Your guide to pre-batching cocktails at home

Welcome to The Glass, an irregular boozeletter awash with drinks to tell your friends about.

This time I’ve prepared a practical post on pre-batching cocktails. I’m giving you the good stuff here, so the real meat is reserved for my paid supporters. This is what they’ll get:

• A look at some General Principles
• Dilution: they why, the when, the how
• 8 pre-batch friendly recipes you can rely on to start your party with a bang 🎉
• How to make your own syrups
• A quick-reference recipe recap

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General principles

Pre-batching cocktails makes hosting a party easier and more fun for everyone. Think about it: do you really want to spend your evening measuring, hunting about for ice, shaking, straining and pouring? Or would you rather just pour out a drink, plop in a garnish, and actually have time to chat to your friends?

All you need to prepare are some scales and a measuring jug, a few clean containers (recently emptied bottles are best) and enough space in the fridge.

Plus the booze, obviously.

That’s a minimum though. There are other things worth knowing that will make your life easier. Here are a few more tips to keep in mind before you actually start mixing anything.

• It’s a good idea to know how much drink your glasses hold. Many recipes assume serving sizes around 90 to 100 ml.
• Check your containers and work out the volume you can store before you mix up your batches.
• Carbonated ingredients should never go into a pre-batched drink; if the recipe calls for fizz, add it as you serve the drink.
• If the recipe calls for fruit juice, make your own from fresh fruit. Recipes containing fruit should be prepared no more than 24 hours in advance and should be kept in the fridge.
• Recipes that include sugar syrup can be made weeks in advance.
• Recipes that include vermouth should be good for a month or so.
• Recipes that contain only spirits can, in theory, be mixed up months in advance. But why would you?
• On the night, chill your stemmed glasses too if you have room, especially for martinis. Don’t worry about chilling highballs or rocks glasses, you’ll be filling these with ice anyway.

Label everything. Masking tape and a marker pen work well.