6 drink hacks that actually work

Hacks – they just make life easier. We’re not talking about Hacks, one of the best shows on TV (although that hilarious Hannah Einbinder/Jean Smart double-act does make life much more enjoyable). No, we mean those little tips and tricks that creatively solve life’s little drink-related puzzles. Like, how do I chill my bottle of wine in a flash because I left it on the bench instead of putting it in the fridge? Or what if I feel like a Martini but really don’t feel like making one? Yeah, we’ve got you.

Below, we’ve listed a few of our favourite drink hacks that actually work. We’ve sifted through some of the worst ideas on the internet (like making hot drinks with an iron) to find the ones you can actually use.

Ice keeps our drinks cold and, for that, we are forever grateful. Without being too nitpicky, though, ice does sometimes melt and dilute our delicious drinks in ways that we don’t always appreciate. Sorry ice, we still love you. For drinks like straight spirits or wine (yes – you can put ice in your wine if you want to), dilution is a bit of a no-no, but we reckon this hack takes care of that nicely.

The trick? Freeze some fruit. Grapes work especially well for this because they’re large enough to stay frozen a while and won’t disintegrate when they thaw. You can try this with just about any fruit you like, though, as well as freezing small pieces of fruit into regular ice cubes. You end up with cold drinks, no (or minimal) dilution and a tasty snack at the end. It’s a win-win-win.

Practising gratitude is when you open the freezer door and see a top-quality cocktail that you made at some prescient point in the past. Give yourself a high-five – you did great. Freezer-door cocktails are made to be served straight out of their ice-cold bottle. They work especially well with cocktails based on purely alcoholic ingredients (soda water isn’t going to love the freeze-thaw cycle). Picks like Negronis, Manhattans, Old Fashioneds and – our personal fave – Martinis – work really well here.

The trick is to get the dilution right. Dilution isn’t great for beer and wine, and it isn’t always desirable for spirits, but it’s important when making cocktails. Dilution naturally occurs when you shake a cocktail with ice, and that’s exactly why we add a little water to our Freezer Door Martini. Since it’s all going in the freezer, we don’t need to shake with ice – it just has to hang out and get cold for a while. Once it’s chilled, pour, garnish and serve.

Whether you’re making a Whiskey Sour or a Cosmopolitan, nothing beats freshly squeezed citrus. But while spirits and liqueurs will just about keep forever, lemon and lime juice oxidises within a couple of hours and the fruit will go off in a few weeks.

Our hack? Squeeze and freeze. Just like with our freezer-door cocktails, having frozen citrus juice ready to go is a generous form of self-care that will take some hurdles out of cocktail making. Just juice your fruit and pour into ice-cube trays (bonus points if you can measure out each portion). Once the juice is frozen, pop the cubes out and seal them in a zip-lock freezer bag for up to three months. Next time you have your pals over for Margaritas, you’ll be ready to roll.

We’ve told you how to make sugar syrup before but, truthfully, we don’t always follow our own advice. It’s definitely great to do things the proper way, adding equal parts sugar and water to a saucepan and gently heating until it becomes a clear syrup. But it’s not an ideal method if you’re hoping to make a cocktail immediately. Hot syrup takes time to cool, after all.

Instead, there’s a quick hack that requires only a jar or water bottle and a little elbow grease. Add equal parts sugar and water to the container and shake until the sugar is dissolved. That’s it. You might work up a sweat and the result will look less syrupy than your stovetop version, but it is otherwise the same. Pop the leftovers in the fridge and, next time you need it, you’ll never know the difference.

This isn’t a drink hack, as such – it’s more like when your mum used to turn cleaning up into a ‘game’. Shame on you for fooling us into doing chores, Mum, but we can’t fault the result.

Here, we’re hacking the cocktail party format with a DIY bar. It goes like this: get your cocktail ingredients together (or better yet, have everyone bring a few of their own), set out some easy-to-follow recipes and grab your cocktail extras – ice, shakers, jiggers, muddlers and more. The trick is that everyone gets to have fun mixing drinks for themselves and you don’t have to play bartender all night. Mum was so right.

A quick word on a few ‘hacks’ that we found in our research. The word is: don’t. These are just bad, so don’t try them (and definitely don’t rely on them).

The spoon-in-the-Champagne trick

The idea here is that, to keep Champagne bubbly after opening, you pop a teaspoon (handle first) in the top. Why? It’s not clear. What will be clear is your Champagne after a few hours, since it will be completely bubble-free. Get yourself a Champagne stopper and save the teaspoon for your cuppa.

Keeping lemons in water

We covered how to preserve citrus juice above – squeeze and freeze the juice – but this hack is supposed to preserve the whole fruit. Supposedly, you can seal lemons or limes in an airtight container filled with water and they’ll stay fresh for months (and some claim up to a year). The only problem is that it doesn’t work very well at best and, at worst, the lemons will rot in water. That’s just gross, really.