Mixing a Long Drink with Tonic: The No-Tech Method

Why the usual G&T disappoints

Dave Arnold ends his book where his cocktail journey began, with the gin and tonic. It was the first drink he remembers his father making, for himself, with a tonic and lime for the boy, and the first cocktail he analysed closely; he still thinks about it daily. The promise is great: crisp, refreshing, on the dry side, a bit tart, slightly bitter, aromatic, crystal clear and very bubbly. But it almost always disappoints. Too much gin means too little carbonation, too little gin means too few aromatics and too much sweetness, and often warm gin and tepid tonic are poured over copious watery ice to give a drink that tastes mainly of water.

It is impossible to make a good gin and tonic using traditional techniques.

There is, he says, no ratio of gin to tonic that gives the right flavour balance and enough carbonation. You may think he is an outlier, ruined by straight tonic water as a boy, but if you look inside, you are probably dissatisfied with the bubbles in a traditional G&T too, especially if it is one of your favourite drinks.

The best you can do without special equipment

Use gin kept in the freezer and fresh tonic water kept in ice water; if you must, tonic that has just been refrigerated in the coldest part of the fridge, the part that accidentally freezes the lettuce. Fresh means recently bought, not just unopened: plastic bottles lose carbonation fast, small ones faster than large ones, and 20-ounce bottles can lose an appreciable amount in a month at room temperature. Glass bottles and cans are gas-impermeable, so storage time hardly matters.

Without force carbonation the flute feels wrong, so serve on the rocks in a standard highball glass. The drink is 1 3/4 ounces (52.5 ml) gin and 3 1/4 ounces (97.5 ml) tonic, five ounces (150 ml) in all. Jigger the gin but not the tonic, because jiggering loses carbonation. Instead, measure 5 ounces of water into the glass first and note the wash line, then practise free-pouring water to that line by eye until you are within a quarter ounce.

1. Put the glass in the freezer several minutes before, and cut a lime into quarters, one per drink.
2. Pull out the glass and gin and pour the gin in first. Gin poured first also melts stray ice crystals on the glass, which would be bubble nucleation sites that foam when the tonic hits.
3. Tilt the glass to 45 degrees and pour the ice-cold tonic in slowly, raising the glass to vertical, and stop at your memorised 5-ounce line. Pouring the tonic into the gin mixes better than the reverse, with no stirring that would release bubbles: tonic is denser than gin even at freezer temperature and sinks through it, and adding the larger volume to the smaller mixes more efficiently.
4. Squeeze in juice from a quarter lime. Lime added before the tonic would mix better but its nucleation sites and bubble-stabilising surfactants would wreck the carbonation.
5. Add freezer-cold ice, not tempered ice, by sliding it in gently with a bar spoon rather than dropping it. Ice added before the liquids promotes foaming and blocks mixing; added last it helps mixing, and ice straight from the freezer adds very little dilution. The cubes crack from thermal shock, which does not matter here.
6. Rest the lime quarter on top if you like. Dropped into the liquid it would nucleate bubbles constantly, but sitting just above the drink it leaves them alone and gives aroma as you lift the glass.

With a force carbonator

With a Sodastream or similar, use the same 1 3/4 ounces of gin and 3 1/4 ounces of tonic (double the recipe for a Sodastream), put the mix in the freezer until crystals just begin to form, and force-carbonate as in the Carbonation chapter. Serve in a chilled champagne flute with no ice, because you have earned it. Squeeze the lime in after pouring, and never put the lime in the flute if you want to keep the carbonation. Clarifying the lime juice first gives an even better result.