Margarita is a popular Mexican after dinner drink. It’s definitely the most common tequila-based cocktail.

There are different versions of this delicious drink whose name means “pearl” in Latin and daisy in Spanish. The most interesting ones are made with peach, strawberry and banana.

The sour taste and citric flavour are typical of a good Margarita so if you prefer smooth and sweet cocktails this drink is simply not for you. You could go for a variant and even add some sweet fruit juice in it.

You will be drinking something different though: fruit-based Margaritas are not part of the definition of a classic “Margarita”.

Trust me, its original version and its typical taste of lemon is so refreshing to fully deserve the reputation it holds everywhere in the world.

Make Margarita following my simple recipe

Try your hand in making it following my simple cocktail recipe. But first just let me spend few words on its main ingredient: the Tequila. Tequila is a distilled drink made from a plant called blue agave, typically produced in the area of Tequila, Mexico.

It is transparent, its smell is strong and its alcohol content is estimated to be around 38%, making Margarita one of the strongest cocktails.

It is not surprising to find out that from the ’30s to the ’50s, it was considered a beverage for macho men, first by Americans than by Mexicans. It became popular and consumed pure – with no sugar added – by people with a certain social prestige.

Being a symbol of machismo and masculine pride the tequila was paradoxically considered more valuable if its flavour was strong and “bad”.

Margarita ingredients:

• Tequila 1 1/4 oz
• Triple Sec 3/4 oz
• Lime juice or lemon juice 1/2 oz

You can simply prepare it by mixing ice, tequila, triple sec (Cointreau is the most famous) and lemon or lime juice.

How to make the typical “frosted” edge

This is how to easily get it with the typical “frosted” edge: Take a “Margarita glass” (a classic Martini glass suits as well) and holding it upside down rim its inner and outer edge with a slice of lemon.

Put some salt in a plate, then roll the edge of the glass into the salt to achieve a “frosted” effect. Store the glass in the freezer and let it cool thoroughly. Meanwhile, fill with ice cubes ¾ of a cocktail shaker, add all ingredients and shake vigorously for about 10 seconds, then strain out all in the glass.

Serve immediately. You can decorate it with a slice of lime, but I recommend serving it with no decoration at all to let everybody focus on the salty edge.

Warning! Not everyone likes to taste salt. In this case just moisten with lemon half edge of the glass.

Scared by Saint Valentine’s Day? Great expectations are in play, I understand. The occasion may require attention to details and long preparation.

Let me give you a dispassionate advice: you should forget all you have been thought about this fateful day and play your own game.

You should not repeat the same old impersonal story with the half hearted intention to make the event classically romantic. Make it amazing, new, different and quirky instead.

First of all avoid candlelit dinners, heart-shaped gift packages, scarlet roses and gentle words with ensured soothing effect. That would introduce yourself as a quite lover in search of quiet emotions.

Also forget those millions of ads you have been reading so far: advertisers and retailers need to push you to celebrate Valentine’s Day in an impersonal way. Showing a reverent observation of conventional rituals would not make this event special. Whatever you decide to do, do it with a personal touch.

Prepare your beloved a drink of love

With all that said, this is not a love blog yet! All I can say is that amongst thousand of ways to get in the mood for love, one of these can be to create and share a dazzling new cocktail. Prepare your beloved a drink of love. Do more, ask your lover to prepare it with you, to get involved in its preparation.

Showing yourself eager to experiment together will make you close by having much more fun. In this way, not only will your partner be amazed because of your skills as a cocktail maker, but you will also enjoy the amazing taste of an experience in which you have combined both ingredients and yourself in a unique and unrepeatable way.

The cocktail recipe is simple. Your main effort will be to get: classic martini glasses, rum, chocolate cream (you can make it by slowly melting a chocolate bar with a spoon of butter in a pan), cream de cacao (chocolate liqueur, that is), ice cubes.

A marriage of impeccable taste

Some people suggest to use vodka. I would only use vodka in extreme cases i.e. if there were no stores to buy rum within 500km. Only rum is in the seventh heaven with chocolate for a marriage of impeccable taste.

Chocolate Rum Love drink, serves two:

• 3 oz rum, better if dark
• 1 ½ oz cream de cacao
• 2 spoons chocolate cream
• Ice cubes

Get into action: Take a martini glass, flip it over onto a plate in which you have previously put a thin layer of chocolate cream (you will add the remaining chocolate cream in the shaker). Once you have decorated the edge of the glass with this cream, pass it onto another plate where you put the sugar cane, or white sugar if you prefer.

