Layering a Drink: Learning Project Week 7

Image taken from TheCocktailNovice.com

Layering a drink is a fairly crucial skill for bartending. While it doesn’t have any change in the taste of a drink, it does have an important impact on the drinks presentation. Presentation is pretty important, as more people are interested in buying a drink when it looks really cool. When you think of layering a drink, I’m sure most peoples minds would go to shooters. However, many cocktails also use layering different liquids rather than mixing them.

Images taken from CocktailParty.com

Some cocktails get layers in different ways. The Tequila Sunrise, pictured on the right, gets its red to orange gradient by adding grenadine to the very end of the drink. The grenadine, being much more dense than the orange juice and tequila that makes up the rest of the drink, sinks to the bottom giving it that gradient look. Then you have a drink like the Paralyzer (on the left), in which we add cream to the very end of the drink. The cream, being less dense than the mixture making up the rest of the drink, sits on top. This one is especially important to do at the very end. If we were to add the cream first, the carbonation in the coke would cause it to curdle. By adding it at the end, we stop the cream from curdling. Or at least, we stop it from curdling too bad. Finally, some of you may have seen these really fancy flaming cocktails, like the AWOL pictured in the middle.

While alcohol is flammable, the liquor needs to be pretty high in alcohol percentage to actually ignite. This needs to be at least 50% alcohol, or  100-proof, to ignite. This means you won’t be able to get a drink mixed with other low proof liquors or any mixers like juice or pop to ignite. To get around this, we can slowly add a high-proof liquor, like a Rum 151, on the top of the drink and ignite it. Adding something to the very end of the drink so it doesn’t mix with the rest of the cocktail is called “floating” it.

Now, I talked about density above, which is crucial to understanding what ingredients we can layer in what order. Density is what allows different liquids t stay separate from each other. Like, if you’ve ever poured a bit of oil into water, you’ll notice that the two won’t mix together naturally. The oil will typically float on top, since its less dense than the water. This is important for a bartender to know when layering a drink. Some liquors will not be able to stay on top of each other, simply because one is denser than the other.

So, knowing how density works, how can we figure out which ingredients will be denser than the others? Well, the best way seems to be by the amount of sugar in the ingredient. The more sugary liquers will be more dense than ones with less sugar. Now that raises the question of how to find out which liqueur has the highest sugar, which can be hard to find. Most liquor bottles I’ve seen don’t have a typical nutrition label like you’d see on other products. For example, this bottle of Crème de Cacao I have pictured below doesn’t have this information.

To help figure this out, I managed to find a website which has made a pretty comprehensive list of the density of many different liquors. Check out Bartenderly’s ALCOHOL DENSITY CHART – THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE LIST AVAILABLE to check out the full chart if you plan on making your own layered drinks without a guide. Or, if you feel like winging it, a fairly reliable way of finding out your ingredients density is by checking the alcohol percentage listed on the bottle. The lower the percentage, the less dense it will typically be.

Most of the layered drinks made behind a bar are going to be shooters. I’ve made a slideshow with a few examples (All images and recipes shown come from SpruceEats.com)

As far a technique goes to actually layer a shooter there are a couple different ways to go about it. I’ve made a video making a couple different shooters to show you. This includes a little trick I learned to lower the density of a liqueur that I picked up on the job.

Or, you want a more concise (and professional) guide, check out the video by Bols below it. Bols is liqueur company, so their guides are quite trustworthy.