, mineral, with the sugarcane still visibly present. Everyone treats it as the cheap one in Brazil. It is the honest one. **Carvalho**: oak. Great wood. It sands the edges off and delivers vanilla and tannin. Useful for drinking or for cocktails. **Amburana**: the common one. Brazilian wood, and it gives up cinnamon, vanilla, and something like baked spice, aggressively. It does not integrate so much as arrive. I personally dislike it. Far too agressive, far too associated with very cheap spirits filled with bad congeners, but that's personal taste. Like any wood, there are great cachaças aged in it. **Jatobá**: mild, more tannic, more resinous. Vague caramel and vanilla notes less rough than amburana, a better company. This is the one I reach for when I want personality without clashing too much, something easy to drink. The reason to keep forty of them is that "cachaça" tells you almost nothing. The wood is doing more work than the distillate in most aged bottles, and Brazil has a dozen woods that no other spirit category is allowed to use. ### On split bases Straight rum in a mojito is fine and slightly boring. Rum brings sweetness and roundness; cachaça brings the green, vegetal cane note that rum has processed out of itself. 40ml rum, 20ml cachaça prata. The rum still runs the drink. The cachaça sits underneath and stops it from being polite. Two thirds to one third is where I land on most splits. Enough of the second spirit to change the drink, not enough to start a fight. --- ## 06. Believe it or not, Vermouth Rosso is banned too Keywords: Vermouth, Negroni, Lillet Blanc This note on its own: https://agnaldoguerra.com/mixology/notes/06-believe-it-or-not-vermouth-rosso-is-banned-too.md I do not buy it. There is none on the shelf. Not because it is bad. Because it is never the thing a drink was missing. Rosso arrives carrying sweetness, spice, vanilla, herbs and oxidized wine character, all at once, all in the same register. It is a full paragraph when most drinks needed a word. Whatever you put it into, it takes over the bottom half of the glass and everything else has to talk over it. The Negroni is where this is easiest to see. The drink already has Campari doing bitterness, orange, herbs, sugar and weight. Gin is doing juniper, citrus and whatever else the distiller decided belonged in the bottle. Then rosso adds another dark herbal mass underneath both, and everybody is talking at once. The result is good. It is also brown. I want the bitterness of a Negroni without the drink collapsing inward. So ours is equal parts Hambre gin, Campari and Lillet Blanc, stirred long and served very cold. The architecture is untouched: spirit, bitter, aromatized wine, one third each. Nothing clever happened to the proportions. The difference is that Lillet Blanc leaves space. It gives you wine, citrus, flowers and enough sweetness to carry the Campari without stacking a second dense layer under it. Hambre is aromatic enough on its own: juniper, citrus, florals, a little roundness; and Campari brings all the aggression the drink needs. Nothing in that glass was short of flavour. It was short of room. Lillet lets the gin stay visible. The first sip is still unmistakably Negroni-shaped: bitter, sweet, botanical. But it is brighter and cleaner, and the flavours arrive separately instead of as one block. I finish it with expressed orange peel, or grapefruit when I want the bitterness to read drier. Someone will correctly point out that this is not a canonical Negroni. That is fine. The canonical one is the reason vermouth rosso got banned. --- ## 07. I hate fat washing, but milk washing is fine Keywords: Fat washing, Milk washing, Texture This note on its own: https://agnaldoguerra.com/mixology/notes/07-i-hate-fat-washing-but-milk-washing-is-fine.md I hate fat washing. Milk washing is fine. This sounds inconsistent because both techniques involve deliberately introducing something strange into a drink and then removing most of it again. The difference is that with fat, “most” is not good enough. Some fat always seems to survive. Maybe not enough to form a visible slick, maybe not enough for someone to call the drink badly made, but enough that I can feel it. And drinking fat with a cold liquid is disgusting. I learned this while trying to make a caramel syrup. I started with an orange oleo-saccharum. Then I took dry sugar to a medium caramel, added light cream, folded in the sugar and citrus oils from the oleo, added a pinch of salt, and finally butter. The flavour was excellent. The butter destroyed it. Every sip gave me this faint oily sensation that reminded me of one of those pools of stagnant water in a forest with a film sitting on top of it. It was not really a flavour problem. It was deeper than flavour. My whole body seemed to recognize the combination of liquid and free fat as something I should stop swallowing immediately. I threw that syrup away. Once I noticed it, I started finding the same sensation in fat-washed drinks. Even when the flavour is clever, even when the spirit picked up exactly what the bartender wanted from the butter or coconut oil or sesame, I am waiting for that texture to show up. And once it does, the drink is over for me. Milk