Mixers and the soft side

Everything on this page has a shelf life measured in days. It's the most likely part of the bar to spoil an otherwise good drink.

• Carton juice - once opened, fridge, use within about a week; the printed date applies to the unopened carton. Bubbling or fizzing means it has started fermenting; that's the signal to bin it.
• Fresh citrus - squeeze as needed. Lime turns brown and dull within hours and is noticeably worse the same evening. Pre-squeeze only what a busy shift will use, in a labelled container.
• Never mix old stock into new. It drags the whole container down to the age of the oldest thing in it.

Half and half - 50/50 milk and single cream - keeps about a week in the fridge once opened. An ice well is not a fridge, so anything sitting in one is good for the shift and no longer. Clotting is the obvious sign it has gone; the smell is the earlier one.

Cola, lemonade, soda water, mineral water, tonic, ginger ale, ginger beer. Check the fizz before service, especially from large bottles, because a flat tonic is a wasted gin, and you can't tell by looking. Most busy bars run a soda gun instead, which takes the problem away - the gas is live at the nozzle, so there is no bottle sitting open going flat.

Mixers must be cold before they go in. A cold mixer over ice stays fizzy; a room-temperature one foams up, goes flat, and melts the ice while it's doing it.

Non-alcoholic drinks are served long, in a tall glass, with ice, and garnished to the same standard as everything else. Even a glass of water should be dressed. Someone not drinking should not be able to tell from the glass in their hand, so lime or lemon goes in the soft drinks the same as it would in anything else.

That matters more than it used to, and the zero-proof chapter in Part IX picks it up properly.