“There is no controversy regarding Vodka Martini. For the simple fact that one must preface “vodka” in their Martini proves it to be merely a riff. I like dark rum Old Fashioneds. If I walked into any establishment, fine or otherwise, and asked for an Old Fashioned I cannot assume the bartender to make it to my unique inclination without further explanation. Therefore, anything besides gin in a Martini is a spin-off, a riff, a spoof.” That is a quote, by me.
Somehow, in faded flashes of memory, I recall my early forays into Martinis. I did turn 21 in 2001, after all. While we mourned the casualties and shoved the proverbial boot in your ass, ‘cuz that’s the American way, if you recall we also experienced a rise in cocktail culture. The renaissance hadn’t yet begun, but the pieces were in place. One of which being the “Martini Party”.
Now, in the early aughts the term “Martini Party” was fast and loose. The party part was legit, but the Martini aspect depended on temporal interpretation. As culture often does. You can say when it comes to Martinis I danced with the devil in the pale moonlight. Or, better yet, rode in the back of a stretched hummer limousine on a bachelor party in Tampa. The party girl we acquired at some random casino bonked her head hard on the door frame as she climbed into the back of our ostentatious carriage and crawled across my lap to squeeze herself between the languid passengers of our quest. I think there was something blue mixed with Hypnotik in our glasses.
Flash to a neon night at the Blue Martini, a suedo-upscale attempt in Orlando, with low cut blouses and thumping bass on a sweaty dance floor. Then jump to a house party with leather sofas and decorative lions in the corners of wrought iron tables where I placed colored bottles of mixers and V-shaped glasses with bent stems out for guests to mix up their saccharine potions before ambling to the lanai’s humid Florida air - oops! Someone just fell in the hot tub. Then of course there was Roxy, whose walls tell multigenerational stories of which I’m not sure the statute of limitations has worn out yet. And… Club Paris.
Nestled somewhere near Church St. and the corner of my psyche in downtown Orlando was Paris Hilton’s bar. Pink vinyl sofas and pounding house beats. And a VIP. A VIP that my acquaintances and I found ourselves in that fateful night. A few couches and a table on the mezzanine cordoned off by the infamous velvet rope.
This is where I feel I should apologize for past behavior, but apologies don’t make for good stories. The drink of the night was Appletini. Several. And possibly, probably, shots of something peachy-sticky-sweet. Now, my tiny bladder is nothing of the new sort and on one such excursion to the men's room it came upon me to relieve myself of more than just the contents of my bladder, but also that of my stomach, in the stall. When I was through and straightened myself out to the best of myself a bouncer promptly informed me that it was time to leave. That is until I relayed that my party was just over there in the VIP with those exorbanantly priced bottles of vodka to which he escorted me beyond the ropes to my seat and proceeded to walk away, leaving me to my scantily dressed lady friends and that grievous bartab.
I didn’t much dabble in what I thought was Martinis from then till years later in Nashville. At the now defunct Sinema. We’re somewhere around 2015 as we find a Tony in his mid-thirties clad in the uniform of the day. Slim fit black button down tucked into dark blue slim fit “going out” jeans, hemmed with no break to show off the black leather Chelsea boots. Out from the courtyard of my bungalow apartment I strolled across the railroad tracks, under the double overpasses, through the carwash lot, ‘cuz there was no sidewalk there and God forbid I show up with mud on the Chelsea’s, past the cowboy bar and eventually to the heavy doors of Sinema. This was an amazing restaurant and cocktail lounge, in every sense of the word, converted from an old movie theatre. The aesthetic as you walked up did not disappoint. Complete with golden age of film marquee and box office. Through the double doors into the foyer there was a small bar to the right, all gold-black marble-leather. In front of a red stage curtain leading to the dining room was the greeter’s podium. To the right, a wide curved staircase rising to the mezzanine housing lounge.
