How to get the quantities – and balance – right every time.
Trickier stuff now, people. When a cocktail recipe calls for a “spoon” it’s almost always referring to a barspoon, which is 5mL or ⅙ fl oz (0.17 US fl oz) or thereabouts. Teaspoons are trickier as the bowl measurement of a metal teaspoon that you find in your cutlery drawer can differ quite a bit – 2.5 to 7.3 mL (0.088 to 0.257 imp fl oz; 0.085 to 0.247 US fl oz) to be precise. So, for ease and consistency, buy a barspoon or invest in a chef’s measuring teaspoon, which will sit at 5mL or 0.17 US fl oz.
If a recipe calls for tablespoons (rare in cocktails), again, DON’T PANIC. The normal bowl depth of a tablespoon in America sits at 15mL or 0.5 fl oz. In Australia, however, our tablespoons are quite large – on average around 20mL, which is about 0.6 fl oz – so it’s important to suss out whether a recipe is American or Australian, and then you can adjust the measurements of the other ingredients. We don’t want an unbalanced cocktail.
They’re the same, right? Wrong. A drop from a pipette is miniscule and you’d have to drop around 41 times to get an equal measurement of 1mL (according to famed cocktail guy Simon Difford, that is). Whereas a dash (if we make the average amount of dashes four) is around 1.25mL. This is super-precise stuff here, and we can’t imagine you’d need such small measurements unless you were entering some sort of fancy bartender competition.
We could get into the size of ice scoops and other smaller and way-too-variable measurements, but there isn’t really a reason to measure out your ice that carefully unless you're batching, and that’s water, not ice.
