There’s something delightful about having a flask of your favorite tipple on hand when you’re out and about. And while the most common use for a flask is carrying spirits like whiskey or brandy, if you’re feeling adventurous then you can also try your hand at flask cocktails. Given that this is Negroni Week, today I’m sharing my personal favorite recipe for a negroni on the go.
How to make a flask negroni
I have a flask of about 200ml, but you can adjust this recipe up or down for the size of your flask.
Ingredients:
- 50 ml gin (I like to use Tanqueray, but you can use whatever you prefer)
- 50 ml Campari
- 70 ml sweet vermouth (I’m using good old Martini & Rossi, but again you can use your preferred brand)
- 30 ml water
- generous dash of orange bitters
Method:
Rather than attempting to mix the ingredients directly in the flask, which is messy and annoying, it’s easier to mix everything in a kitchen jug. Pour everything in and mix well, then taste to see if it needs any tweaks. If not, use a funnel to pour it into the flask and enjoy your negroni on the go.
The art of flask cocktails
The trick to making a good flask cocktail is understanding how to mix a room temperature drink. Virtually all traditional cocktails are drunk chilled, but with a flask cocktail, even if you start with chilled ingredients, you’ll end up with a warm drink after carrying it around with you all day. So you need to adjust your recipes to account for that.
The biggest factors to allow for with a room temperature drink are water and sweetness.
It may seem odd to add water to a cocktail, but think about shaking or stirring a cocktail with ice — this doesn’t only chill the drink, it also melts the ice into water which is an essential part of a balanced drink. If you made a negroni using the traditional ingredients but didn’t stir it with ice and drank it at room temperature, it would taste harsh and unbalanced. Stirring a drink adds around 15-20% of water to its volume, so you want to add this much water into your flask cocktail too.
The other issue to consider is sweetness. When a drink is chilled, its flavors tend to be rather muted. Chilling spirits helps to round off their harsh edges — just think of throwing a bottle of vodka into the freezer before doing shots to make them smoother. If a drink isn’t going to be chilled, it is going to taste more boozy and less mellow. To counteract that, I like to add more sweetener to room temperature drinks than I normally would.
In the case of a flask negroni, that means upping the proportion of sweet vermouth as this is the main sweetner in the drink. The exact ratio can be adjusted to your liking, but I like to add around one third more of the sweet vermouth than I would normally, changing the traditional ratios of 1:1:1 for this drink.