A glance back towards the stairs and above the landing rail now revealed a large wall with a black and white movie projected onto it. In the lounge pictures of stars, movie and music alike, adorned the walls. My favorite of which was Marilyn hanging in the men’s room. Her heavy lidded sultry eyes smiling at you holding yourself over the urinal.
Behind the long L-shaped bar, decorated same as the one downstairs, on either end was bookshelving. Some classic literature, as well as bar manuals, and old Hollywood ephemera. It was early for a Saturday. Maybe 7:30pm. Soon the sofas, nooks, cushioned chairs and barstools would be full with dressed to impress tipplers of all ages. A middle aged man in a European suit accompanied by two young ladies with straight off the runway looks and skin tight cocktail dresses. A young professional fella dappered up for his date holding his drink in the hand with the shiny watch. A few Buddy Holly hipsters, and a murder of sexy girls tossing shadows around like so many crumbs in the city park.
And there I was. Holding court with my own thoughts like the good little fly on the wall I was. The next morning I would use this setting and characters I might meet as inspiration for a short story or a song. If I was a better writer I could make things up, instead I have to make things happen. For that, I needed some social lubricant. Even though the beer came in nice stemmed pilsners this wasn’t the place for suds. I was tired of the ubiquitous straight bourbon everyone drank in Nashville. The idea of finding good sipping rum in even an upscale bar was still a few years away. But, you know what? There had been some chirpings in the nicer establishments as of late of a sort of craft-cocktail revival. Old Fashioneds were being doled out as fast as the spoon could spin, but I wanted something unique. Something from the past that could finally be asked for without raised eyebrows and could finally be prepared properly by a trained mixologist. I ordered a martini.
There was no further questions from the bar. Not, what type of liquor? Or, what flavor? No, what came to me in a small glass coup was cold but clear and smelled a little like the juniper breeze lotion girls would wear in high school, but brisk. Like the scent blew across a handful of cool snow before reaching my nose. It tasted crisp, mildly floral, but with the musky body of dry white wine. There was a bitter-sweet bite and the aura of vapor that hangs in my memory like a dragon on the air. A dragon I’ve been chasing ever since.
Ladies and gentleman. My name is Tony, and this is Pod Tiki.
This is not going to be an easy episode. Hence why it took so long to get out. On account of I want to hit as many facets of this omnipotent promethean cocktail as possible, and that I am very opinionated about such. Thus, I want to give a well rounded overview as well as an in depth retrospect including but not limited to my own spirited thoughts on the matter.
To understand the origins of the Martini we must understand cocktail culture at the time. The time? That would be circa 1870 - 1910’s. An era referred to as the Gilded Age of cocktails. The Manhattan having already proved itself a fan favorite, we know that mixing vermouth with spirits was old hat. The way it worked before codified recipes was that spirits could be swapped for any other in any given drink. Whiskies, brandies, and yes, even gins were all interchangeable. This was due to the fact that the Old Tom or Holland gins of that day were sweeter with more body and less floral spice than the dry gins of today.
Early Martini’s would’ve been thought of as a Manhattan riff. Gin with sweet Italian vermouth, some bitters and a dash of gum, which is what they called simple syrup. It wasn’t until preference shifted towards dryness around the turn of the century that we begin to see a Martini we might recognize. The whole tenor of drinking was switching at the time and everything was coming up dry. Dry wines were all the fashion and a new style of dry, juniper heavy, gin out of England was gaining popularity. One of the earliest mentions of a Dry Martini is from the New York Herald in 1897 where it gives a recipe of Plymouth or London Dry gin with dry French vermouth.
And, that is it. Right there in the Herald from over a hundred years ago and documented and sourced from David Wondrich’s wonderful book Imbibe!. Take note that even the syrup and bitters have been omitted by this point. London Dry Gin and French vermouth. Case closed. No further inquiry necessary. No further debate. Now that we know what a Martini is we can ask “where did it come from?” “Who invented it?” This is where it gets real murky.
In this there are a few prevailing theories. Mr. Wondrich reviews his top four origin claims in Imbibe!. Please refer to that work for a deeper dive. Here, I’ve endeavored to consolidate what seems most likely.
