At good cocktail bars, bartenders tend to use only fresh ingredients, with carefully sculpted ice and intricately measured alcohol proportions. These craft cocktails take awhile to make, but drinkers are often rewarded with the nuanced and subtle flavors. Nation's Restaurant News writes about a new cocktail trend that goes the other direction, in which large batches of cocktails are served in draft form. A negroni can come out of the tap just like a Bud Light.
At first, these draft cocktails struck us as a cheap ploy -- we mostly support the obsessive tendencies of mixologists today -- but apparently, drinkers are digging these large batch libations. In fact, customers at Mercadito restaurants in Chicago and Miami reportedly preferred the five-day-old margaritas tapped from kegs versus the made-fresh versions. The kegs offer more time for the flavors to blend, which could even be an advantage over cocktails a la minute.
We'll resist making judgment until we try some draft cocktails ourselves. It sounds like that won't be hard to do in the future: the beverage consultants Tippling Bros. are developing a 48-head custom draft system that will pump out up to eight cocktails.