Gin cocktails, wonderful things and properly made, they don’t taste like gin they taste like a well balanced drink. In this episode, I’m giving you two for the price of one.

Welcome to the Cocktail Spirit from Small Screen Network, I’m your host Robert Hess. Now, for this drink, we’re going to be using gin again and normally what I do when I prepare this drink in a seminar or a class or something like that, I don’t tell them what I’m preparing until after they had a sip of it just because it really kind of drives the point home that I’m trying to make. But since I can’t serve it to you and you taste and feel what’s going on and since you might have actually looked at the title of this segment already, so you know what I’m going to make, all right I will tell you, I’m going to make martinis. But I’m going to do—it’s a slightly different twist. So of course the martini is made with gin. If you’re one of those people who prefer with vodka you want to make sure you ask for a vodka martini because a martini, you use that for straight martini, it should always be made with gin.

We’re going to add 1 1/2 ounces of gin and then we’re going to add a ½ ounce of sweet vermouth. So all ready, you’re saying, “Oh my God, what’s he doing adding sweet vermouth to this cocktail?” Well, hold your horses. There is the sweet vermouth and now we’re going to add orange bitters, you had another surprise perhaps. And what I hope doesn’t come as too much a surprise to you. I’m actually going to stir this drink rather than shaking it because as you can see, it’s all clear ingredients and if I have to shake this instead of stirring it, it would cloud up especially without the vermouth out of this. So here we have a gin martini made with sweet vermouth and I’m going to add and use a cherry in this case as the garnish for it.

Now, this drink and especially in this particular glass, is the way the martini would have been made originally. Smaller size glass, the sweet vermouth, the orange bitters, the cherry garnish. The only thing that’s really different about this drink for what I would originally done rather than using a dry style gin, they would have used what was called Old Tom Gin which is a sweetened gin. So that’s sweet gin, just slightly sweet gin, sweet vermouth and orange bitters.

Now, the right about that time, the French came out with their French vermouth, so they this dry style vermouth rather than the sweet style vermouth. And both, the Manhattan and the martini, it was common to take and say, “Gee, maybe I’d rather have the dry vermouth instead of the sweet.” And so you do in cases like that is you would say, “Bartender, I would like a dry martini or a dry Manhattan.” That’s where the term dry martini comes from. It’s not from decreasing amount of dry vermouth, it’s switching the vermouth from sweet vermouth to dry vermouth, the same thing works in the Manhattan, and in the same way with the Manhattan you can order what’s called a perfect martini, which is where you use equal parts of sweet and dry vermouth the same way you order a perfect Manhattan.

Now, you noticed in this drink that I used what you might consider a big hunk of vermouth. I mean, it’s like an ounce and a half of gin and a ½ ounce of vermouth, so that’s a three to one ratio. Back in those days, the first martini that came out actually were 50-50, so 50% gin, 50% vermouth. I feel that it doesn’t quite have the right balance to it that’s why I took and I pulled back on the vermouth a bit and increase the gin. The goal of Martini is to be a cocktail and a cocktail is meant to be balanced.