Why age a cocktail?

In short, because it can taste better.

Spirit-forward cocktails, or cocktails with no fresh ingredients, can be premixed and bottled simply to make the process of moving them around and preparing them simpler and faster.           

Cocktail bars will often batch popular cocktails to their own recipes to accelerate speed of delivery and provide a better service to their customers. In 2005, Tony Conigliaro, the much celebrated London bartender started to investigate this further. He noted that drinks containing vermouth or sherry would oxidise, rounding out the flavours and creating a smokiness and subtlety that was not there in the freshly mixed drink. The aged Negroni and Manhattan was born.

Jeffrey Morgenthaler in Portland took this a step further with large batches of premixed cocktails left to age in oak whiskey barrels. The results were phenomenal, and soon the cocktail world was alive with experimentation in ageing and premixing ingredients and cocktails themselves.

At Myatt’s Fields Cocktails, we age most of our core range. We’ve spent years now working on ratios, cutting vermouths and sherries, trying them with different spirits, and testing testing testing. We hope you’ll love the results.

Ageing cocktails is a wonderful mix of art and science and has helped light up the cocktail world. We look forward to helping bring that world to you.