Food, Home & Lifestyle
Dinner Party Refreshments: Sherry Spritz and Queen’s Park Swizzle
Lesson time 14:28 min
Ryan creates a savory spritz using basil and bell peppers. Lynnette explains her swizzle technique and how rum can be brightened up with mint and Angostura Bitters.
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Topics include: Sherry Spritz · Queen’s Park Swizzle
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World-class bartenders Lynnette and Ryan (aka Mr Lyan) teach you how to make perfect cocktails at home for any mood or occasion.
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[00:00:00.00] [MUSIC PLAYING] [00:00:26.07] - So one of my favorite things to serve alongside food, either as a dinner party or when you've just got people around for kind of some snacks, is some lower alcohol drinks. These are great for not knocking your palate out too much. They're perfect for still having a complexity without really giving you that whack of booze. So it's a really fun set of drinks to kind of explore where you don't want to kind of overbear your palate when you've got some dishes sitting alongside, or you just want to have some that's a little bit more of a pacing drink. [00:00:52.88] And one of my favorite products to always turn for that is to some sherry. Now, sherry-- I think a lot of people are put off it because they think it's what their grandma drank, and it's something sickly sweet, and you kind of pull it out from the back of the cabinet. And the true sherry is kind of so far away from that. It's essentially like a wine. [00:01:10.82] It's something that you should try and turn over at a reasonable pace, like you would a wine or a vermouth. It's got a little bit more fortification, so it's a bit more forgiving. But this style of wine is kind of the ideal base for making a cocktail. It's bone dry. The Fino style is something that you get a lot of green olive, a lot of nutty notes, but it's a really clean style base. [00:01:33.34] So it still allows you to kind of layer flavors in on top, but it doesn't add this kind of extra hefty weight of having a spirit behind it. So this is something that I turn to a lot when I want to be able to either serve out some lighter drinks, or I want to use a balance that really starts to explore something a little less overt. It's a little bit more teased out. It's a little bit more delicate. And it suits perfectly when we're starting to kind of have some food alongside it. [00:02:00.20] So to nod to that, I'm just using a couple of accents. We're serving this almost like the heritage of the product. Like the Spanish-style gin and tonic, we're serving it in a wine glass, and we're giving some big cubes of ice and a couple of accents around it, and just some kind of carbonated bubbles to lift it out. But we're trying to accent it in a slightly different way. [00:02:20.12] So using some kind of savory notes, and I'm using some orange bell peppers. For anybody who knows me, they know I don't do chili, so these are sweet peppers. Nothing that's going to add any heat. And that's partly because I'm a wuss and I don't want to add anything else that's going to be too hot for me to drink. But it's also because it was there to kind of not overtake anything else alongside the food. [00:02:42.58] So it's not anything that's going to give a huge amount of heavier flavors. It's just a sweet vegetable note that not only lifts out from that kind of green olive dryness of the sherry, but it also brings a little bit of its vegetable note to tie into any food that you might serve alongside it. Just...
About the Instructor
James Beard honoree Lynnette Marrero has been at the forefront of the NYC craft cocktail movement. Ryan Chetiyawardana (aka Mr Lyan) is the founder of Dandelyan, named the world’s best bar. They will teach you the essentials of cocktail making, from developing your palate to building your home bar. Learn how to mix a perfectly balanced drink for every occasion and mood—and become your friends’ new favorite bartender.
Featured MasterClass Instructor
Lynnette Marrero & Ryan Chetiyawardana
World-class bartenders Lynnette and Ryan (aka Mr Lyan) teach you how to make perfect cocktails at home for any mood or occasion.
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