Mixologists: what am I doing wrong with my Long Island iced tea?

Cafe Society
1

A few months ago, I discovered the Long Island iced tea while out with some friends and fell in love with it. I’ve always hated the taste of alcohol, and the LI was the answer to my prayers; a drink that doesn’t taste like booze, but still has enough in it to give you a bit of a buzz. Unfortunately, the price tag at most local taverns ($7 for one drink? Fuhgeddaboudit!), not to mention that driving home after having one or two of 'em is no mean task, put me off having any for awhile. Eventually, I decided to try making my own, and looked up the recipe on the net. In search of delicious, lemony sweet alcoholic goodness, I cruised down to the local liquor store, picked up the necessary ingredients, and came home eager to make my own drinks for a fraction of the price.

Oh, if only it were that easy.

Every attempt at an LI iced tea that i’ve made so far doesn’t taste ANYTHING like the ones I get at any of the local watering holes, and for that matter is barely palatable. The flavor of the tequila is overwhelming, it’s too bitter, and the taste of the alcohol, which the professionally-made versions mask, is all-too-prevalent. Omitting the tequila fixes the one problem, but it still leaves the drink lacking. Using a shaker to mix the components seems to make it a little more palatable, but all of the above problems are still present and, intoxicating effects notwithstanding, it’s still a pale comparison to the ones I get at the bar.

Here’s the recipe i’ve been using;
1 part rum (Bacardi Superior, white)
1 part gin (Gordon’s)
1 part vodka (Gordon’s)
1 part tequila (Cuervo Gold)
1 part triple sec (Hiram Walker)
2 parts bottled sour mix
Cola to fill the shaker

Where am I screwing up? Should I be using different brands of liquor? Should I be making my own sour mix instead of using bottled stuff? Does the kind of cola I use make a difference? Wikipedia tells me that some bartenders substitute brandy for the tequila - should I try that, and if so, what kind should I use? Any advice from anyone who knows their cocktails would be sorely appreciated.

2

Are you putting lots of ice into the shaker, then using ice in your glass? Your recipe looks pretty much like the one I use (maybe a little less sour), so I don’t know what you’re doing wrong. But sometimes a drink meant to be drunk while ice cold isn’t quite the same if it’s warm.

ETA: You might try a better brand of tequila (100% blue agave), and I don’t know about Gordon’s vodka-- I usually use Stoly, Skyy, or Kettle One.

3

Former bartender (for about 20 minutes in the 1960s) here. Paradoxically, your problem may have been buying all that name brand hooch. When you get a LIIT at the bar, it’s mixed with the rail versions of all those liquors, not the name brands, which all have more personality than the generics. (If you’d like to get rid of all that good booze, and buy some cheap stuff, I’d be happy to take it off your hands.)

However, there should be a way to make it work. Since the tequila is overpowering, try using half a measure instead of a full measure.

While we’re at it, what unit are you using? A jigger (i.e. 1.5 ounces)? The LIIT uses a lot more liquor than the average mixed drink, so if you’re using a small glass, you may not be adding enough cola. Try using one ounce of each liquor (except the tequila) instead.

And John Mace is right: fill your mixing glass with ice, add everything but the cola, put on the shaker and shake it all up, then strain it into another glass full of ice. Try pouring only half or two-thirds of the liquor+sour mix into the glass, then top it with cola and stir, and see how it tastes. Add a little of the remaining liquor to taste.

Once you find the right balance, you’ll have a better idea of how to scale the booze to the mixers. Good luck.

4

I’ve been using a shot apiece of each of the liquors, mixing it with the sour mix and the cola in the shaker, and serving it in a pint glass.

I did start out using cheap booze (there’s a regional distillery around here called “Monarch” that seems to sell cheap versions of everything you can imagine), but I found that even less palatable than what i’m doing now. (I had to pour out almost an entire bottle of cheap tequila because it just wasn’t drinkable in ANY state.) The stuff i’m using now seems less offensive.

I haven’t been using a lot of ice - two or three cubes at most, so from what you’re saying I think I might try using more ice the next time I mix one, which won’t be until tomorrow night - one an evening is more than enough, after all.

Is there a particular brand of tequila you’d recommend, John Mace? I’ll admit that I don’t know an awful lot about tequila - I picked up Cuervo mainly based on the name recognition, and the fact that it was at least half the price of the other tequilas the names of which I recognized.

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I usually use whatever 100% Blue Agave I can get my hands on-- not the mixto stuff.

6

OK, let a professional sort this out for you.

First and foremost, the Long Island is the bargain at any bar. At a paltry $7 it’s a veritable steal considering the amount of booze in it relative to every other item on the menu. So perhaps you should rethink your position and leave it to the professionals.

One very possible difference is that many bars, especially ones catering to the college aged crowd, use a “long island mix” as a substitute for the booze. This mix is essentially just a blend of those low end liquors with the proportions slightly tweaked, but when you use it to make a cocktail you measure it as if it were a typical mixed drink. In other words, you’re getting a 3 or 4 count of booze like in a rum and coke, which is about half the booze of a real LIIT.

Next, it’s not about the booze. A LIIT is the perfect drink for economy booze and substituting in a high end vodka or tequila is just a waste of money. Plus the recipe will be effected by the subtle flavors that most sipping liquors pick up in the aging process. Never use a reposado or anejo tequila, never use a dark or spiced rum and never use a heavily spiced gin. Stick with silver (white) tequila, white rum and extra dry gin.