washing is different because the milk is there to leave. You curdle it into the drink, filter the curds back out, and the proteins take tannins and astringency with them. What survives is the absence, not the milkiness. It also makes a cocktail shelf stable and flavour stable, so you can pre-batch it. I do not love it. It is fine. --- ## 08. Shake the caipirinha Keywords: Caipirinha, Cachaça, Dilution This note on its own: https://agnaldoguerra.com/mixology/notes/08-shake-the-caipirinha.md The caipirinha you get almost everywhere is lime, sugar, cachaça, ice, and a spoon. Muddle, stir, serve. It is the national drink and it is served underdiluted roughly all of the time. Cachaça prata is not a soft spirit. It is grassy, mineral, and it has an edge on it that a stir will not touch. Put it in a glass with lime and sugar and hand it over, and the first thing the drink does is announce the alcohol. The lime is fighting it. The sugar is trying to hide it. Nobody is winning. Shake it. Because shaking does the one thing the drink is missing, which is water. Not because it is more elegant. A hard shake against ice drops the temperature and adds dilution at the same moment, and dilution is what takes the edge off cachaça. The spirit stops arriving first. It arrives with everything else. People object that shaking bruises the lime. It does not. You are shaking a drink that happens to have lime in it, not muddled fruit into submission, and ten seconds of that will not ruin anything. The second change is sugar. Most caipirinhas are underdiluted and undersugared, which is a strange combination to defend. A caipirinha should be sweeter than people make it, because sweetness is what gives it body and stops it reading as sour spirit in a glass. Demerara, obviously. There is no white sugar in my bar. The problem is that you cannot balance real sugar with muddled lime alone. Crushing a few wedges gives you oils, pith, and a little juice. Oils and pith are the character of the drink. They are not enough acid to carry sugar. So add lime juice on top of the muddled fruit. Muddled wedges for oil and bitterness, fresh juice for acid, demerara for weight, and a shake to bring the temperature down and the cachaça into line. The drink gets sweeter and sharper at the same time, which sounds contradictory and is not. Sugar and acid do not cancel. They both go up, and the drink gets louder in both directions. That is a caipirinha with a punch in it, instead of a caipirinha you drink because it is what the country serves. --- ## 09. Oleo-saccharum is a tea technique Keywords: Oleo-saccharum, Tea, Citrus oils This note on its own: https://agnaldoguerra.com/mixology/notes/09-oleo-saccharum-is-a-tea-technique.md Steeping is built around water. It is excellent at extracting the compounds water readily carries, and much worse at recovering the aromatic oils concentrated in citrus peel. You can put a lemon peel in hot water and the result is faintly lemony and mostly disappointing. The oil wants to go into sugar. Oleo-saccharum attacks that problem from the other direction. Peel, dry sugar, time, and pressure. The sugar draws moisture from the peel while the contact releases its oils, until the sugar turns into an intensely aromatic syrup that smells more like the fruit than the fruit does. No heat, no dilution of the aroma. It is the most concentrated citrus you can make at home and it takes nothing but patience. The point is that it sits on top of steeping. It does not replace it. Steep the tea properly, on its own terms, and then add oleo. Now the drink has both halves of the plant world: the water-soluble structure and grip from the leaf, and the volatile oils from the peel that no amount of steeping was ever going to reach. They occupy different parts of the mouth, which is why they do not fight. Black tea with orange oleo is the obvious one and it is very good, hot or cold. Green tea with lemon oleo is better than it sounds, because the oil is bright enough to survive the vegetal edge. Mint steeped and served with lime oleo is close to a drink. Most tea recipes that call for citrus tell you to add juice or a slice. Juice adds acid and thin aroma. A slice adds almost nothing. The oil was always where the smell lived, and sugar is the only thing that will go and get it. --- ## 10. The espresso martini is a dessert and should be treated like one Keywords: Espresso martini, Dessert, Scotch This note on its own: https://agnaldoguerra.com/mixology/notes/10-the-espresso-martini-is-a-dessert-and-should-be-treated-like-one.md People are apologetic about the espresso martini. It is too sweet, it is a party drink, it is not serious. It is a dessert. Desserts are allowed to be sweet. Nobody defends a flan. Once you stop trying to make it a serious cocktail, it gets better immediately, because you can put things in it that a serious cocktail would not tolerate. I put doce de leite in one. There is no version of cocktail theory where this should work. It is dairy, it is sugar on top of sugar, it is heavy, and it is going into a drink that already has coffee liqueur in it. It should have been sickly. Instead the milk fat and the caramel sit underneath the coffee bitterness and hold it up, and the