Bartending Terms: Part 2

Video Transcript

"When you stir a drink you're going to want to use the long swizzled end, not the actual spoon, because if you use the actual spoon, as you can see, it just gets a little bit messy and you're more likely to drop the ice out. In addition to this there's some drinks that call for "muddling". When you "muddle" a drink what that means is all you're doing is you're taking some ingredients in the bottom, you put your ice in the drink, you put either a mint sprig or pineapple or raspberries or whatever it is you're going to muddle, and you just take your muddler, or, if you don't have a muddler, you can use the end of your spoon, and you just muddle everything around like that just to infuse the flavors. When someone orders a drink they could say two things, they could say "on the rocks" or "straight-up". "On the rocks" means literally on the rocks of ice so you're going to put some ice in a drink, it just means "on ice". And generally if someone orders something "on the rocks" you can use your rocks glass or your old fashioned glass. Or you could serve it, if they say "straight up", you might want to serve it in a martini glass or something like that. Sorry, not a martini glass, a cocktail glass. Another term you might want to know about is "frosting". When you "frost" a glass, which is usually beer mugs, or beer pints, or cocktail glasses, you're just going to put it in the fridge. It's going to be cold enough to chill the glass, you're just going to want a little bit of a cold on the side of it so not a fridge, you're going to want it in a freezer and you're just going to let that get a nice "frosty" outside edge and it's best to do that with your cocktail glasses when you're making a cocktail. In addition to that, when I talked about earlier about lacing the drink, you can also do something called "floating". And when you "float" something it is similar to lacing it because you are pouring it on the top, but the goal is to get it so that it floats, so generally you want to be a little bit carefuller with it and you almost want to layer it. So, for example, when you layer something you're just going to use your spoon and go off the back of your spoon and I'll talk about that a little bit in another section. And these are pretty much the basic terms for being a bartender."