Stir ingredients in a shaker half filled with ice and pour them all into the decorated glass using the filter to remove the ice. If you have any, add some red berries on top. As a final touch, if you fancy a contrast of colours, sprinkle petals of grated white chocolate. At last intoxicate yourself drinking it in a good company.

To burn off excess calories gained during party and festivities you are probably keen to get on with an after Christmas diet plan.

Probably just like me you allowed yourself to eat and drink more promising to turn excesses in sacrifices one day. Where do we start from?

By far the best drink after water is tomato juice seasoned with salt and lemon, full of antioxidants and vitamins.

The best cocktail to pick up is a Bloody Mary, then. A deep red cocktail created 80 years ago by a bartender at Harry’s Bar in Paris. Served in the morning, it is also a real blessing for those who have to fight dehydration and vitamin deficiencies caused by the hangover.

• 1 oz. to 1½ oz. (30-45 ml) vodka
• 3 or 4 ice cubes
• Tomato juice
• Celery stalk for garnishment
• 1 dash ground black pepper
• 1 dash tabasco sauce
• 2-4 dashes of worcestershire sauce
• ½ lemon (to squeeze)
• A pinch of salt

You can prepare it directly in a highball glass, adding the vodka together with ice cubes, tomato juice and all the other ingredients. I suggest to stir it, not to shake it. In fact If you shake a Bloody Mary you will get a lot of froth from tomato juice and the ice will melt quickly making the cocktail insipid before you can finish it. Garnish with a celery stalk and a skewer of olives, pickels and carrots, if you fancy. Serve it fresh.

Distinguish between lighter and heavier drinks

Maybe the topic “low-calorie cocktail” is just an excuse to introduce you to this healthy cocktail. It is not my intention to further pursue this subject, indeed. I think it is quite pointless to warn you that a Pina colada contains much more calories than a Margarita. I’d rather not to remind that to myself either since I would probably start following a drastic diet based on temporary and pointless restrictions.

What I think would be more useful instead is to give a general look at the amount of calories contained in cocktails and to acquire some knowledge useful to distinguish between lighter and heavier drinks.

The reason why a White Russian has more calories than a Bloody Mary, for example, is the sugar and alcohol content, with the main contribution coming from alcohol. 1 gram of it contains 7 calories. As a consequence if you follow a diet you should avoid large quantities of alcohol and start gaining an insight into calories contained in different spirits. Let’s see how.

On each bottle you can read a percentage: the alcohol content. With a little of mathematics and a couple of notions of physics you will come to know how much calories that percentage corresponds to.

How many calories are there in your favourite cocktail?

The alcohol content is expressed as a percentage of the total volume of alcohol. For example, a liter of wine showing 12% vol. contains 12 cents of gallons of alcohol (ie 12 cl or 120 ml).

If the specific gravity of alcohol is equal to 1, 120 ml correspond exactly 120 grams of alcohol. The specific gravity of 0.79 of alcohol is, in other words, a liter of alcohol weighs 0.79 kg. The grams of alcohol contained in a liter of 12 degrees wine is therefore 120 × 0.79 = 94.8 grams. Finally, multiply by 7.

The formula is:
 Degrees = kcal × (quantity in liters) × 7.9 × 7.

Ok, I do not blame you if you use the calculator to work it out or if you forget about calculus and just consider that highest percentages correspond to more alcohol which corresponds to more calories.

Wines contains less alcohol. The last two cocktails I have suggested (Bellini, Happy Honey Pear cocktail), based on a sparkling wine (even more lighter than red wines), can be considered a good choices in terms of low calories drinks.

In conclusion I have just one simple suggestion: if you wish to order a long island tea, knowing that it accounts for around 750 calories, just associate it to a lighter dinner. And maybe stop dreaming, just like me, of a world in which a tea has 300 calories and a pina colada only 30. Less drastic restrictions and a little more moderation and awareness make us healthier drinkers.

I have recently prepared a cocktail that combines three of my favourite ingredients.

Some of the best recipes are born this way: you like something but you don’t know how it will taste when mixed together with other ingredients. You try, eventually also fail a few times, before you get something good. In my case the risk involved mixing pears, honey and Prosecco.

I had all the ingredients leftover from New Year’s eve so I could start mixing them without leaving home for shopping. You are not wrong if you consider laziness as an ingredient of this cocktail. Though this approach is not highly professional, it led me many times to make a virtue of necessity with good result.

Discovering flavours

As I was not going to follow a specific recipe I ended up discovering flavours that I would have never tried otherwise. Necessity is the mother of the invention. Not to mention all of the masterpieces born by mistake, a separate chapter should be devoted on these.

