How to Memorize Cocktail Recipes

Have you ever wanted to learn how to memorize cocktail recipes?  It can be daunting for someone with no experience to learn popular recipes for alcoholic drinks.  You may think that you have to learn thousands of different recipes to be able to work as a bartender, but the fact is that no one knows thousands of recipes.  That's why they make books with drink recipes as a reference guide when you need it.  You really only need to know about 50 or 60 of the most popular drinks in order to work at most bars. 

Now that you've narrowed down this task from 1000's of drinks to 60 drinks, it does seem a little less challenging.  However, 60 drinks will take some time to learn if you know nothing about learning cocktail recipes.  here are some tips to help you learn how to memorize cocktail recipes.

One thing you can do is make yourself flash cards with the drink name on one side and the alcoholic drink recipes and ingredients on the other side.  This is just like in grade school when you learned division.  Have a friend review the cards with you every day for at least an hour and you will start to get familiar with the drinks that you need to know.  You can even color code certain main ingredients in the drink recipes to make them easier to remember.  For example, color sweet and sour mixer green and rum purple.  That way you can associate a color with that ingredient making it easier for you to remember.  Try it, because it really does work.

Another technique to memorize cocktail recipes, is to start practicing what they call bottle touching.  Bottle touching is where you spend hours pretending to make cocktails that are read out loud to you from a list of popular drinks.  This is a really easy way to get good at memorizing cocktail recipes, and to improve your overall speed.  There is just something about handling the bottles that helps you really learn the drinks quick.  I think this is the way that most professional bars train new staff.  They have to teach even experienced bartenders, because some bars have their own certain drink recipes for making popular drinks.  Thay like to offer consistency in their cocktails to their patrons.

Another way to go is to just start making drinks.  That sounds stupid, but the best way to learn is to do.  Have yourself a cheat sheet of the most popular 100 drinks and be ready to learn.  Start out with the ten easiest on your sheet and when you get them down move onto to the next 10 easiest.  Eventually, you'll get it, and you'll be proud too.  It's amazing how much the human mind can remember when trained properly.

Well, hopefully these tips will help you learn how to memorize cocktail recipes.  Practice makes perfect and you can do it.