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JIGGER vs FREE POUR or TOBIN ELLIS, part lll

11 Oct

JIGGER vs FREE POUR or TOBIN ELLIS, part lll

 

Recently I assisted a class given by Tobin Ellis at Bridget Albert’s Advanced Academy here in Chicago. The class was not about “mixology” or spirits…it was about efficiency and service behind the bar.

I don’t think there really is any debate on giving good service to ones customers, just a growing emphasis on the lack of it in the bar industry in general and especially the pretentious nature of many of the “craft” cocktail bars that have grown along with the cocktail renaissance.

But, the subject of free pouring and using a jigger behind the bar came up and this caused a ruckus. I have wanted to write on this subject for quite a while now, and this class gives me the perfect opportunity to weigh in on this subject, and agree with and support many of the the assertions made by Tobin, that jiggering is not as accurate as one would think, that jiggering at any speed is not as accurate as a trained free pour, and that it doesn’t offer any special service, in fact it offers slower and even less service in busier bars. This also has the effect of lower bar rings, lower bar tabs, and less money being made by everyone.

I have been in many debates with colleagues over the use of jiggers at bars, especially at busy bars. After having worked in this industry in many varied venues for over 10 years here in Chicago, I can’t think of any reason most bars…busy or not…would employ the use of jiggers to make the bulk of their cocktails and other drinks.

The standard argument for the use of jiggers comes in two forms: They are more accurate and consistent, and they offer a better show or service to the guest.

Let’s look at the idea that they are more accurate and more consistent a little deeper.

On face value it seems to be obvious that a jigger would always be more accurate than free pouring, and it would be more accurate if it was up against a person that wasn’t trained in free pouring. But let’s look at the problems we will encounter in the real world of bartending. Cocktails that use all kinds of measures from 1/4 oz to 3 oz. Standard jiggers have 2 sides that can vary from 2oz/1oz, 1.5 oz/.75 oz, and many other combinations. Small graduated measuring cups are also often employed that allow a little more freedom than non graduated sides.

The accuracy problem with this is threefold. The first is that under stressed/busy conditions, mistakes are prone to happen searching for the correct jigger measure to use. The other is the temptation to start guessing, e.g when you only have a 1.5 oz side, only need an ounce, and just pour to where you think an ounce is. The other is when you do need 1.5 ounces and fill it to the top, making some spillage almost a certainty, or not filling it to the top, to avoid spillage, thus making the pour low. And, finally, the issue of grabbing the wrong jigger in the first place and not catching your mistake. If you have 5 jiggers, and they are only different by .25 or .5 oz, the closer ones start to look pretty much the same, and under stressed conditions mistakes, again are very likely. And, once one starts guessing at all, it makes the entire accuracy and consistency argument moot. In this case the pour is either under or over. losing money for the house if it is over, and cheating the customer if it is under, making the drink inconsistent, and, again, in all cases inaccurate.

To address the issue of these inevitable mistakes, the jiggering process must have a speed limit that can quickly be overwhelmed in busy bar situations or will not be able to keep up with the orders.  That issue will be addressed.

The show and service part of jiggering a drink also doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. A bartender can still take his/her time to stir a cocktail and free pour it. In fact, they have more time to attend to the customer and add the truly important steps to building a beautiful cocktail. It still is also a bit of an insult in many circles to jigger a drink for a customer as it looks like you are demonstrating the inhospitable step of measured pouring, ala the Berg System (Berg System Auto Pourer). The level of this indignation is debatable in many places, I grant you, but not the fact that it doesn’t exist to a degree that should be taken in to consideration by any bar owner or bar staff member. Jiggering in a service well, when the bartender is not serving guests, does not make sense from a service stand point again, when the only thing that counts in the well is speed and accuracy of the cocktail.