drink comes out rounder and less sharp without tasting like a milkshake. The bitterness of good espresso is doing more work than anybody gives it credit for, and it will absorb an enormous amount of sweetness before it stops being coffee. The other one worth trying is scotch. Vodka is in the standard build because vodka contributes nothing, which is a reasonable thing to want when the coffee is the point. Scotch contributes a great deal: smoke, cereal, a little wood. All three of those are things people already put next to coffee on purpose. The strange part is the capacity. A scotch version will take ninety to a hundred millilitres of spirit and still not read as alcoholic. I do not completely understand why. Coffee bitterness is doing some of the hiding, the wood may be doing some more, and the sweetness and temperature are certainly helping. Whatever the mechanism, the result is slightly dangerous. That is the argument for treating it as a dessert. A dessert can carry weight. It was never trying to be delicate. --- ## 11. Yerba mate belongs in the syrup, not in the glass Keywords: Yerba mate, Syrup, Chimarrão This note on its own: https://agnaldoguerra.com/mixology/notes/11-yerba-mate-belongs-in-the-syrup-not-in-the-glass.md Yerba mate is what the south drinks. Something closer to a habit than a beverage you choose. And like coffee, the terroir shows: the soil, the shade, the drying, whether it was smoked over wood. Two mates from two states are not the same ingredient. None of which means you should put it in a cocktail. Mate is bitter, but the problem in a cocktail is not just how bitter it gets. It is how long it stays. A direct infusion can take over the finish until every sip ends in mate, regardless of what happened before it. Put it in a syrup instead. Now concentration and volume stop being the same decision. I can make the mate extraction as assertive as I want, sweeten it into something usable, and then add ten or fifteen millilitres instead of making half the drink taste like cold chimarrão. Citrus and mint are the obvious companions, because people in the south have already spent a long time discovering that those things taste good with mate. Nobody drew a flavour-pairing chart. Steep the mate properly, build the syrup on it, and let it be one voice among several. Used that way it does something no other ingredient in the bar does, which is bring a dry, green, slightly smoky bitterness that is not amaro and not tea. Used directly, it is just the last thing you taste. --- ## 12. How far can you take a caipirinha before it stops being one? Keywords: Caipirinha, Construction, Fruit This note on its own: https://agnaldoguerra.com/mixology/notes/12-how-far-can-you-take-a-caipirinha-before-it-stops-being-one.md A caipirinha is unusually modular for a drink people treat as fixed. Change the lime for strawberry and nobody panics. Passionfruit, pineapple, kiwi, grapes, berries, all acceptable. Change the cachaça for vodka and now it is supposedly a caipiroska. Gin gets another name. Sake gets another one again. I do not find this taxonomy very useful. What makes a caipirinha taste like a caipirinha is the construction, not the cachaça. Fruit in the glass. Sugar against the fruit. Muddle them together. Add fresh lime juice when the fruit is not already lime. Add spirit. Shake it hard enough to actually dilute it. Serve the whole thing over tubular ice, fruit and all. That is the drink. My starting architecture is roughly 50ml of fruit, or the fruit itself when lime is the base, 55 to 60ml of spirit, sugar adjusted to whatever that fruit needs, and enough fresh lime juice to give the thing an acid spine. Caipirinhas are strong. That is not an accident of my recipe. The sugar is allowed to move, but it moves upward from a level most bars never reach in the first place. Fruits are not standardised objects. Strawberry and passionfruit do not arrive with the same sweetness or the same acidity, and pouring 20ml of syrup into both because the recipe says so makes the recipe more consistent and the drink less. The lime juice is the part bars miss most often. Muddle strawberry with sugar and pour vodka over it and you have made alcoholic strawberry. The lime is what turns fruit into the same sweet, sour, bitter, aromatic architecture that a lime caipirinha gets for free from muddling the whole fruit. The spirit matters much less to the identity than people pretend. Cachaça and gin and vodka and sake make obviously different drinks, but they are doing the same job inside the same machine. There is a point where the machine breaks. Strain the fruit out and I no longer think it is a caipirinha. Build it with clarified juice and syrup and it is something else. Serve it up in a coupe and the argument is over. The pulp, the peel, the seeds, the crushed fruit, the melting tubular ice and the drink changing underneath you are all part of the structure. A caipirinha is supposed to continue extracting itself while you drink it. So yes, I will call strawberry, lime, sugar and gin a caipirinha. The cachaça is traditional. The mess is essential. --- ## Other pages - [Home](https://agnaldoguerra.com/index.md) - [Technical note](https://agnaldoguerra.com/technical-note.md)