It sounds like you are using too little ice. Ice is crucial because it chills the booze and therefore mutes some of the bitterness in them, also it helps to dilute the mixture to mellow the tartness of the sour and lower the alcohol concentration. Lastly, the ice is a important component to the measures. By shorting the ice you are likely to add too much sour/coke to top off the glass. So, before you do anything fill up the glass that you want to drink from to the very brim with ice.

Next, don’t be a slave to the jigger. Those proportions are fine, but not every glass is the same size and you can screw up the sour/coke part if you add a full jigger of everything. A better tactic is to get a pourer spout and add equal parts of each booze using a two or three count pour. You’ll be looking to fill the glass about 3/4 of the way full with all the alcohol, anything more or less and the proportions are going to be screwed up.

Finally, you should be using sweet and sour mix in a long island, not regular sour. Sour is meant for margaritas and has much less sweetness than sweet and sour, this is probably why it tastes too bitter for you. Also you should be essentially filling that final 1/4 of the glass up with sweet and sour mix. Totally ignore the coke, all it does is add color. If you can taste any coke flavor at all, you’ve added far too much. When you are making it you should always use the glass you will drink from, a good standard heavy pint glass is ideal, and fill it to just beneath the rim and give it one sharp shake. Then set the glass back down and splash in just a hint of coke and let it settle.

There you go. Like any drink it’s all about proportions. Avoid the pricey/fancy liquors, it’s a waste and it brings flavors you don’t want here. Lots and lots of ice. Sweet and sour mix and the slightest dash of coke. Take two of these and let me know how it goes.

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Oh, how I love this board.

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What’s the thinking here? What’s wrong with the ice that was in the shaker?

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Nothing. I’m not sure where he got this idea. All you’d really be doing is increasing the amount of ice melt in the drink and therefore diluting it. I suppose some drinks could benefit from extra water, but this isn’t one of them. Most likely it’s just a presentation thing that some marketer at a high profile bar decided looked “professional” or “classy”.

10

If I was working a bar that was busy, I’d use crushed ice in the shaker to chill the drink quickly, in just a few shakes, and use cubed ice in the glass to keep it cold for a long time.

11

It’s dubious that the crushed ice would chill a drink notably faster than cubes, a drink is generally chilled as much as it can be after 3 or 4 brisk shakes, and the crushed ice would create a lot of melt and dilution.

More to the point, there might be 25 bars in the whole of the USA that have both crushed and cubed ice at hand for a bartender.

12

Yeah, you’re probably right. I drink neat scotch in bars, and I’ll have a martini before dinner in a restaurant, so bar practices regarding ice are not that familiar to me. At home I use cubed ice in the shaker for martinis and I notice it keeps getting colder for quite a long time as I shake it, but my ice at home comes out of a freezer set for 5 degrees below zero, and the stuff at bars or restaurants always seems a lot warmer than that to me. People figure cold as ice means a specific temperature, but there’s a big difference between ice at five below zero and at 25 above zero.

I just did the math and cooling 50 grams of gin from 70 degrees F to 32 degrees F requires melting 16.2 grams of ice at -5 degrees F and 21.8 grams of ice at 25 degrees F. That’s almost a 35% increase in dilution. It was a quick and dirty calculation, and I assumed the enthalpy of gin was the same as water, which it isn’t, but it’s the right order of magnitude.

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Surface area is going to be a bigger deciding factor in the process than temperature of the ice in the time-to-cool equation. Bar ice is much smaller than standard home ice cubes. Not sure how that math works out, but that’s my guess. Regardless, it’s moot since the drink is served on ice. The temperature doesn’t need to reach it’s peak coldness in the tumbler like a martini. Point is, shaking just isn’t much of a factor in this drink.

14

I bartended for years at a country club and this is spot on. Especially about the bar sour and the coke usage. I also always kept simple syrup on hand to dash into LI’s and Margaritas…it tends to round out the sour/sweet combination of flavors.

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Omniscient, that was awesome. If we ever have a SDMB NFL party, will you tend bar? We’ll put out a HUGE tip jar…

Smapti, to commiserate, my experience was like yours. There was a bar that made 'em great, Mikey’s Specials. I talked to Mikey, got all the exact brands and after visiting with him in detail about his procedure, still failed to produce anything similar at home. It can be a tough drink to get right but now you’ve got some experts behind you.

Let us know how these tips work out. Looks like great advice.

16

I’m normally a 100% Blue Agave snob. But, for this drink, Sauza Blanco would do just fine. The Cuervo Gold has caramel & other flavors added to mimic a Reposado or Anejo–so it’s wrong for the job.

Actually, Tequila Sunrises & too many shots back in the 70’s convinced me that Cuervo Gold is Just Wrong. Period.

Hence the 100% Blue Agave.

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Actually, I just checked my bar, and what I have is… Sauza Blanco. I forgot that it wasn’t 100% blue.

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Yes, yes I would. Though by the night games my skills would be severely diminished.

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Just noticed this after rereading it, what you’re more than likely feeling is the shaker/glass getting colder as you continue shaking it, the liquid probably isn’t changing temperature very much after the first couple shakes. It’s a pedantic little hijack, apologies.

20

This doesn’t answer your question and you probably already know this anyway, but a cheaper alternative to bar prices guaranteed to taste right are the pre-made bottles of these that you can get at a liquor store for 7.99 or so for a 24 oz bottle.