The last step, the final touch, the last addition to any cocktail: The garnish.

Image taken from MarthaStewart.com

The garnish is often seen as the least important part of a cocktail, which may very well be true. However, I’ve always believed there’s something to be gained from them. A garnish will often add a subtle, yet noticeable flavor. This is easy seen in less flavorful cocktails, such as an orange peel in an old fashioned or a lemon twist in a martini. In fact, there’s a few types of garnishing that are nearly essential to a drink. However, some of these garnishes give off a very subtle flavor, if there is one at all. I have learnt many ways of garnishing different cocktails, but I wanted to know more. I wanted to what kind of other ways there were to garnish cocktails, and why we use each kind for each cocktail.

Fruits and Almost Everything Else:

Citrus is often the first kind of garnish to come to mind. You’ll often see a wedge of lemon, lime, or even orange hanging off your drink in decoration. However, as we know, adding it to the drink adds a bit of flavor to your drink with how strong these citrusy flavors are. An extra bit of lemon juice in your water is easy to notice. We use the peel many different ways as well, to add a much much subtler flavor to it. Whether using the peel or the fruit, there are many ways of presenting it. Check out the video below for a better look at them.

Other types of fruits and berry’s are also often used as garnish. Sometimes these are hung off a glass like a citrus, but more often then not they’ll be skewered. You may also see to herbs and vegetables, like mint or cucumber. Herbs will usually float on top of the drink, as a small sprig or leaf. Vegetables will typically be placed in the drink or hung off the side like a fruit, depending on what it is and the cocktail its a part of. Then there’s some other odd things. Things like a sprinkle of chocolate shavings in a chocolate martini, or coffee beans in an espresso martini. Most of the time, these garnish’s won’t add much to the drink. We typically use these garnish’s in order to help convey the idea of the drink, just as a bit of presentation. Its meant to convey what’s in the drink, like cucumber to know the drink has muddled cucumber, or chocolate shavings to show it has a chocolaty flavor.

Rimmed Glasses:

Then, there’s rimmed drinks. We typically rim drinks with either salt or sugar, each majorly effecting the taste of the cocktail you drink. A sugared rim on a Lemon Drop Martini adds some sweetness to the very sour taste of the drink, which is basically just vodka and lemon juice. However, it isn’t the most necessary thing on already sweet drinks which are rimmed anyways. Then, we have salted rims on margaritas, which can be very important. The salt works to take away some of the “bite” from the tequila, while at the same time contrasting the sourness of the lime, which can elevate the sweetness of the juice and the triple sec a bit in a well-made marguerite. We usually rim a glass by coating the rim of it in lemon or lime juice, and then placing the rim in either salt or sugar, which then sticks to the juice on your glass. I’ve demonstrated it before, on the video I posted making the Raspberry Lemonade. However, there are many other things you can rim a glass in.  There’s a guy named The Tipsy Bartender, who makes some crazy weird and cool drinks for his TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube channels. In the videos of seen of him, I’ve realized that you can rim a glass with anything.

From pop rocks, to jelly beans, to cotton candy, anything can be a rim if you do one simple trick: use corn syrup instead of lime juice. Now, obviously, this is best used for sweet things like chocolate shavings or candies, but it still looks like a fun way to decorate a glass. I had never tried riming a glass in corn syrup before, but I wanted to try it. I decided to rim a glass in chocolate, and see how it turned out and what it added to the cocktail. I figured the minty-chocolaty Grasshopper would be the perfect cocktail to try a chocolatey rim with. I made the video below showing how I rimmed a glass in chocolate shavings (and the cocktail I used it for). Check it out below.

I think it turned out pretty well, but it added a lot of sweetness to the cocktail, almost too much. Its important to note that it did make a bit of a mess as well, as the syrup started to drip down the glass pretty quickly even with it being chilled. It may look great, but corn-syrup rimmed glasses may not be practical, but it does look good.

At the end of the day, it seems like the garnish we use it more often used for presentation purposes than to add anything to a drink, aside from the odd rimmed glass which benefits a lot from it. While an extra squeeze of lemon juice in a Long Island Iced Tea is nice, its not exactly necessary. Usually, a garnish is used to give a bit of extra insight to what the drink is, what’s in it, what it should taste like, or the impression you want to give by it (like those little umbrellas in “tropical” cocktails, which add nothing to the drink but the cool vibes). But, presentation does go a long way. One of my favorite parts of mixology have had to do with the different ways of presenting them. Figuring out what glass to use, if it should be mixed, if it should be poured over ice, and of course, how to garnish it.