If you’ve ever wondered how a famous cocktail’s ingredient list came to be, it’s worth taking a look at when it was made. Almost any pre-Prohibition cocktail’s original specs mostly hover around the three-to-four-ingredient range. By the time the tiki craze was underway in the ‘30s and ‘40s, it was par for the course to see drinks containing over seven ingredients and multiple expressions of rum layered on top of one another. And with the modern cocktail renaissance of the late ‘90s and early aughts, everything came full-circle as bartenders breathed new life into forgotten, bare-bones classics by riffing and reimagining them with different spirits and modifiers. And now, we find ourselves in a time when anything goes as cocktail culture embraces its molecular-gastronomy era — carbonated fish sauce and duck-fat-washed bourbon in the same glass? Why the hell not?
We’re all for experimentation, but in the drinks world, there is such a thing as too many ingredients. And while a cocktail containing a slew of spirits, herbs, juices, and tinctures may win curiosity, the finished product can also be a letdown.
To find the spec sweet spot, we asked eight bartenders how many cocktail ingredients is just too many. And just like some builds themselves, their answers were complicated. Let’s dive in.
How many cocktail ingredients is too many, according to bartenders:
“I’d liken it to the difference between walking into an Italian restaurant and an Indian restaurant. In the case of Italian cuisine, the predominant olfactory experience you get is garlic. With Indian cuisine, there’s a cacophony of flavors and smells that are easy to identify as a curry in general, but that profile comes from many different spices. Both are amazing and unique experiences in their own right, but they require completely different roads to get there. All of this goes to show that the number of ingredients doesn’t matter, but balance should never be compromised. If you introduce an esoteric ingredient or infusion just to be different or change up the menu, that’s fine. I’m all for innovation and pushing the craft, but it’s generally the basics that sell because they’re familiar and appealing to the senses.” —Stefan Was, owner, Porco Lounge & Tiki Room, Cleveland
“I think as long as all of the ingredients can be identified and the drink is balanced, there’s no such thing. Sometimes, certain ingredients will complement each other in a way that makes it hard to pick them out or identify them, but they should always be used for enhancing, not hiding!” —Bobbi Adler, bartender, Shinji’s, NYC
“This is a little tricky, but I’d say four or five primary flavor profiles is as far as you really need to go before the cocktail is too busy or you have flavors that only really read well on paper. That doesn’t necessarily mean four to five ingredients is the max, especially if the drink is using a lot of echoing or reinforcing flavors, like peach liqueur and peach purée in the same drink. But coming from the Milk & Honey bar ethos, our goal is typically to show restraint and simplify a cocktail as much as possible. Creating a three-ingredient cocktail that makes it into the canon is the dream.” —Jon Prus, bartender, Dutch Kills and Dear Irving, NYC
“This is an interesting question because culinary technique has very much taken over cocktail culture. As bartenders start thinking about a cocktail like a chef instead of a traditional bartender, the door opens to a much wider array of ingredients. This is ultimately a good thing, but alcohol is a finicky devil and can be really difficult to balance, especially as more ingredients get added. Bartenders can also get hyper focused on the interesting processes and flavors and forget that the drink just has to be good. For example, I made a deconstructed Jungle Bird variation that had a coconut fat wash, a Campari coconut foam, a Spinzall clarification, and a forced carbonation. Unfortunately, it sucked. I lost sight of the ‘let’s make a good drink’ part of it because I wanted to impress my friends. So no, I don’t think there really should be a limit to the number of ingredients as it serves the drink and not themselves. The drink can’t be sh*t, regardless of how cool the technique or ingredients are.” —Alec Kossoff, bartender, Monkey Thief, NYC
“There is no hard rule in terms of the number of ingredients, but as a standard, it is safe to say that less is more. Although, this primarily depends on the style of cocktail you’re looking to create. Tropical drinks and more savory cocktails tend to be able to support the addition of more ingredients, whereas the traditional styles of cocktails tend to suffer from the addition of too many. It’s important to remember that you want the ingredients to shine through in the final product, and if that’s not the case, you probably have too many things going on. Simplicity rules in terms of flavor perception.” —Drew Furlough, bartender, Amazonia, Washington, D.C.
“I’ve always thought that the best cocktails are the ones that highlight their ingredients. Sometimes, that cocktail ends up being just two or three ingredients. Other times, it might end up being five or six. Something I tell bartenders is that they should try to make whatever flavor they’re manipulating in the prep phase shine through or be highlighted by the other parts of that particular drink.” —Darwin Pornel, director of operations, Paradise Projects, NYC
“I think bartenders can definitely go too far in the amount of ingredients they add to a cocktail. I’m a bit biased, of course, as Phil Ward runs our beverage program here at Altar. His philosophy has always been less is more, and our cocktail list follows that philosophy pretty strongly. Accessibility is really important to me on a menu and while you want to be introducing your patrons to new spirits and ideas, if there are six to seven ingredients listed per drink and half of them are bartender deep-cuts, it becomes a bit like inside baseball. You don’t want to overwhelm a guest who may already be apprehensive about trying out a hoity-toity cocktail bar in the first place. I like to see a drink that introduces a few strong ingredients or ideas that I wouldn’t typically imagine pairing. For me, it’s more exciting to say to myself ‘whoa, I want to see how those flavors play together’ versus ‘I can’t even imagine what all those flavors would taste like together.’” —Andrew Boutselis, bartender, Altar, NYC
“There is no ‘too many ingredients’ as long as the drink makes sense and doesn’t compromise guests’ experiences during their visit. However, everything relies on the concept of the establishment. We could be talking about tiki bars where people understand they’re getting multiple rums on top of different juices and syrups in a single cocktail. Or we could be talking about a sports bar where the situation is more easygoing — beers and shots, traditionally. We also have come down to define what an ingredient is. For instance, we hypothetically have a highball on the menu. That drink requires booze and some carbonated mixer for operation purposes, but our mixer has been through an extensive preparation process before it hits the bar.” —Eduardo “Lalo” Hernandez, bartender, Superbueno, NYC