I did not know what to expect but a certain intuition about the flavours inspired me to venture. As I wrote in a recent post, Prosecco is an Italian sparkling wine with fruity aroma. Fruit juices are usually used in the preparation of cocktails based on it, see Bellini. A wine with fruity notes goes well with fruit. Elementary, my dear!

If you put together ingredients that are like colours separated by a few tones, few shades, you may assure yourself results at least discrete, sometimes surprisingly excellent. Not the traditional sugar mixed with the usual alcohol.

Prosecco is a versatile drink, with a level of acidity lower than Champagne. The favourite drink for festive occasions in Italy. And not only. With exports rising by 25 percent, most of the toasts will be made in Italy everywhere. This is shown by an analysis of Coldiretti, Organization of Italian farmers, on the basis of market sales in the world in the first nine months of 2011. Coldiretti estimated that over 300 million bottles of made in Italy sparkling wine were consumed during 2011 (10 million more than Champagne), +37 percent in the United States, + 25 percent in the United Kingdom .

Happy Honey Pear cocktail recipe

Let’s forget about market sales now. I always suggest you to follow tastes more than trends. If a trend is so appealing or convenient to capture your attention, take a chance on it just to discover new things and create your future recipes, like I did with this Happy Honey Pear cocktail.

Serves 4:

• Take 3 pears, peel and cut them into pieces (leave some pear for the garnishment if you fancy it)
• Bake them until they are tender, around 20 minutes
• In a food processor mix the pears with honey (2 tablespoons of acacia honey for a delicate sweet taste) and blend until you get a smooth cream
• Slowly add the chilled Prosecco and blend it again
• Freeze at least one hour
• Pour everything into glasses and garnish with thin pear slices.

Fresh, smooth, delicious. Want to try some?

How many cocktails are out there on the market? Thousands of different cocktail recipes, each of which has dozens of variations. How to choose the cocktail right for you, then?

You can narrow down the field taking into account when you are going to drink, enjoying a pre or after dinner cocktail. If the alcohol content is your main concern instead, you need to know that going from long, medium to short drinks, the alcoholic percentage increases.

Personally I do not like to follow classic rules. I suggest you to get to know your tastes first, then to try to be imaginative and choose your drink according to your fantasy or mood.

Imagine being able to hear the rhythms of a hot night in Rio de Janeiro, along an endless stretch of white sand washed by a sea whose waves seem to dance samba… Can’t your imagination help you prepare a caipirinha? Do you feel like being as much adventurous as James Bond chased by soviet agents in “The Spy Who Loved Me”? Then you may order a vodka martini saying “shaken, not stirred”. If you plan to give a theme to your drinking session, or to unleash a special feeling in those who will taste your drinks you have plenty of choice.

A matter of personal choice

The game of associations has no limits. Once I met an Italian lawyer with a passion for surfing and drinks whose personal selection criteria involved music. He told me: “it’s now time to taste a rhum, almonds and dark chocolate listening to “Into The Wild” movie soundtrack, Eddie Vedder” , “I am going to sip a Bellini on the notes of Even Flow of Pearls Jam”, “You should definitely drink a Tio Pepe while Paco de Lucia plays a great flamenco”. Things like this. Music as a liquid continuation of notes, one essential ingredient more.

Music/drink can be a tricky pairing, a matter of personal choice. If you need some kind of inspiration there are many websites addressing the topic. Among the many online contributions it worths mentioning Drinkify, a website helping you when you know what music to listen to but a dilemma is troubling you: “What should I drink?”. The idea is not original but intriguing. You may get stuck wondering what kind of criteria links a red bull to Justin Bieber or why a spiced rhum pairs well with Metallica’s songs.

I tried it typing Jingle Bells and surprisingly I found myself happy with the answer: my Jingle Bells song matched a Woodford Reserve based cocktail. A Bourbon, a whiskey made with corn, that is. A very special one: a small batch numbered bottle, something made in limited quantities by mixing the contents of a small number of valuable barrels. A great suggestion! Does it have something to do with Jingle Bells, though?

Quality is the first step to the right drink

Whatever the answer is, this Christmas cocktail deserves my appreciation to Drinkify (if you do not like coffee try a different version, Mint Julep). Wood, flowers, nuts, and notes of sweet citrus peel coming up from this special bourbon can drag you in the Christmas atmosphere. However I will not encourage you to “drinkify” your cocktails but to focus to your imagination instead. To vigorously stir all the ingredients with creativity!

Don’t you know where to start and your imagination is running dry? Do not give up. First, do not choose a cocktail just because others tell you so (obviously, everyone has different tastes). Second, stick to one key point: the selection of quality ingredients.

