How to Create Your Own Cocktail Recipes

Over the past few months here at The Kitchn, there’s been a lot of talk of “cooking by feel” - of bypassing the comfortable authority cookbooks often seem to offer, and taking a more creative and intuitive to approach to preparing meals. But what about applying this freestyle, seat-of-the-pants technique to mixing drinks?
Over the weekend, I did just that.

On Saturday, I attended one in an ongoing series of workshops led by Jonathan Pogash at the Astor Center called “The Elements of Mixology.” There were eleven of us in the class, with diverse cocktailian backgrounds: enthusiastic beginners, seasoned home cocktail makers, along with a few diehard bartending professionals.
After a quick but thorough overview of cocktail history and technique, we were divided into groups of two or three. We then got down to business: In the style of Iron Chef, each team was given a surprise ingredient to work with (unveiled from under a bar towel) and then allotted 40 minutes to design an original cocktail.
~ Nora Manyard