Starting Out Slow

Our experience with mocktails has been a gradual one. We started by just buying the frozen concentrates of pina coladas and daiquiris. We also would order those same kind of drinks at restaurants. We then progressed into buying drink mixes at the grocery store. These mixes are very convenient because the only thing you usually need to add is either ice for a frozen drink or club soda for an 'on the rocks' drink. We have experimented with various flavored mojito mixes and have enjoyed them a lot. We have also recently found a great cheesecake mixer at Target. It is very rich and more of a dessert drink. We also add a little bit of grenadine to this mix to give it a cherry cheesecake flavor.

We have slowly added things to our bar collection. One of the most important pieces to have when mixing drinks is a cocktail shaker. This allows you to mix all of your ingredients with ice and then strain the mixture into a glass without the ice. You can pretty much use any glass for a mocktail, but of course a fancier glass enhances the experience. So far we have lowball glasses and wine glasses. I would eventually like to add martini glasses and margarita or pina colada glasses for frozen drinks.

We are now getting to the confidence level where we can start to make drinks from scratch. The first thing I suggest is to go online and do a search for non-alcoholic cocktails. I found a ton of different recipes. Look through the ingredients of each drink and find some that sound appealing. We found that a lot of drinks use the same basic ingredients with variations here and there.

We found a lot of drinks that appealed to us and then bought all the ingredients in each. We tried to get a lot of drinks that took a lot of the same ingredients so we could make a variety of drinks without a whole lot of extra ingredients. Our next plan is to throw a cocktail party. We are going to incorporate this into a Halloween party at the end of the month. This will serve as an experiment for us in order to find out which drinks most people like and what ingredients go well with one another. After the party I will post the most popular drinks and their ingredients.