Drink Recipes are Essentially LISTS!

Broken down to their most basic elements, drink recipes are comprised of four factors: 

Exact Varying Quantities (of each)
Ingredient in a list (put into specific)
Glassware (made according to)
How Prepared.

Our lists are broken down into drinking vessel (glassware) as a rough indicator of category

NOTE: Drink Category and type of glass are not the same. There are more categories of drinks than there are kinds of glassware in most bars today.


So while there are such categories as: 

“Daisies,”
“Flips,”
“Cobblers,”
“Shrubs,”
“Blazers,”
“Cups,”
“Toddies,”
“Slings,”
“Juleps,”
“Negus’,”
“Sours,”
“Fixes,”
“Fizzes,”
“Collins’,”
“Nogs,”
“Cocktails,” and 
“Punches” (I’ve left out more than a few)…
 
— Today we mostly start out learning bartending by learning the glassware each category goes into first, and then the groupings of common ingredients, common formulaic proportions (ex.: rocks type: 1 1/2 oz. main liquor, 1/2 oz. of sweet liqueur), and the method of making the drink (shake & strain, build in glass, blend, etc.).   

Today our basic categories of drink (all of them glassware focused) are:

Martini & Manhattan
Highballs
Classic Cocktails (Sours, Margaritas, Daiquiris)
Fruit Juice based Drinks
Frozen Drinks
Cream Drinks
Cognacs, Brandies, Liqueurs
Coffee Drinks
Rocks
Tropical and Tall Drinks (essentially “large glass”)
Wines
Beers
Shooters

Mnemonics, Priming, and Associating to Improve Memory

Whether you’re a brand new bartender or have plenty of experience you can improve your memory skills using numerous memory techniques called mnemonics (tools you can use to remind yourself of drink recipes and other information). Some mnemonic techniques include loci²(also referred to as “station” by Dr. Anthony Metivier and his followers), peg, and the story and link systems.


Mnemonics can remind you by associating a letter or number to information. For example, if you’re trying to remember the ingredients in a Jolly Rancher, use the first letter of each ingredient as a cue. By using the word SPAM, you can remember each of the ingredients: Sour Mix, Pineapple Juice, Apple Pucker, and Midori. “SPAM” is an Acronym. 


Similar to the Acronym system above, today’s bartending schools teach simple formulaic drinks using Acrostics, also using the first letter of each ingredient (For instance a B-52 Shooter is “Kills Bad Guys” which stands for “Kahlua, Bailey’s, Grand Marnier”). Those Acrostics are used for simple formulaic drink ingredient lists for drinks such as shooters because they’re easy “one part A, one par B, and one part C” drink recipes. When I say “easy” I don’t mean to say that these are easy for everyone. They’re relatively easier to remember using Acronyms and/or Acrostics. That’s because of association and something called Priming, as well as something called Chunking. Jolly Rancher “SPAM” (Sour, Pineapple, Apple Pucker, Midori) is an example of Chunking. You take a bunch of information and “Chunk” it into one word, and B-52 “Kills Bad Guys” (Kahlua, Bailey’s, Grand Marnier) is more of an association with a sentence that makes sense (The B-52 airplane kills the bad guys). 

Priming – Remembering “Related” Things and Lost Information.

Thus, with Acrostics and the story you’re associating with the drink ingredients turned into a sentence, a process known as priming is used to help you remember. When you’re priming memories, you remember some related things (in this case that the B-52 kills the bad guys) in hopes of remembering the “lost” information, which is the ingredients. Another example of priming would be if you forget where you put your car keys, so you retrace your steps. You try to remember where you were and what you were doing, “priming out” the memory of where you left your keys by going over what’s familiar that you CAN remember and seeing if that jogs your memory.


Part of the secret formula of the B-52 Acrostic is that “B-52s kill bad guys” so the drink name is the cue for easy association and recall. This is a known form of memory priming. Simply put, I can prime your memory to remember the word banana if I give you the word “yellow” first. 


You can structure information all sorts of ways to help you remember it. If you organize the information by serializing, chunking, or even rhyming it, you can remember it.

These relatively simple “one and done” Mnemonic Acrostics are great for simple lists, but not great for fraction of an ounce quantity, glassware, mixing method, or garnish. The reason schools and most individuals have Acrostics for shooters like the  B-52 are because almost all shooters are 1 part, 1 part, 1 part drinks, all shaken and strained into shooter glasses, and almost none of them have any garnish.



