IVBalance and structure

The six families

Six structures that cover almost every drink here, and how to build on them.

6 min read

The classics chapter at the end of this book holds thirty-five recipes. As a list, that is thirty-five things to remember, and the list only ever gets longer. As structures it is six, and the six cover far more than the thirty-five.

The families are sorted by what holds the drink together, not by which spirit is in it. A Negroni and a Boulevardier are the same drink, and sorting by ingredient won't tell you that.

Open Cocktail families on its own

Reading the table

Take the Old Fashioned: spirit, a little sugar, bitters, ice, a twist. Swap bourbon for aged rum and it's still an Old Fashioned. Swap the sugar for maple and you've made a variation people put on menus.

Take the Martini: spirit and aromatised wine, nothing else. Swap gin for whiskey and dry vermouth for sweet, and you have a Manhattan. Add Campari in equal parts and you have a Negroni. Those are three separate recipes and one idea.

The Sidecar is the family people miss: spirit, liqueur, citrus. It looks like a sour, but the sweetening is coming from a liqueur, which brings flavour as well as sugar. A Margarita is a Sidecar. So is a Cosmopolitan, and so is a White Lady.

Three drinks, one structure

the structurespiritliqueurcitrus=White Lady40 gin30 Cointreau20 lemonMargarita45 tequila30 Cointreau15 limeCosmopolitan40 citrus vodka15 Cointreau15 lime+ 30 cranberryonly the Cosmopolitan carries a fourth ingredient
Bands drawn to the real measures, so the three read as the same shape rather than as a claim that they are. The sweetening is a liqueur every time, which is what separates a Sidecar from a sour - it brings flavour along with the sugar. The Cosmopolitan's cranberry is shown as the addition it is rather than folded into one of the three roles.

Building something new

  1. Pick a family. Decide what shape of drink you want before you decide what goes in it.
  2. Choose the base spirit.
  3. Fill the other roles with things that belong beside it. The family says what the roles are.
  4. Build it at the family's standard ratio.
  5. Taste, and move one thing at a time.

That's how most of what's on the Backbar shelf got made. The Black Magic Margarita is a Sidecar with cassis standing in for part of the orange liqueur; the Ginger Collins is a highball with a sour underneath it.