Today I want to share the results of my obsessively nerdy mind. You see, I like organising and classifying things. Sometimes, the act of organising or classifying gives me more satisfaction than the things I’m organising themselves.
Therefore I’m sure you can completely understand that I just had to create my own cocktail categorization that fits both my sensory experience of cocktails and my obsessive mind. I bet everyone does this, right? I found plenty of cocktail classifications online. But none of them scratched that itch to satisfaction, you know?
So, let me tell you about my typology! (yes, I’m going to use at least 5 more synonyms for classification in this post)
So, what is it about existing systems that just don’t do it for me? Well, classifying by base spirit is really unhelpful for me. If I swap gin for vodka, it’s still basically the same drink! There are many drinks where you can hardly even taste the base spirit clearly, so this is especially true for those. But even if you can taste the base spirit, a Margarita and a White Lady should always be right next to each other on my menu! Also: “orphans”, “miscellaneous”, “other”, … No! Every drink ought to be classifiable.
What I care about for my classification is not so much the flavour but the taste. By taste I mean simply the 5 basic tastes of sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami. If we take flavour to mean the entire perception of stuff we put in our mouths, then besides taste (aka gustation, registered by your tastebuds) flavour is further composed of aroma (aka olfaction, registered by your nose). Aroma accounts for about 90% of the experience and is therefore what makes a strawberry taste of a strawberry, for example.
Well actually, there is a third component to flavour, which are the trigeminal senses. These include temperature and texture, and those I am definitely also interested in for my categorization. So I’m going to say that I’m interested in the taste experience: I want my categories to be along the lines of taste experiences, not flavour.
Okay, of course what I really care about is a nice tidy system so my brain stops fussing about it, but what is the purpose of a typology to me?
The purpose is manifold. Firstly, a tidy system helps me think more clearly about cocktails, to remember them, to navigate through possibilities as I’m creating new drinks. Secondly, my home menu needs to be organised in such a way that both me and my guests can easily find our way through it. Thirdly, it should help one quickly find a drink that fits whatever one is in the mood for at that time.
So here are the principles of my typology:
- Each drink has exactly 1 type and 1 type only
- There exist no “other” or “orphan” categories whatsoever
- Categories are defined primarily by “taste experience”
You can think of it in the following way: I could pick a flavour pairing or profile, independently from the drink type. Or in another way again: given a drink with a particular flavour profile, I can change something about the drink to move it to a different category, but still retain the essentially same flavour profile. For example, I could pick honey and apples, and could equally well create an old-fashioned, highball, sour or tiki drink with that flavour pairing.
Enough babbling, let’s see what this looks like!
Now for a few initial explanations. How did I decide on which types to define? (we’ll get to what the definitions are a little later). Well, rather arbitrarily I should say!
The best categorization I came across is the one by Gary Regan in his book The Joy of Mixology. In fact, I read about his categorization somewhere and then I went right away to buy his book pretty much exclusively for this bit. It is extremely useful, and also the way he specifies the ingredients per drink in a family in a nice table format, is something I copied and expanded for my home menu.
So I’m using most of Regan’s types, except for some modifications. Of course, I got rid of “Orphans”, and some gimmicky ones like shots. Then, I added some extra ones, which I mostly did whenever the number of cocktails on my home menu within one category started to get too big. Sometimes I added extra (admittedly small) categories when I really felt something didn’t belong together with something else, or when I saw some pretty patterns in the drinks. So you’ll see some names that are weird and unfamiliar to you.
I did lose some sleep over a couple of types: swizzles, juleps, punches, and mules. But we’ll get to that later, I bet you want to see my definitions first!
Well hold on to your horses for just one more bit, I actually need to give you a disclaimer first: these category definitions are based entirely and exclusively on my own sensory experience of the drinks, and for my own purposes. I am in no way trying to say that a certain definition is better than another definition, I’m not saying that this or that is the proper way to make a such and so, and I’m definitely disrespecting all of cocktail history with this, so be warned!
We could talk for ages about this, but let’s see if there’s anything that really needs some comments. Probably the Tiki’s. I just happen to have a lot of Tiki drinks on my menu (mostly from the Smuggler’s Cove book), and they typically have a lot of ingredients, so it was hard to keep an overview. To be fair, I’m also including drinks in this category that wouldn’t normally be considered Tiki (like the Mary Pickford), but to me from a certain amount of fruitiness onwards it just can’t fit any other type. So maybe the exact line between the sours and the tikis in my system is a bit arbitrary and it’s down to the vibe I get from a particular drink (hence why I call that region fruity or tropical).
Anyways, for Tikis some subtypes were in order, to introduce a bit more order. But unlike with the other types, we can’t just go by some straightforward ingredient combinations. I decided to play it by ear, or nose I guess, because “spiced” and “funky” are kinda breaking my rule about no definitions based on flavour. Again nothing strict, but down to the vibes, and similarly with the “sweet” subtype although that is a bit more straightforward.
Ok, remember I said I lost some sleep over swizzles, juleps, punches and mules? And do you remember what I said about the trigeminal senses? Well funny thing: on the one hand I had enough drinks containing ginger ale or ginger beer on my menu to justify an extra category, but on the other hand, now that all drinks are only allowed 1 type the poor Mint Julep had been left all alone! The Mojito went to join the sparkling sours, the Mai Tai the tikis, and the Old Cuban the Champagne sours etc etc… So perhaps “minty” really shouldn’t be a type at all, because isn’t mint a flavour instead of a taste experience? And in that case mules shouldn’t be their own type either, right?