From the free pour point of view, the first non-truth that jiggering is more accurate is clearly that, not true. Again, at first glance to the layman or untrained free pourer, it looks like a measured pour using a jigger would be laughably more accurate than the “non measured” and unregulated free pour. With a closer look, though, measuring 1.5 oz in a 1.5 oz side of a jigger does not always give you 1.5 oz. Why would that be? In part it is because the measure has to go to the top. This, as I stated earlier, is very difficult to carry to the mixing glass, and if done over the glass, has the effect of nearly forcing the bartender to over pour and spill pour into the glass (by flipping the jigger while still pouring), or under pour if they become aware of this. To get your pour to the top exactly, and on a non flat surface, is not easy at a slow pace, let alone a fast one. But, at any level of speed, free pouring by a trained bartender (it must be a trained professional bartender) is at worst on par with a jigger, but in most real life situations, far more accurate than the jigger. Not only is it more accurate, but it is multiple times faster in busy and chaotic situations, allowing for the bartender to tend to customers and transactions much faster while maintaining that accuracy, and have a more natural flow of service that can easily be accelerated when necessary. It is just so much more natural.

The speed of free pouring is very important to maintaining the bartender’s natural level of concentration and not be a bottleneck that jiggering so often is.

Another question is trust in the free pouring bartender. That again is made moot by the fact that jiggering bartenders can be just as shady or incompetent as any free pouring bartender on giving away the house.

Of course the free pouring bartender must be trained, and tested from time to time. But isn’t this what should be expected of a professional bartender in the first place?  Especially in bars where they are looked at as craftsmen. But, unfortunately, the opposite is more often true.

One question keeps popping up to me about this whole issue. Where did this jiggering thing come from, anyway, when most bars were free pour trained 10 years ago? I believe it came from the influx of truly untrained bartenders from the back of the house i.e. cooks, chefs etc.. laymen owners of the new bars who have the same lack of training and knowledge, and the pre-prohibition/craft/mixology cocktail trend and new cocktails with laundry lists of ingredients. It is also an obvious control issue to those who do not understand free pouring or the business of running a busy bar. This is pure speculation, but it comes from a lot of experience in this business.

At the very least, as a fail safe, bartenders should be trained to free pour, even if they work at a jigger only bar. This will allow them to know the accuracy of their pour, even if they are pouring into a jigger…and then they do not ever have to guess what an ounce is in a 1.5 oz jigger.

Free pouring doesn’t have to conjure visions of spring break bartenders, 4 deep bars making buttery nipples and jager bombs, it is for nearly any bar and any clientele.  There are always exceptions and places where things may work or not. Every location is unique in taste, image, and environment and clientele.  But, that goes for the Berg measured pour system as well. High volume and high bartender turnover would be one place I could think of immediately for that system. But the Berg is even not as fast as true free pouring. Blindly inflicting a jiggering system on your staff and clientele without weighing these details is not good business. But blindly inflicting any system, jiggered, free pour, or Berg, is the wrong way to go as well. If you know you cannot consistently have trained free pouring bartenders behind the stick, then another system…jigger or Berg…is necessary from a pure business standpoint.

As for me, after free pouring for 10 years, I absolutely could not work in a bar that was jigger only. It would be like putting training wheels back on your 10 Speed, and would be utter frustration.

This really has been a subject in need of deeper investigation and debate, and I welcome all comments and rebuttals.

 

TODD APPEL

Piranha Bros Cocktail and Cocktail Event Consultants

www.toddappel.com

A Rationale of Sugar Syrup in Cocktails

30 Aug

A RATIONALE OF SUGAR SYRUP IN COCKTAILS

Todd Appel

What should the sugar to water ratios in syrup for cocktails be?

This has been a very important subject and one that for some reason still has some controversy over in our new world of drink mixing. One would think sugar syrup wouldn’t be a hot button issue, but whenever I have brought it up, I get some pretty hot responses and like I am a heretic that I should even question such a law of “mixology”. But there are some very good historical as well as logical reasons for my disdain of 1-1 simple syrup in cocktails.

For years I have wondered why my taste buds seemed to be at odds with many of the classic and new cocktails being offered around the country in during the renaissance of our modern cocktail world.

And I thought about something important that I realized many years ago.

Syrup in cocktails should be sugar heavy. Not to make the drinks sugar heavy, but to balance the sour ratios to their proper place and lessen added water.

I am not here to say drinks should be made in any way other than what the drinker wants. That takes precedent over anything. So if they want a sweet or sour or “balanced” drink, or a watered down drink, that is their prerogative. and you can do all of those things with a rich syrup, but once you have made your syrup 1-1, you can’t go back and you can’t get the balance that I believe is needed and was intended from the beginning and in most classic cocktail recipes calling for simple syrup.