Preparing a cocktail is like preparing a dish, just like a pizza made with poor ingredients doesn’t taste good, a cocktail mixed with cheap alcohol may disgust your palate. You’re going to spend a few cents per drink more, but you will end up achieving better results. Still wondering how to choose the right drink? If there is no such a evocative music to inspire you, just pick up a few initial ingredients, the good ones: quality is the first step to the right drink for you.

Aren’t you tired, like me, of being served too sweet cocktails, undrinkable after few sips, or drinks in which the most decisive flavor comes from loads of crushed ice?

It is not uncommon to bump into a makeshift bartender, someone who has done an hour long mini tutorial held by other bartenders before the beginning of his first shift. With the obvious disastrous results.

And what about those lazy/posh bartenders who would never accommodate a customer’s request since a slight change of the recipe would take few seconds more and/or ruin the golden recipe?

You’d like to find the best bar in the world, instead. That place where you can find the cocktails you love the most and with taste of distinctive fresh flavours in a cosy atmosphere together with the right people. A place that never closes, and you do not have to face long journeys by car or by bus to reach. You would like to stay…. home, then. Your home can be the best bar in the world! Your home is like you, about you, is your refuge, and it can soon become your favourite bar.

Few basic rules before making your first cocktail

Before you rush yourself in to the preparation of your first cocktail you may want to know some few basic rules. Bear in mind that acquiring a basic knowledge about alcohol and equipment, will not make you an expert. Whether you want to be a bartender or a good “cocktail maker” at home, the experience and practice in preparing your drinks will make you better.

You can learn how to prepare a cocktail online, simply by scrolling through the online recipes or watch a video tutorial. Anybody can do that and, if your purpose is just to make good cocktails, you don’t have to spend your savings in an expensive bartending school to earn a bartender’s certificate. You may also want to satisfy your curiosity, for example getting to know that the etymology of the word rum may refer to the noise of boilers for distillation (from ‘rumble’) and that Cachaça is known in Brazil with over 2000 different names.

In any case, you will not be able to recognize the flavors and aromas of different spirits, or to distinguish the different qualities of rum just by reading online! Practice is essential. If you are really keen to develop the ability to delight your palate and impress your clientele, whether you are serving friends at home or paying customers in a bar, first of all I suggest you to:

1. Be curious
2. Watch how professional bartenders work
3. Abandon the idea that people only drink to get drunk
4. Pick fresh and quality ingredients
5. Get started practicing with easy-to-make and popular cocktails, such as caipirinha

Follow our cocktail recipes and add them a pinch of creativity and passion!

Image by Galant.

Mmmm . . . cocktails! Don’t you just love those alcoholic drinks? You watched your favourite superstars drink them in Hollywood movies, and now you drink them yourself in bars, clubs and at dinner parties.

And more often you see people create cocktails in the comfort of their own homes. You should make sure that you and your friends look the part when you gather around the table and see the night through with your favourite cocktail drinks.

To find out how to create your own cocktails for your next party welcome to the glamorous world of cocktail making. This is your introduction to cocktail mixing.

Cocktails are mixed drinks that contain two or more ingredients. There is a wide variety of cocktail recipes available. A typical cocktail contains minimum one spirit. The base of a cocktail drink is made with a distilled spirit such as vodka, tequila, whiskey or rum. The spirit is then mixed with some soda or fruit juice. Additional flavourings such as honey, cream, sugar, herbs, juice, spices, water, fruit or a variety of other flavourings are added on.

Cocktail mixing is an art. Cocktails are made by putting together all of the ingredients and shaking them for some seconds with a cocktail shaker. Without a shaker you can crush everything with a pestle or stir everything with a long stem spoon. The shaken drink is then poured into a cocktail glass. Cocktails are served chilled on crushed ice or just plain ice.

Some of the most traditional and best tasting cocktails are Margarita, Martini, Daiquiri, Bloody Mary, Screwdriver and Tequilla Sunrise. In recent years fancy cocktails have become very popular with names like Caipirinha, Cosmopolitan, Mojito, Sex On The Beach and Long Island Ice Tea.

Remember to drink cocktails responsibly, remember to dance seductively and live passionately!

If you want to learn how to make cocktails, you are in the right place.

HowToCocktails.com is a website for all your cocktail-making needs. We experiment by drinking almost daily to collect all the cocktail information you may find interesting.

On How To Make Cocktails you will find cocktail drink recipes, other alcoholic drink recipes, best cocktail bars, cocktail-making tools and other tips. We concentrate on the best tasting cocktails and the most traditional, natural and hand-crafted ingredients.

Remember to drink responsibly, dance seductively and live passionately!

But enough talk, time for caipirinhas!