First, we have to give props to the Godfather of cocktailing, Jerry Thomas. Thomas had the clout to write the big book, and he did. Jerry didn’t invent the cocktail but he was the first one to collect and publish a book of recipes. Including the tools, procedures, and etiquette of tending bar. He opened, consulted, or worked in most of the premier bars from San Francisco to New York City. Okay, now that props have been properly proffered. There are those who would like to believe Jerry Thomas invented the Martini like he did so many Gilded Age classics, but it just isn’t so.
There’s so much information regarding the mixture of gin and vermouth It feels like every time we get a handle on it another albatross perches upon our masthead. This one informs us that part of the difficulty in pinning down an origin is because at this time there were drinks called Martini, Martinez, Martine, Martigny, and so on. The claim in Jerry’s camp is that he mixed up a gin and vermouth cocktail in the 1960’s in San Francisco for a traveler heading to the town of Martinez. Thus, the Martinez cocktail. Unfortunately, the Martinez cocktail is not mentioned in any of his books till a reprint two years after his death. Furthermore, the Martini was already a popular drink by this time and Thomas was nothing less of the consummate showman regarding his trade and the spotlight. Therefore, if he had created a cocktail with such pomp and circumstance encircling it he surely would have leaned into its creation myth during his life, which there is no record of.
Next we meet the honorable Randolph B. Martine, judge and district attorney for the great state of New York. Martine was known to enjoy a libation and indeed was a member at the Manhattan Club as well as the sporting fraternity. The latter being a term for the betting, tippling, and social men with the means it took to engage in such wanton frivolity. Think the Gatsby crowd, or Thurston Howell III. Many classic era cocktails were created at the Manhattan club and it’s said that Martine followed suit with his eponymous mixture of gin and vermouth. This one has a valid claim due to Martine’s proclivities and proximity to one of the centers of cocktail culture but, there’s something else. An 1888 book called New and Improved Illustrated Bartender’s Manual by Harry Johnson, yes, real name, is one of the earliest mentions of the Martini. But, the footnotes under the illustrations refer to it as the Martine. In fact, gin and vermouth being labeled as Martine continued in recipe books for another two decades.
The arguments against Judge Martine are twofold. Once again, the Martini was a hugely popular drink during his lifetime and there is no mention in his obituary of him giving rise to this phenomenon. It seems this a posthumous claim credited to Martine due possibly to his titular similarity to Martini brand vermouth. I don’t know about you guys but when I discovered there was a brand of dry vermouth called Martini, available in New York at the time this cocktail, using dry vermouth, was created I closed the book and thought, “Why even read anymore? This seems so obvious the origin of the name.” But, then I realized the fact that there was more book to be read meant the story wasn’t over.
The Turf Club was the rough and tumble precursor to the Manhattan Club. Literally, it was what the bar was called from 1880 -1883 before becoming the Manhattan Club. In 1884, the same year the Martinez was first mentioned in print, an anonymous bartender’s guide was published with a recipe for a Turf Club Cocktail made by mixing, you guessed it, gin and vermouth. This theory is predicated on a fact we discussed earlier that often spirits were swapped out while the drink kept the same name. Within 15 months of each other New York’s Sunday Morning Herald reported a combination of whiskey, vermouth, and bitters going under the names Manhattan, Turf Club, or Jockey Club Cocktail while the Chicago Tribune boasted the rise in popularity of the Manhattan Cocktail made with gin and vermouth.
First of all, I love that newspapers were reporting on drink recipes. Especially the Sunday Morning Herald. Thus, as you can see, all the confusion between Manhattan/Martini/Martinez/Martine, whiskey + vermouth and gin + vermouth being conflated as the same drink, a popular brand of vermouth called Martini. My humble opinion on the entire matter is that no one person invented the Martini.
