Review: Cocktail Kingdom Mixtin

When people visiting my lovely neighborhood say they're going to a restaurant called Super Six, I invariably tell them the following: If the tall, bald guy with glasses is behind the bar, start with a cocktail.

The tall, bald guy is Morgan Phillips, a sommelier turned bartender who won me over with his white negroni, swapping the traditional equal parts of gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth for more intricate portions of gin, Dolin Blanc, and the and the pleasingly bitter Salers liqueur. Served straight up, it is limpid to the point of what cocktail legend David Embury calls in his book The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, a "scintillating translucence," with a slight, pleasant viscosity. It is a lovely example of a stirred cocktail.

Shaking and stirring are the two primary ways to mix a drink, though stirring might be considered shaking's kinder, gentler cousin. In short, shaking is usually used for drinks that contain juices, cream, or egg, and it incorporates zillions of tiny air bubbles, lending a pleasing froth to cocktails like sidecars, daiquiris, and whisky sours. Stirring tends to be used for stronger, spirit-based drinks, the boozy legends like Manhattans, martinis, and those negronis. The shared goals of both methods are diluting the drink and making it very, very cold. Dilution is important because it rounds off the alcohol's sharp corners and cooling is important because, as cocktail wizard Dave Arnold puts it in his revered book Liquid Intelligence, "I associate warm martinis with sadness."

Regardless of how you mix, consistency is the name of the game when making cocktails; come up with a lovely concoction, write the proportion in your bar book, then make it the same, perfect way, over and over, forever.

At a good bar, stirring happens inside lovely vessels called mixing glasses, but Cocktail Kingdom's new Mixtin "mixing tin" promises better consistency through temperature control, swapping out thick glass for vacuum-insulated double walls made of stainless steel.

You may be wondering why this is important, and frankly I was too, but the Mixtin's difference centers around thermal mass. When you stir a drink in mixing glass, the glass and the booze are typically at room temperature and their energy is transferred to the ice, melting the surface of the ice and cooling the drink. Stir a drink in a stainless vessel with low thermal mass and you can pretty much take the vessel out of the equation.

The thing is, unless you're working at a science-forward bar like The Aviary in Chicago, I'm not sure you need one.

Here's a fantastic scenario no matter what I'm drinking; I'm sitting at a bar with my sweetheart, and we're relaxing at the end of a day, and nibbling on some olives. The lights are low and just off to the side is our trusty bartender who's stirring a drink in one of those lovely Japanese mixing glasses, the gentle clink of ice cubes as the spoon chases them round and around. There's a bit of a buzz in the room, and the evening is going so well that we might as well have a little force field around us.

Now replace the bartender's glass with its brushed stainless steel counterpart. It's no eyesore, but it's not catching the light anymore and it's certainly not romantic. That lovely glass-clinking sound disappears.

I called one of my favorite bartenders, St. John Frizell, who owns New York City's fantastic Fort Defiance restaurant, to make sure I wasn't off base.

"I'm sure there's a good scientific reason for it to exist. It must make some consistent cocktails," he said, "but I like ice in a glass. I like how it sounds. It's the sound the bartenders will make tonight at six thirty or seven when you get off work. It's pavlovian."

Then, like a good bartender, he offered some sage advice: "Just test their claim."

I tested the Mixtin against a traditional mixing glass, looking to learn how much dilution happened in each vessel and what the final temperature of the liquid was. I'd been boning up how to test by reading two great books, Jeffrey Morgenthaler's The Bar Book and Dave Arnold's aforementioned Liquid Intelligence. Arnold is a big fan of stirring drinks in shaking tins, so I added those as a third vessel to test.

Since booze is stored at room temperature, I started with room-temperature water, mixing three-ounce (90 ml) "drinks" into a lovely Yarai mixing glass, the Mixtin, and my shaking tin, each of those three-quarters filled with ice. I stirred them for 45 seconds then strained the water into a plastic cup (low thermal mass), immediately taking the temperature, then weighing the water to measure how much dilution had happened. For consistency's sake, I ran the entire test on one vessel before starting anew with the next.

The mixing glass water clocked in at 34 degrees Fahrenheit, the Mixtin and shaking tin at 33, so not much to report, temperature-wise. I did notice a few things though, the Mixtin's nice thin-lipped spout poured very cleanly, but perhaps due to the brushed stainless walls, stirring often had a noticeable drag.

I checked the dilution by weighing the strained liquid at the end and found the big difference: 20 ml in the mixing glass, 6 ml in the Mixtin and 4 ml in the shaker. A new round, stirred for only 30 seconds produced similar temperatures but less dilution: 10 ml in the glass, but a scant 1 ml from both the Mixtin and shaker. In a stirred drink, Morgenthaler advises shooting for 20 to 25 percent dilution to avoid those sharp corners. The low thermal mass of the stainless vessels wasn't making a better drink.

There are a host of little variables at play here and some of them can be used to your advantage, most notably that more dilution and, to a point, lower temperatures can be achieved by more stirring.

The practice round in my pocket, it was time to test with some real drinks, so I made three-ounce negronis. Here, the alcohol allowed the liquids to become colder than the freezing temperature of water, and I noticed a bit more difference. The mixing glass brought the drink down to 27 degrees Fahrenheit, while the shaker and the Mixtin got down to 23, still, both numbers are plenty cold for stirred drinks. Dilution results, however, were familiar: 20 ml for the mixing glass, 11 ml in the shaker and 13 in the Mixtin. At a party a few days later when I'd given my thermometer the night off, I made doubles and had similar dilution results.

If you're a bartender and scientific consistency is your goal, the Mixtin may help get you where you want to go, but it's worth mentioning that stirring a drink in a shaking tin yielded near-identical results to what I was seeing with the Mixtin. "Using any of the three vessels—a mixing glass, a shaking tin, or the Mixtin—you'll have what you need to make great stirred drinks. Just be consistent. All that said, whether I'm a customer or the one making drinks, I'm all for romance, beauty, and that pleasant clinking sound in the background: Go with the glass.

Hopefully, you'll hear that sound today, right around 6:30, and it'll put you in the right mood for the evening ahead. Don't resist. It's Pavlovian.

Food writer Joe Ray (@joe_diner) is a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalist of The Year, a restaurant critic, and author of "Sea and Smoke" with chef Blaine Wetzel.