To teach a bartender how to make a decent Martini, your recipe might say 60ml of gin and 20ml of dry vermouth. Depending on the structure of your recipe management you might also add the explanation of method as something like:

Add 60ml of gin and 20ml of dry vermouth to a mixing tin, fill it with ice and stir to chill. Put a strainer on top of the mixing tin and strain the drink into a pre-chilled martini glass. Garnish with lemon twist or olive depending on the guests' preference.

Now, in my humble opinion, this explanation is one big load of jargon. I don't believe it contains any meaningful information beyond the 3-5 words "stir", "martini glass" and "guest preference". I believe any decent bartender should be able to make your house martini simply from the ingredients, the specified garnish and the method saying stirred.

Your counterargument might be that in this day and age it's far between good bartenders and most bartenders can't make a decent martini just from my simplified instructions. Therefore we need to spell it out for the staff with more explanation.

I think both sides are equally right and wrong. That's the fun part of discussing opposing opinions. One side says a single word or two is enough explanation while the other argues every drink should include a mini-essay of instructions.

IYKYK... And If You Don't Know, You Don't Know

The paradox here lies in the question of whether the bartender is already capable of making a decent Martini. With my assertion that "Stirred" should be more than enough to specify the method, that obviously comes with a certain amount of pre-assumed knowledge and skill. It's a bit like how we are comfortable just writing "Gin" and "Dry Vermouth" on our classic specs because we trust our staff to know what our house pours are.

If the bartender can already make a decent stirred drink, then adding 50 words of verbose instructions is not only a waste of their time and a waste of the guests time, it's also straight up disrespectful to the professional behind the bar as it communicates we don't trust their ability.

On the flip side, let's say the person behind the bar genuinely can't make a decent stirred drink. If someone is behind the bar and has never made a good martini before, do we then really think that 50 words is enough to explain it to them?

I don't believe so. Not just because a martini is a notoriously difficult drink to get right on temperature and dilution, but because the techniques of the bar aren't understood well enough through a small template of words around a recipe. We need to learn drinks by making drinks.

It would be the equivalent of teaching someone to cook a perfect roast by saying "Combine all the ingredients and put it in the oven. Once done, cut and plate to match the picture". That's obviously not very helpful unless you have done it before and already know the specifics. How long should it go in the oven for? At what temperature? How do we judge when it's done?

It's the same problem with cocktail recipes.

If your bartenders can't make a decent martini without 50 words of verbose method explanation, then they also probably can't make a decent martini with only 50 words of text to teach them.

Teaching the methods of our craft should be done with specific hands-on examples and not delegated to a confusing block of text. If a bartender can't stir or shake a drink correctly, then we should stop and educate them.

After all, if we think 50 words is technically enough to train them on paper, then surely that would only take us a few minutes of effort to exceed in person.

As for my Dry Martini, I like to keep my spec simple, elegant and clean on a tidy card.

Dry Martini

Ingredients

  • 20 ml Dry Vermouth
  • 60 ml Gin

Garnish

  • Discard Lemon Twist
Glass
Martini
Method
Stirred
Ice
No Ice

I like a 3-to-1 ratio and a discard lemon twist. I bet that's everything you need to know.