This is a case of contemporaneous thinking in which the zeitgeist and milieu of an era, the cultural information being broadcast to us all, steered a natural progression towards the invention of a thing they all saw coming. Like the cultural memes of today the Martini Cocktail evolved naturally through shared experience. It’s like if you asked 10 chefs to make a pot of soup each chef adding one ingredient at a time. It would probably come out delicious because they all know what ingredients go together based on shared knowledge of their field. I guess what I’m saying is - the Martini was destined.
Of course, the controversies and theories about the Martini don’t stop in our modern day. Type of glassware, measures of ingredients, garnish, proper set and setting, and cultural posture all come into play when discussing the meritorious Martini.
I am a huge proponent of proper aesthetic in my epicurean experiences. When ordering a drink at a bar or restaurant I’m not only thinking of what flavor or spirit I’m in the mood for but what is the ambiance of the establishment? Will I be eating, or smoking, or simply holding court? Most of all, do they have the proper glassware for the cocktail? The Martini enjoys a bit of wayward freedom in this regard as there are 3 acceptable types of glasses for it to be served in.
We all know the famous V-shaped Martini glass. The actual glass dates to Paris in 1925 where it debuted at The International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts as a nod to Art Deco. Initially, because it’s Paris, the V-shaped glass was used to serve Champagne. It wasn’t until the 1960’s, when James Bond sipped his, ahem, “Martini”, from the V-glass that it grew in popularity and became known as a Martini glass. This shape really took off though, in the 80’s and 90’s during the fallow days of cocktailia when any neon vodka drink could add -tini to its name and be fancy.
It’s also not uncommon to be served your Martini in a coup. It makes sense that the coup would be tied to such an infamous libation as it is the most infamous glass. Mythology behind the coup purports that it was modelled after Marie Antoinette’s breast. There’s no historical evidence to corroborate this but, why let truth get in the way of a good cocktail? Makes me wonder, though. I have many sizes of coupes. I wonder if she was a 5oz or more of a 7oz? Whatever cup size your coup is, it’s a legacy cocktail vessel. Notably, to us Tropiki lovers, for the daiquiri. It’s hard to overstate how much the coup means to cocktail culture at large. Or, maybe I’m just partial because it’s my favorite style. Notwithstanding personal proclivity, the glass is rooted in France. King Louis XIV would shoot Champagne from a coup at every meal. You heard me right. See, back then Champagne wasn’t sipped and savored, but shot back quick like so many Jager-bombs in the early 2000’s. For daiquiris and other cocktails I love a larger, 7-10oz coup. Especially when they are engraved in an antique style. However, for Martin, which is a considerably small beverage, I prefer the tiny 5oz coup. Mainly due to the fact that I don’t like when a drink only fills up half the glass. A standard 5:1 Martini, the one being ½ oz, equals 3oz of liquid. In a 7-10oz glass this not only gets warmer faster due to more surface area, but it looks ridiculous.
Lastly, we have what might be my new favorite piece of glassware for versatility and style. The Nick & Nora glass. In the 1934 film The Thin Man, retired detective Nick Charles and his wife Nora theatrically drink dry Martinis from this upside-down bell shaped glass that actually resembles a boob much more than a coup if you ask me.
Famed bartender and mixologist Dale DeGroff was working at the Rainbow Room in New York in the 1980’s when flipping through a vintage glassware catalog he found this style of glass and nicknamed it the Nick & Nora, after the movie. The name stuck and seems to be making a revival. A lot of boutique cocktail bars have brought the Nick & Nora back into vogue and I can see why. It features an elegant shape while being large enough to accommodate even straight up Tiki drinks like Royal Hawaiian. I love serving Daiquiris, Presidentes, and any other straight up cocktail in this glass. It lends itself to Martini because the deep “bell” shape keeps the majority of the drink away from the surface and colder longer. Granted you hold it by the stem and not the bell like a heathen.
