Cocktail Picks

Why bother with garnishes? Garnishing requires you to use your knife skills to make interesting shapes, grow special pots of herbs, or precisely place bits and pieces just so they look neat. It can seem like a lot of trouble for something you can't drink. I don’t like to chew on fresh grapefruit peel - that’s just a personal preference of mine. So why bother with garnishing when most garnishes get thrown in the trash?

But here's the thing: garnishes are important for the experience and often contribute important flavor nuances. With Tipply, you can ignore garnishes, for those days that you might not have the mental energy for a creative, additional step. Furthermore, ignoring garnishes can greatly decrease the number of ingredients you need to manage. If you need to, ignore them, but let me encourage you to get into, if not increase, your garnish game.

Simple garnishes are easy to make and often are a valuable use to products that may be wasted. What good is the outside of a lemon? Once you juice it, you'll likely throw the lemon shell and it's zesty peel away. Take a step beforehand by slicing off a sliver of peel. That sliver contains a lot of oil, which when expressed over your drink, gives it a delightful bouquet. In a drink like a Vieux Carré, the lemony scent combines with the alcohol fumes and welcomes your nose with each sip. Don't forget that scent affects your perception of flavor and your memory - and are not things to ignore! All you have to do is cut, squeeze, and then place the peel in or on the vessel.

That squeezed grapefruit peel may be useful, and it might even be decoratively tasteful. It just isn’t creative. An easy way to increase your garnish options is to use a cocktail pick. That sliver of peel can be made into a flag or a sail. For a recent Conquistador, I used two skinny lemon peels slivers to form a cross. The Spaniard I served it to got a nice chuckle out of it.

With a cocktail pick, you can combine that lemon peel with a brandied cherry to create an eye or planetary rings! What would a Saturn be without such an imaginative garnish, where the cherry is the planet and a long lemon peel becomes the rings?

Sometimes, you just want something to hold a special treat. I have a drinking buddy who loves his Bourbon. He owns one cocktail book which is dedicated to Old Fashioneds. But when he makes an Old Fashioned, his comments swirl around the anticipation of the brandied cherries awaiting him - three cherries chummed up together on a cocktail pick. Without that pick he'd have to fish the cherries out of his drink, like a kid picking marshmallows out of his cereal. That's an unclassy act even by my standards.

What to look for in cocktail picks

There is as much variety in cocktail picks as options for garnishing. On one end, you have your basic disposables: wooden toothpicks, plastic swords, and small bamboo spears. On the other, you have reusable, themed options, often metal, enameled, or carved bamboo..

My recommendations

My preference is the utilitarian middle ground: the basic stainless steel pick. This option let's me put the focus on the garnish and drink, with the cocktail pick receding into the background. I can use these simple metal picks on almost any drink and I don't have to sort through a bunch of options for a more unique option.

I’ve also picked up a bag of bamboo skewers, because the kids like to make my stainless ones disappear when they make their kid drinks.