Learning More Than Just Shooters:



We (all bartenders and schools using “simple” Acrostics and Acronyms) and start learning to be more elaborate in our encoding for all cocktails we can’t simply “remember” easily and long term with our natural memory without consciously trying.



The main thing we’re doing now with these “Ingredient Lists” (drinks) is getting into more Elaborative Encoding than merely using the most simple related story imagery Acrostics as in “Kills Bad Guys” for the B-52, or “Just Pay Cash” for the Red Headed Slut, or Keep Bouncing Around for an Orgasm.


What we’re doing here with Acrostics and Acronyms is to “chunk” information into larger chunks so we can later recall chunks of chunks (multiple drinks in a chunk, multiple ingredients in a drink – chunks of chunks). There’s more to it than that though. As long as we’re associating a chunk of information encoded within a word, or a sentence, we can elaborate and expand that story a bit to include other clues as to how much of each ingredient, exactly what glass, and exactly what garnish. That’s where my images, the images I’ve created for you to use to remember fractions of ounces of ingredients comes in. These will be VERY helpful to you in recalling later with absolute certainty just how much of each ingredient you should be pouring to make a drink to proper specification “according to the recipe”. 


I’ve written a follow up post to this called BARTENDING AND DRINK MEMORIZATION which covers a more advanced drink, with a lot of varying ingredient measurements, the Singapore Sling. You’ll be able to see how I take the images I’ve created for measurements and applied them along with an Acronym to create a complete drink memorization mnemonic covering both the ingredients and the amounts.

BartenderLife

Site Author, David Jonathan Curtis: David Jonathan Curtis, a seasoned professional in his fifth decade of bartending and bar management, began his career in Midtown Manhattan, NY, tending and managing bars before diving into Manhattan’s bustling nightlife scene. Over the years, he has mastered high-volume, high-pressure bartending as the lead bartender in both iconic Midtown clubs and Wall Street bars, generating over $1,350,000.00 annually in personal drink sales. He has since extended his expertise to establishments in Georgia and now Tampa, Florida. David’s roles as a Bartending Instructor at the American Bartending School in Tampa, while maintaining a second job bartending, and his years experience of managing bars, and working as a Brand Ambassador along with his extensive professional library of over 1,000 bartending books, highlight his dedication to continually refining his craft. He holds a diploma in Bar Management and is BarSmarts certified by Pernod Ricard.

1. USING CLUB SODA TO CHILL A COCKTAIL GLASS: You’re going to use club soda in an iced up cocktail glass to chill the glass more quickly. Here’s the science: Warm water rises, cold water sinks. Ice is expanded water in solid form, lower in density (weighing less) than water so it floats on top of the warm layer. As the bubbles of soda expand they rise up to the top and push club soda ahead of them forming a mini current, pulling bubbles up. As this happens the warmer soda water is chilled by the ice and is driven to the sides of the glass, where it falls down and cools the wall of the glass. This “up through the center/force sideways/slide down the edges of the glass movement quickly chills the entire glass more swiftly than water and ice just sitting there. The club soda creates a physical action powered by the expanding CO2 gas.[↩]
2. LOCI, or “Stations”: Some people call the Memory Palace the “method of loci,” because “loci” is the Latin plural for “location” as found in the anonymous book
   Rhetorica ad Herrenium, amongst other ancient texts dealing with Ars
   Memorativa (the art of memory). The basic concept that has lasted
   throughout history is this: Memory Palaces contains a number of “loci” or locations and that the person memorizes material by creating associative imagery and leaving it at various locations within the Memory Palace.
   
   
   
   Just as Simonides of Ceos could tell the authorities where various victims had been standing when the building collapsed, we can “find” information we’ve memorized by looking for it at the place we left it in our Memory Palaces.
   
   
   
   Since ancient times, different terms have been used to describe this
   process, including “the Roman Room method” and “the journey method.”
   
   
   
   Although the technique has never gone away, it has recently been
   revitalized on a larger scale in contemporary culture through Thomas
   Harris’s fiction about the serial killer Hannibal Lecter (from Silence of the Lambs, amongst other films and novels) and various memory
   championships around the world. Sherlock Holmes has used a Memory
   Palace on television as has the character Patrick Jane in The Mentalist.[↩]