Despite the V-shaped being the newest Martini modality it seems to have persisted as the most recognizable and used for this libation. Case in point it’s referred to as a Martini Glass. Pretty much the universal iconography of cocktails. Think of how many bars or liquor stores incorporate a Martini glass into their branding. How many neon ladies swinging their legs over the edge of a Martini glass have been affixed in dive bar windows? Hell, my best friend has that imagery tattooed on his arm, women and alcohol, to represent man’s downfall. The Nick & Nora with its classic heritage and newfound adoration. Stylish and useful. That’s a combo not often found in the realm of epicurean experience. However, when it’s all said and drunk, my vote goes to the 5oz coup as the best glass for a Martini. It looks good, feels good to hold, keeps the beverage cold, and perfectly fits the 3oz cocktail.
Delivery methods aside let’s move our attention to how one properly orders a Martini. This may sound silly but, hey, I didn’t eat at Panda Express till I was 40 years old because I didn’t understand how to order. Chinese food is either ordered from a paper menu with numbers or piled onto a plate from a buffet. Cafeteria style Chinese food totally glitched my matrix. How many things could I get? What if I want all the rices? Are they going to have my General Tso’ s touching my beef and broccoli? ‘Cus that’s simply unacceptable. Does it come with an egg roll and a fortune cookie like combo 12 at No.1 China Wok down the street from my apartment? It was all so confusing. And Confucius says, “He who is baffled by menu, often baffled by life.”
So, there’s a few things to keep in mind when ordering a Martini at a classy joint. The first being that Martini’s are measured by the ratio of gin to vermouth. More vermouth makes a Martini “wetter”, as less makes it “dryer”. This may sound strange at first, especially to us Tiki nerds, but no one knows better than Tiki tipplers how a slightly heavy handed pour of any one ingredient can wildly offset the flavor of such a precariously concocted potion. So, how does one discern to order a Martini by taste?
If you ask for simply a Martini and nothing else you’ll most likely get a standard 5:1 3 oz Martini. That’s 5 parts gin to 1 part Vermouth, or 2 ½ oz gin to 1 oz vermouth. Now, you can ask for a 7:1 or even a 10:1. Or, perhaps you prefer wet and want a 2:1. Just keep in mind that the amount of liquid in your glass remains the same 3 oz, only the ratio of ingredients changes.
This has always been a point of facetious pride within the drinking community. How much vermouth is proper, manly, decorous? Hemingway famously favored a 15:1 ratio opting for a cold glass to reduce stir time to reduce dilution. It’s said that Winston Churchhill preferred to merely glance at the vermouth bottle while mixing his Martinis. There are claims that one should place the vermouth bottle in front of a fan blowing towards the drink, or that waving an open bottle of vermouth over the glass is sufficient.
I never understood this attitude. If it’s supposed to be more macho to drink your Martini with as little vermouth as possible then why not just order straight gin? If we’re buying into the masculine stereotype it would seem more manly to drink it neat from a rocks glass than chilled in a coup. A Martini is gin and vermouth. If you don’t like vermouth you should order something else. In fact, some very early Martini recipes call for equal parts. Vermouth is a wine product and can be sweet even though dry. Personally, half and half is a bit too wet for me, but at least it’s a cocktail and not just chilled gin in a questionable glass.
Okay, so, we’re asking for a 5:1 Martini. But, wait! There’s more!
The Martini is uniquely quixotic in the fact that garnish doesn’t matter but matters the most. So much that changing the garnish actually changes the name of the drink. Sure, we all know that the traditional garnish for Martini is a skewered pimiento stuffed olive. If you order it “dirty”, the bartender will add a dash of the olive brine into your drink giving it a salty-savory bite. This is a relatively new trend, considering the evolution of the cocktail, but it’s proved to stand the test of time. If that doesn’t swell your ankles up enough you could ask for “Extra Dirty”. Or, you may prefer yours the way my wife does, with a twist. In this case we forego the olive altogether and replace it with a thin strip of lemon peel “twisted” over the drink to release the oils then dropped in or draped languidly over the rim. Here’s the one that gets me. If you replace the olive and the lemon twist with a pickled onion, the same exact drink we already have ceases to be a Martini and is now called a Gibson.
