Crafting Your Signature Cocktail
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- Beginner
You set aside a room, your garage, or basement. You built a custom bar and created your perfect man or ma’am cave.
But now that everything’s in place you don’t want to just crack a beer or open a bottle of wine. To put your personal stamp on your private club you need to create a cocktail with your name on it. To figure out how—I visited the Craft in America Center for the perfect presentation: Crafting the Cocktail.
Melkon Khosrovian, co-founder and spiritsmaster of Greenbar Craft Distillery, and Brandyn Tepper, bartender at Cocktail Academy were there to talk about what you’re pouring and how to mix it.
What You’re Pouring
Anyone can go buy a bottle of booze. What you want is something distinctive that sets your bar apart. As Melkon puts it, craft spirits is “an unedited relationship between the maker and the drinker.”
That means when he creates a spirit—whether it’s a whiskey, vodka, or gin—it’s his vision for the flavors and aromas to introduce the feeling he wants to evoke. Don’t depend on market research, focus groups, or brand managers. A perfect example is the Grand Poppy liqueur.
It’s a bitter aperitif like Campari, but infused with poppies. It was inspired by hiking in the California hills and delivers other iconic California flavors like bay leaf and pink peppercorn.
Use it to make a Negroni instead of the Campari and that cocktail is yours now.
How You’re Pouring It
“Craft is a mindset and bartending is my craft.” That’s Brandyn, and his point is also that craft is a transfer of emotions between the maker and recipient.
We’re not drinking just to get loaded. We’re creating a shared experience. You don’t have to take 10 minutes mixing complex ingredients, but put thought into each component.
What’s the temperature?
How much water?
What kind of glass?
“A crafted cocktail deserves crafted glassware,” Brandyn adds.
Get a variety of glasses for appropriate cocktails—highball, rocks, martini wares.
And when you use a martini glass, don’t fill it to the point where spilling it is of greater concern than tasting it.
What You’re Mixing
Taking all that into consideration—now make a cocktail.
It doesn’t have to be a completely new invention. Take a classic and put your own stamp on it. All you have to learn is a balance of ingredients. Both experts have almost the same advice explained in different ways.
According to Melkon, you can’t fail with a 4-part cocktail.
Parts 1 and 2 are your alcohol.
Part 3 is sour.
Part 4 is sweet. Then add a garnish or bitters.
Brandyn boils it down to a metaphor.
You’re making a sandwich. The meat is the alcohol and the bread is the sweet and sour. Apply this to whatever combination of ingredients you want. Use rum, Curacao (sweet) and lime juice (sour) and it’s a Mai Tai. Change the rum to vodka and the Curacao to ginger beer and it’s a Moscow mule.
Take those basics and experiment fearlessly with substitutions. Find a combination you like. It doesn’t have to be 100 percent original. Find the right swap for one ingredient from a classic and put your name on it.
With that, here are some actual recipes you can put your personal stamp on.
From Melkon: The Poppy Patch
- 1 oz Grand Poppy
- 1 oz Slow Hand white whiskey
- ½ oz Fresh lemon juice
- 1 oz Fresh strawberries
- 2 dash Bar Keep lavender bitters
- Muddle strawberry
- Shake + strain into a rocks glass
From Brandyn: Pisco Sour
- 2 oz Pisco
- 3/4 oz lemon/lime juice combined
- 3/4 oz simple syrup
- 1 egg white
- Add all ingredients in the shaker without ice, dry shake
- Add ice, shake, strain into a coupe
- Garnish with a dash of angostura bitters
From me: The Hot Eyeball
- 2 oz TRU Organic GARDEN Vodka
- 1 oz Fresh tomato water
- 1 oz Fruitlab Organic Jasmine liqueur
- 2 Dash Bar Keep Organic Chinese Bitters
- 1 Muddled cherry tomato
- 1 Sliced jalapeno pepper w/juice
- Top it off with soda water
- Stir and serve over ice in a highball glass
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![Justin DiPego]()
A former senior editor for DoItYourself.com, Justin spent years both as a writer/editor and working in the trades as a handyman, framer and installer of skylights. He's still active in his workshop, making things out of other things, like glowing whiskey bars, reclaimed redwood tables, knives out of horseshoes, lamps out of plumbing parts and a butler robot (WIP).![Stephini Candella]()
Stephini Candella is a Nutritionist, and attended the University of Texas for a B.S. in Nutrition and Didactics. She was a manager for a small gourmet restaurant, and has spent over 15 years cooking as a hobby for health. She has extensive knowledge of food science, micro-nutrition, history of the classic foods from across cultures, modern commercial and home cooking processes, disease restricted diet meal planning (cardiovascular, GAPS, diabetes), and popular diet trend (Paleo, Keto, Vegan) diets. Stephini most enjoys meal planning that focuses on simplicity and cost-effectiveness, and she strongly believes these are the foundations for delicious and healthy meals—the basis for a happy life. She is addicted to reading food labels, and uncovering the nutritional benefits of traditional cooking techniques of the classical foods across cultures. If you let her, she will talk your ear off over her fascination for how traditional fermentation cultivates the metabolic byproduct of certain bacteria into nutritional gold for human health. Stephini is also a CRLA (Certified Reading and Writing English Tutor) and has professionally tutored college students as well as K-12 students for an accumulated 15 years expanding to private school curriculum development and teaching in STEM and STEAM. She has been a professional researcher for multiple private and non-profit companies and organizations including the University of Texas Food and Housing Division. There, she researched and wrote recommendations for the University’s campus wide composting and food waste reduction initiatives, design and management of campus wide food waste studies, and the procurement of technologies best suited for large scale composting and food waste reduction. As a former Red Cross shelter manager, she has worked with her National Guard, and the US Army and Marines in search and rescue, procuring, and deploying multiple shelters serving thousands of evacuees. She has overseen the management of over 25 shelters in the state emergency operation center, and was held responsible for procurement of meals, medical supplies, and basic necessities. She also assisted in local county natural disaster rescues, providing insurance evaluations and recommendations for approving families affected by natural disasters to receive financial aid, housing, and food assistance. In addition, she volunteered for her local food pantry and domestic violence shelter where she prepared food. These discovered passions for emergency aid volunteer work led her to pursue national and state EMS licensures. She has traveled from Houston to New York to Seattle on a Leadership Scholarship, listening to world renowned scholars on the values of great leadership. Her favorite being the opportunity to sit and connect with the grandsons of Gandhi, listening to their first hand childhood experiences growing up alongside their grandfather organizing and executing his activism. Presently, Stephini conducts research and assistance on customer relationship management campaigns for 30 year veteran executives and business owners as an operations manager for a small, boutique executive assistance CRM firm. She has retired into a quiet, family-centric life, and can be found living between her home and college towns where she is raising her children. There, she is imparting her love for DIY learning and food on to them in the hopes that self-directed creativity and production will bring to them the same sense of holistic wellness that she’s experienced for herself.
