The parts nobody teaches and everybody judges
Two bartenders can pour identical liquid and produce noticeably different drinks. The difference is almost always ice, glassware, and the ten seconds at the end.
Ice is an ingredient
Ice is not there to make the drink cold. It is there to make the drink cold and to add water, and the water is not a defect — a properly shaken sour is roughly a quarter dilution and tastes wrong without it.
What follows from that:
- Never skimp on ice. More ice means colder, which means slower melting, which means less dilution overall. A glass half-filled with ice makes a warmer, weaker, more watery drink than a glass filled to the top. This is counterintuitive and it is the single most common ice mistake.
- Always use fresh ice for the drink you serve. Shake with ice, then strain over new ice. The ice in the tin is already spent and half-melted.
- Big cubes for spirits you sip. An Old Fashioned on a single large cube stays an Old Fashioned for twenty minutes. On pellet ice it is brown water in five.
- Crushed ice for tiki and juleps, where fast dilution is the intended effect.
- Never put a scoop, a glass, or a bottle into the ice well. Use the ice scoop, keep it out of the ice between uses, and if glass breaks anywhere near the well, the entire well gets dumped and washed. There is no shortcut on that one and no manager will thank you for finding one.