We’re not going to spend too much time derailing our main narrative to side quest the Gibson, because there’s nothing to discuss. Two main theories of origin are out there. One from San Fanciso’s Bohemian Club and the other from New York’s Player’s Club. The thing is in both of these stories a bartender was challenged to improve the standard Martini and in both they simply removed the orange bitters that were common at the time. A practice that had already begun to catch on for the standard recipe. Nowhere in these accounts is there mention of a cocktail onion and as far as I can tell no one really knows when or why this became a thing.
I actually prefer no garnish. I want nothing in my Martini except gin and vermouth. Therefore, my standard order is 5:1 Martini, no garnish.
Once you get your Martini the etiquette doesn’t stop. If we were in charm school they would instruct us that the proper way to hold a stemmed cocktail glass is by the stem with two fingers of one hand while resting the flat bottom in the palm of the other. In these our modern days I’ve observed people in tax brackets I can’t even see from where I am, in the swankiest places around, holding their drinks by the bell. It has become totally acceptable because it looks cool. But, not only does this warm your drink up faster, and the Martini should be served cold cold, but it covers your glass in greasy fingerprints. Ain’t nobody got time for that!
Okay, keeping all of this in mind the most important thing to remember when ordering a Martini as a classy gentleman is, don’t be a pretentious douche. Read the room, bro. You should be able to tell if you’re in an establishment that has the capability and expertise to make your Martini to specification from a place you should just accept the way it comes. Or, from a place where perhaps you should order something else. I hear the Busch Light draft here is to die for.
All jokes aside, (well, maybe leave some jokes), I enjoy keeping time in a gamut of the diviest dive bars to the trendiest cocktail lounges and a gentleman or lady should know how to appropriately order a commensurate cocktail in either.
However, what if we’re making Martinis at home? Endeavoring to impress a lovely lady or man? Making drinks for dinner guests? Perhaps, bringing a little mojo to a garden party or picnic? Here are some tips.
We’re going to need a mixing glass, barspoon, cocktail strainer and mesh cone strainer, ice, and, of course, your choice of glassware and garnish. You may notice I did not mention a shaker. Here we go!
Shaking standard Martinis is not a thing. Neither gin nor vermouth require aeration. Shaking does make liquid colder quicker. But, we stir a drink to give it a smoother, silkier, texture. While shaking renders a cloudy fizzy dirty bathwater look rather than the clear crystal rainwater on a frosty window look a Martini should have. Shaking Martini’s didn’t become popular till vodka started being used because vodka has less taste and needs to be colder to be palatable. That’s my hot take, but also pseudo-factual. The botanical notes of gin are much more flavor forward than the highly nuanced notes of vodka. We’ll cover the various types of Vodka Martinis in separate episodes but since they are riffs and not true Martinis we’re not going to spend too much time on them here. Suffice to say they were made popular by a certain British secret agent in the 1960’s and took off as a cultural diaspora.
A lot of people like vodka because they don’t like gin. Fair enough, but then you’re only ordering a Martini because you wanna feel fancy holding the glass? Also, if you ask any bartender worth their rim salt for a Martini they will ask for your gin preference. They only tolerate vodka Martinis as a thing because they sell more drinks. For a cocktail lover it’s not totally a detriment because the popularity of vodka, especially flavored varieties, brought people back to craft cocktails again. You can obviously tell which side I’m on here. Martinis should be gin and stirred. However, I feel the same way about it as I do non-believers celebrating Christmas. If it brings someone to church once a year, or, at least makes them a nicer person for a month - spending time with loved ones, setting grievances aside, showing compassion for the underprivileged - then they’re doing the thing Jesus wanted anyway.
The realm of Martini prep is replete with superstition. My personal favorite, I believe it came from a Hemingway novel, but don’t quote me, is that Martinis should only ever be made one at a time. I like that. I don’t know why. It’s an esoteric request that doesn’t inconvenience a bartender terribly. If my wife and I both order a Martini I will ask the barkeep to prepare them individually. There’s something poetic about that request. Poetry shouldn’t be explainable but my interpretation is that each individual Martini is a piece of stand alone art that resents being tainted or manipulated in any way by having its DNA split in the womb. As an added benefit, if you find yourself in a bit of a spiff with your partner at the bar ordering this way infers, “I don’t even want the contents of my drink touching theirs!”