Here’s the interesting thing: the trigeminal senses, besides texture and temperature, also include hotness and coolness! Like the sensation of spicy and minty foods! What happens is that certain molecules just happen to trigger the temperature sensors of the tongue. Astringency, metallicness, numbness and sometimes even more things are also part of the trigeminal senses.
So! We have some scientific reasons to keep these categories! Phew! Although in the end where you draw the line is kinda arbitrary of course. The mint is not the only thing that makes a Julep a Julep. What really sets it apart – why it can’t be included in the other types – is that it’s essentially an old fashioned on heaped crushed iced and made really, really cold. And where the difference between a sour served up and on crushed ice isn’t nearly enough in my experience to warrant separate categories, crushed ice completely changes the experience for something that is boozy and not sour. So I guess we need a category of essentially frappé old fashioneds. And I’ll allow Juleps to be the minty sub-type of that. I decided to re-use the term Cobbler for the main type. If I understood correctly the Cobbler actually evolved from the Mint Julep, but there doesn’t seem to be a really clear definition of the Cobbler anymore, so I’m repurposing it to: boozy, heaped crushed ice, no sour.
As for the Swizzles and Punches: both historical concoctions of course, but you will see I only left one of them in. Both of these have their own chapters in the Death & Co book, and the Swizzle just really looks like something different, especially if you dribble your bitters on top after swizzling. However, literally every single swizzle drink I could find was also easily classifiable as something else. Then I did a little experiment that put the final nail in that coffin: I un-swizzled some swizzles, and I swizzled some sours, and the technique just… didn’t change the experience enough in my opinion. Yes, colder, more diluted, more refreshing, but all these sours are already refreshing even without swizzling (in stark contrast with the Cobbler/Julep vs Old Fashioned, clearly!). Of course I’m not saying there’s no reason to swizzle a drink, far from it! You should definitely swizzle your Chartreuse Swizzle! It’s just that I can’t justify a separate type for it.
How about Punches then? Why not put them with the tiki’s? Well, looking at many punch recipes – ignoring the sizing, which you’ll agree is irrelevant in this system – I noticed that there really are a lot of non-tropical punches. Autumn punches, floral punches, etc. So that didn’t feel right. Just distribute them between tiki’s and sours? Also didn’t seem justified, as I feel sours are often a bit more intensely sour. So that leaves only one thing that sets these recipes apart from all the others: the amount of dilution. Most punches that you see will have a reasonably liberal amount of soda or tea (such a good idea!) added, and are supposed to dilute more and more over time as the ice melts and the bowl becomes emptier. So there you have it. Decision made! For now.
Alright so one last thing, which is partly about cocktail history and naming things. When I started out on my cocktail journey, I couldn’t help but look for patterns, which is something I enjoy as you may have noticed. So naturally I’d try to remember what the different cocktail families are and how they are related. As soon as you start to do some searching though, you run into a lot of inconsistencies. Of course, maybe one should have expected this, there are no rules about naming mixed drinks, you can do whatever you want and through the centuries people tend to disagree with each other!
While creating my typology I did try to do a bunch of research (Gary Regan’s book, Difford’s Guide and the Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails) so as to make sense of various naming conventions and accompanying recipe templates. In some cases, these were simply too inconsistent to use in my system, in some cases I just didn’t feel the extra category added much use to it. Nevertheless, it might be of interest to put some existing terminology in the context of my typology:
- Fizz: is just a Sparkling Sour without ice. Traditionally anyway. Drink fast.
- Fix: Sour on crushed ice
- Collins: prototypical Sparkling Sour.
- Rickey: Sparkling Sour but usually without any sweetener.
- Silver Fizz: Fizz with an egg white. You often see eggwhite fizzy drinks being called “such-and-so Fizz”. The addition of egg white does not change my categorization as a Sparkling Sour though.
- Golden Fizz: Fizz with an egg yolk. Don’t have any of these on my own menu. Should it go in the Flips? If it has soda and citrus, perhaps not, and it would deserve its own category. If I had seen any recipes like this, that is.
- Bucks: Mules but with ginger ale instead of ginger beer. Still Mules, or Sparkling Sour.
- Royal/Royale/Imperial: a modifier you can add to the name of the cocktail when you add Champagne to it.
- Sling: apparently it originated as a highball with a sweetener (as opposed to the simple highball, that does not (always?) have sweetener). You see tons of cocktails with “Sling” in the name, but I can make heads nor tails of the reasoning behind these.
- Cooler: kinda like a highball, as far as I can tell, but it’s very ambiguous.
- Smash: almost a Julep (that’s apparently how it got started, a less finicky Julep), but pretty much all “Thing-a-ma Smash” cocktails I come across are Sours (usually Simple Sours).
- Frappé: a serving style, namely served on crushed ice. So from least cold and diluted to most cold and diluted the serving styles go: up, on big ice, on ice cubes, frappé, swizzled, frozen.
- Swizzles: to come back to this, in my system a Swizzle is “just” a serving style. You can swizzle any drink if you insist. Juleps and Cobblers closely resemble, in my opinion, this serving style.
- Shrub: more of an ingredient than a drink, namely acidified syrups. Could be just citrus and sugar, or a syrup made of juice, sugar and vinegar.
Thanks for making it all the way to the end, I hope you found it useful in one way or another!