Christmas Cocktails 2023
In 2023, we went to a couple Christmas parties, and brought along some homemade cocktails. Here are some tips we learned after trial and error, that you may learn with less trial and error.
The Setup
We purchased this cooler and this set of 24 6oz bottles. The bottles are actually a little more like 8oz, with some significant variation in size. The cooler pretty snugly fits all 24 bottles though. We then placed ~10 lbs of ice below the bottles. The labels are designed on canva & printed on regular printer paper.
We brought this cooler with 6 bottles each of four drinks to the parties, and dealt with the following constraints:
- 8oz is a large drink: You can’t really do standard cocktails of 15-20% ABV, as that’d be too much alcohol, especially given that the parties we were attending weren’t the crunk sort. The target ABV is 10%.
- Carbonation doesn’t work: Carbonation is already challenging in a cocktail where you’re diluting its source with other non-carbonated ingredients. But, especially in this context, where you’re filling the bottles ahead of time, carbonation disappears pretty quickly.
- Blended drinks don’t work: They’ll melt. Similarly, if you’re using standard recipes served over ice, they’re likely under-diluted and you’ll need to correct for that.
Additionally, we wanted to try to make our drinks cover different niches, our initial lineup centered around the areas of:
- Holiday-ish
- Creamy
- Strong
- Non-alcoholic
Cocktail Lineup I
- Holiday punch 10% ABV
- 1 part bourbon
- 3 parts Trader Joe’s Winter Wassail Punch (non-alcoholic)
- Banana-colada v1 12% ABV
- 1 part banana liqeuer, 2 parts white rum, 2 parts coconut cream, 3 parts pineapple juice
- Boulevardier 20% ABV
- 1 part bourbon, 1 part sweet vermouth, 1 part amaro, 1 part water
- Ginger Mango Lemonade 0% ABV
- 1 part lemon juice, 3 parts mango juice, 5 parts ginger ale, sugar syrup to taste
- Optional: soak minced ginger in the lemon juice for a few hours & strain out.
Learnings from Cocktail Lineup I
- Banana-colada v1
- Coconut cream: The texture was rather grainy, due to the coconut cream separating out. We later tested Coco Real, and found it too sweet & not creamy enough. Finally, we landed on using Coco Lopez.
- Banana liqeuer: The banana liqueur added sweetness, which was okay with the coconut cream, but didn’t work when we switched to Coco Lopez. Additionally, it wasn’t a great banana flavor. We switched to Lorann Oils Banana Emulsion for a tastier banana flavor without any sweetening.
- Ice: Most pinacolada recipes rely on ice, to water the drink down. We eventually added a bit of milk to weaken the drink while maintaining creaminess.
- Boulevardier: It’s too strong of a drink
- Ginger Mango Lemonade: Very well received - great success for a mocktail
- Strength: It seems like making it very gingery + very lemony + very sweet is pretty important. We initially tried to reduce the sugar level, but it tasted worse in hard to pin-down ways.
- Ginger ale: High quality, complex ginger ale matters a lot - we used Reed’s Extra. We tried other alternatives, but they made the ended up tasting worse.
Cocktail Lineup II
- Holiday punch 10% ABV
- 1 part bourbon
- 3 parts Trader Joe’s Winter Wassail Punch (non-alcoholic)
- Banana-colada v2 12% ABV
- 2 parts white rum, 2 parts coco lopez, 3 parts pineapple juice, 2 parts milk, banana emulsion to taste
- Boozy Horchata 2.5% ABV
- Ginger Mango Lemonade 0% ABV
- 1 part lemon juice, 4 parts mango juice, 6 parts ginger ale, sugar syrup to taste
- Optional: soak minced ginger in the lemon juice for a few hours & strain out.
Learnings from Cocktail Lineup II
- More mocktails: The lemonade ran out the quickest, we ideally should’ve brought non-alcoholic horchata, given the preference for non-alcoholic drinks. Generally, a 1:1 ratio of non-alcoholic to alcoholic drinks sounds more aligned with our circles