(I would like to add that the above statement regarding DNA splitting is regarding cocktails only and in no way is meant to offend human twins. Here at Pod Tiki we love twins. The Doublemint twins, those two Siamese cats from Lady and the Tramp. In fact, I think if you’re a twin and you go to a Tiki bar with your twin there should be a secret Tiki drink, in special matching mugs, that only twins can order.)
Moving on. The next thing is dilution. How long to stir and should you use wet ice? Wet ice is a term to describe when ice is left out long enough to begin to melt giving it a shiny appearance rather than being frosty. This supposedly offers more or more even dilution. I don’t have the science behind that claim. But, it seems to reason that stirring with more ice longer will dilute more. A balanced cocktail has to include proper dilution. Evidenced by the earliest definition of a cocktail being spirit, sugar, bitters, and water. Unless you’re Hemingway of course who, much like in his prolific writing, makes his own rules for drinking. He wasn’t off base, though. The tradition of cooling the glass off persists today. Though, the proper practice is to fill a coup with ice while you're preparing the Martini, dumping it before pouring the drink in.
The final part of creating a Martini is the pour. Stirring won’t break up cubed ice but, in the case you’re using crushed ice or scooping it from a bucket where it may become chipped, double straining works wonders in keeping the drink crystal clear and consistently free of bothersome ice slivers.
There’s always been one thing that perplexed me amid the oeuvre of Martini prep. In the novel Don’t Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk, wherein a stressed out public relations agent gives it all up to buy a hotel in Martinique, there’s a scene in which he mixes up a batch of Martinis in a shaker for a picnic with a love interest. This seemingly breaks two cardinal Martini merits. Prebatching multiple drinks at a time and using a shaker. The former is excusable since it’s only an anecdotal rule, but the latter has had me nonplussed for years. How does one pre-batch Martinis while assuring proper dilution?
The answer seems so simple I’m embarrassed not to have figured it out sooner. Simply pour your desired measurements into a tin shaker, add a few drops of water per drink, say six drops for two drinks, stir, and place in the freezer till you're ready to go. Wrapping the shaker in paper towels when packing it up will help insulate. Now you have pre-batched Martinis for your garden outing which I hope is with your wife and not a mistress like in the book.
Thus, we see, the tin shaker is merely used to keep the liquid cold. There is no shaking. And there’s no ice to worry about watering the drink down. Wallah!
One of the tricksy, yet amusing aspects of the Martini is that it’s highly customizable but with only two ingredients. It's like ordering a steak. You know it’s simple. Meat and temperature. I like mine medium rare. The issue comes that much like pants in the 2010’s, measurements vary depending on manufacturer. Dry, dirty, wet, briney, bone-dry, much like your sex life if you drink too much, these can vary wildly from bar to bar and bartender to bartender. That’s why understanding how to order just what you want assures the premier experience imbibing in Martini should be.
Well, it appears we’ve come to the part of the show where it’s time to make a drink! … Almost.
This topic entails so much that this is going to be Pod Tiki’s first ever 2-parter. This may not be my personal favorite cocktail of all time, but it is the preeminent cocktail. The iconography of the Martini is what even people who don’t drink think of when picturing an upscale cocktail experience. From history to legacy and everything in between I wanted to make sure that nothing was left out.
So, in the next episode we’re going to cover that legacy and what the Martini means today as well going over variations in ingredients and finally making that drink. Your homework is to go out, order some Martinis, and try putting into practice all we’ve discussed today.
Till then, My name is Tony and this has been Pod Tiki.
Sources: Imbibe! By Davis Wondrich, liquor.com, Imbibe.com, diffordsguide.com, wikipedia, Google AI
