More Than Just the Booze: What Makes a Great Cocktail?

Low Bar’s mixologist shares the ingredients and techniques behind out-of-this-world drinks

By Karl Klockars | Nov. 30, 2024

What makes a great cocktail?

If you were to judge by the array of hundreds of bottles of spirits behind the bar at Traverse City’s cocktail lounge Low Bar, your first instinct might be to name any number of high end whiskeys, rums, gins, vodkas, or other liqueurs. And sure, every great cocktail does start with a pour of something that may have been resting in a barrel for years, even decades, awaiting that final moment it meets the other ingredients that enter your glass.

But there’s much more than that. If all you needed was a pour of an intoxicating liquor to create a cocktail, we’d be done here…but we aren’t. What about all the other elements that go into making a delicious mixed drink? We’re talking bitters, herbs, syrups, and even smoke.

Maybe you don’t think about these things, but bar manager and mixologist Zach Cavender certainly does.

“I had a little bit of experience before [joining Low Bar]; Jeff Hoisington and Alex Reed were the bar managers and bartenders at the time, and they really encouraged the methodology and education behind cocktails. Especially Prohibition-era ones,” he says.

That education began amidst the pandemic-era drinking of 2021 when Cavender started out at Low Bar, and since then he’s worked his way up to not just mixing the classic Prohibition-era cocktails they’re known for, but putting a few on the menu himself.

There’s one thing that’s harder to teach than recipes, though: heart. “[Hoisington and Reed] were both very passionate about it, [and] it made things easier to learn when you're following someone that is as passionate as that,” Cavender says.

We chatted with him about what a good cocktail bar must have to go above and beyond what a mixed drink at home can taste like … including some things that you can’t simply go out and buy.

Bring in the Bitters

“Bitters are the salt and pepper of the cocktail world,” Cavender says. “Because bitters can make or break a drink, you know? But they’re such a small element by volume.”

Low Bar has many of the widely-available bitters on hand like Angostura and Peychaud’s that you need for drinks like a traditional Manhattan or a Sazerac (respectively), but they also have their own concoctions on hand for some very specific uses.

“The bitters that we’re known for is our Krampus bitters. They’re going to be more of a kind of a seasonal holiday-esque bitter. You’re gonna have those heavy cardamom elements in those bitters; it’s very rich, and you will find that in our Krampus Old Fashioned. That’s the only cocktail we use it in,” Cavender says.

That drink also blends bourbon with sugar and a brulee-ed orange slice to augment and elevate the traditional version of the drink, but like Cavender says—the house bitters give it that extra edge.

Jazz Up Your Juice & Spiff Up your Syrups

The next two ingredients are things that a home bar may or may not have on hand, but definitely makes a huge difference in the quality and freshness of a cocktail.

“We squeeze all our own juices and we make all of our own syrups,” Cavender says. While a straightforward simple syrup, rich simple, or even demerara syrup are all generally within the grasp of a home mixologist, the infusions that a discerning cocktail bar produces get much more specific.

For example, Cavender notes that “Right now we have a sour apple syrup for this time of year, [and] there’s a tea-infused syrup that we’re using with tea from Spice Merchants here in Traverse City.”

Juices aren’t the only things you want on hand that are fresh—Low Bar also has plenty of fresh ingredients like mint and citrus (or at least as fresh as limes and lemons can be in northern Michigan) for the zest of their peels and the oils in their skins, which can be ignited across the top of a drink for a smoky, tart zip of extra flavor.

Building from Barrels

If resting whiskey or rum in a wooden barrel for a few years develops the delicious flavors that those spirits are known for, why not make a barrel an ingredient in a cocktail as well? Barrel-aged mixed drinks are fairly rare, but they do turn up from time to time at Low Bar.

“We’ve done barrel-aged Negronis and barrel-aged Old Fashioneds in the past,” Cavender says, but winter drinkers will want to be aware of what’s currently being infused. “Right now we have the base for our hot toddy resting in one of those barrels,” he adds. That bourbon-based blend of warming, comforting flavors starts out a little spicy, but “by resting it in a barrel, it’s going to mellow it out a little bit more.”

One main ingredient of a good barrel is the toasting of the internal oak staves. As a result, wood smoke is another ingredient you may have seen around town that’s unlikely to get incorporated into a home bar.

“I think there’s not just an interest, but a love of smoked drinks,” Cavender says. “One of our most popular drinks, The Boss”—made with mezcal, cognac, cherry Heering, and orange liqueur—“is a smoked cocktail that’s rather interactive. We smoke it in a bottle and so it’s deconstructed. It’s up to you to figure out how smoked you would like it.”

The Final Ingredient: A Skilled Hand

And where there’s smoke, there’s often also … fire.

Before we set things ablaze, there are a couple of very important cocktail “ingredients” that a home bartender can’t buy from a liquor store or order online: technique and skill.

We walked into Low Bar thinking we’d be discussing how they dehydrate fruit or prepare spice mixtures or distill rare ingredients into hyperconcentrated tinctures, but quickly realized that it’s the practiced skill of how a bartender spins ice in a mixing glass or shakes an egg white into foam which is the most important part of preparing a drink that someone would pay good money for.

“You can have a very simple drink with the right technique be out of this world. A complicated drink with the wrong technique? It can just ruin your night,” Cavender says. “But a lot of these techniques have been around for a hundred-plus years. For stirred cocktails, we’re stirring it for 40 seconds. The aeration of certain shaken cocktails … there’s a reason for everything.”

That’s when Cavender took a small saucepan filled with an aromatic concoction from atop a small burner. After explaining that this was the heated base for their hot toddy, he says, casually, “I'm gonna actually pass this one between two mugs while it’s on fire.”

(Flaming liquor is definitely a don’t-try-this-at-home kind of ingredient … but if you must try it, at least do it outside away from any tinder or kindling.)

Deftly grabbing a couple of jiggers, Zach drew out a measure of high-proof bourbon, then mixed it in with the heated base and a bit of water to dilute this rocket fuel. Then, out came the butane torch, and he lit the drink and passed the flaming liquid between two mugs, artfully extending the glowing pour further and further with each pass before pouring it into a glass garnished with a small slice of orange peel.

Breathing in the slightly charred, spicy aroma of fire-activated hot toddy, we realized that there’s a final ingredient that only you get with very rare drinks: Showmanship.

Visit Low Bar at 128 S Union St. in Traverse City. lowbartc.com