What Is A Press Drink and How to Make It?
A press drink is a kind of cocktail made from simple and fewer ingredients. A raspberry press cocktail, for example, is a refreshing summer drink. To make it well, you will need ingredients like raspberry vodka, club soda, and a lime wedge.
Other press drinks like a Gentlemen’s press or Vodka Press also use fewer ingredients. It’s a simple, quick, and sharp cocktail recipe to make at home. And it’s easily one of the most popular drinks in bars.
Having said that, press drinks use a cocktail-mixing technique that takes a while to master. That technique is known as rolling.
Let’s talk a bit more about this technique below.
How to Properly “Roll” A Press Drink?
In layman’s terms, this is commonly referred to as shaking a cocktail. You’ve seen bartenders do this in movies. You can use a cocktail shaker or two tall glasses to do this.
For a press drink, the drink is supposed to add all the ingredients into a highball glass. Fill it with ice and roll or pour the drink back into a cocktail shaker. Pour it again back into the highball glass and serve with a lime wedge or other garnish.
This may sound simple to some of you. But if you’re a beginner, spilling a few drops while pouring is possible. But that’s nothing a consistent practice won’t fix.
Shaking is a basic bartending technique. And learning how to do this well can improve your press drink-making skills.
Rolling a drink is quite easy. Even for a beginner to practice, it should not take more than 2 minutes to do.
Here’s the proper way to shake a cocktail before serving. To better explain this technique, let’s write down the recipe for a raspberry press cocktail.
Ingredients
- 2 oz of raspberry vodka
- A splash of club soda
- A splash of sprite
- Lime wedge as garnish
Method
- Pour all the ingredients into a mixing glass or a cocktail shaker.
- Fill up the empty portion of the glass with ice cubes or crushed ice.
- Roll or shake all the contents in the glass to mix.
- Pour it into a serving glass and add a lime wedge for garnish.
Conclusion
While this is a basic cocktail shaking technique, it takes a while to completely master a press drink. You may get the ingredients right each time. But the rolling technique takes a while to get good at.
Having said that, it’s important to make press drinks consistently. You can use a cocktail shaker to make things easier for you. Pouring drinks for a press drink is good and easy. Make sure you have a firm grip over the glass to avoid spilling.
If you are using a three-piece shaker, it’s important to place your index finger on the lid. This keeps the lid in place and gives you a better grip at pouring drinks into other glasses. There are different ways of making a press drink. But there’s only one way of acing it.
Ask any bartender; they’ll tell you that making a press drink, you have to make sure the drink is chilled and has a unified flavor. Once you’ve got that, you have your press drink ready to serve or sip!