The original reason for making syrup for cocktails and other drinks was to make the sugar soluble. Pure and simple, no pun intended. One doesn’t need an equal amount of water to dissolve sugar, and I can only speculate as to how this practice came to be. But I believe it was out of a bit of laziness and expediency, both very human traits, but traits that unfortunately lead to things like “White Whiskey” and “Hamburger Helper”.

Many of the oldest drink recipes call for lump sugar to be dissolved by crushing or mixing. This became impractical as the cocktail evolved and pre-melting the sugar into a syrup became a standard.

That being said, the logical conclusion would be to nudge the solid sugar into liquid sugar. But we can’t realistically have that so we must add water to melt the sugar. Logic would have us add only as much water as needed to melt the sugar to be as close to liquid sugar as possible. But that logic has, for some reason, eluded far too many in our modern cocktail world.

Some basic premises, first.

1 When making cocktails, the general rule is that any outside water that gets into the drink, that isn’t added on purpose, will come from the ice melt and/or any juice.  This is very important to getting the correct dilution for spirits in cocktails.

2 The more water you have in your syrup ratio, the less sugar you have in your measurements and the more water you have in your cocktail, and the reverse.

3) The more water you have in your ratio, the less sugar you have in your syrup to balance the acid (lime or lemon juice)  1 oz of 1-1 simple is only .5 oz of sugar.

These two points are incredibly important to making a balanced cocktail, particularly when trying to recreate classic recipes that call for sugar, sugar syrup or gomme syrup.

But points that I realized have been lost on nearly the entire renaissance of cocktail culture in the US.

While there is a definite demand for quality ice and attention to ice melt today, there hasn’t been that same attention to the water and sugar in 1-1 sugar syrup.

It is also the reason, I believe, that far too many cocktails in our new cocktail world are terribly unbalanced, even though they seem to be following classic recipes to a tee. And those erroneous ratios are also translated to many modern originals today with the same poor results.

In Cooling Cups and Dainty Drinks, (William Terrington, 2nd edition,1870, pg. 60)  for making syrup…”..(sugar) …should be close in texture and hard to break. It requires for its solution one-third of its weight in cold, and less of boiling water.” This is a 3-1 sugar to water ratio.

When reading the classic Embury tome, The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks (David Embury,1948), some time ago, I was very disappointed to see his ratios of citrus juice to syrup up to 2-1 in his cocktail recipes, until I read his ratios of sugar to water in his syrup. Now it made much more sense and was important historical and logical evidence to support the use of heavy sugar syrup in cocktails..

He used almost pure liquid sugar and not the 1-1 sugar water that so many of today’s mixologists blindly use and not adjusted to the ratios that Embury might suggest. This leads to a complete disaster in the final product..

The problem here is twofold. 1-1 syrup offers more water and less sugar. This leads to more dilution and/or overly acidic drinks. Another problem is that if you are using measuring cups and not using a scale, you will have even less than a 1-1 ratio since a cup of dry granulated sugar weighs less than a cup of water.

Embury goes on about the sugar to water ratio to my absolute delight..”The object to determining the ratio of sugar and water is to make the syrup as heavy as possible without getting later crystallization. I have found that a mixture of 3 cups of sugar to each cup of water yields very satisfactory syrup.”

EUREKA!!!

Embury also goes on to state he uses only syrups in even his Old-Fashioned cocktails and other cocktails that call for granulated or lump sugar and that there is absolutely no need nor desire to use gum arabic in syrups (pg 83-84, Art of Mixing Mixing Drinks, Embury)

The 1-1 ratio for simple syrup in cocktails is the elephant in the room of bartenders and mixology today.

I can’t think of one cocktail that would be better served with a ratio of more water, less sugar and/or more acid than what is called for in it’s recipe, and that is exactly what is happening in even some of the best cocktail bars in around the country.

The idea of delineating “rich” simple syrup vs “regular” simple syrup use in cocktails today is rendered inane with this realization.

All cocktails that use sugar really should use at a minimum a 2-1 ratio and the days of blindly using 1-1 sugar water in any cocktail needs to be a thing of the recent past.