Thai basil has a more assertive flavour than the more usual sweet basil varieties. The leaves are smaller and the stems purple. The flavour has hints of liquorice (licorice) and mint. Basil leaves don ...

Read about cocktail measures and measuring. This shaken recipe includes orange juice (classically, it doesn't), giving the otherwise anaemic-looking cocktail its namesake golden hue. Adding orange ...

Distillation does not produce alcohol, it merely concentrates it. To produce a distilled spirit you need to start with an alcoholic liquid ('wash') to distil your spirit from. The majority of vodkas ...

Tequila is a distilled spirit made from the cooked and fermented juice of the agave (pronounced 'Uh-Gah-Vee'), a spiky Mexican plant which resembles a cactus. Traditionally the process is labour ...

The Dry Martini, a blend of dry gin (or vodka) with a hint of dry vermouth and perhaps orange bitters is one of the quickest and simplest cocktails to make. However, due to the myriad of different ...

James Bond drank a Negroni when he wasn't in the mood for a Martini, and when Orson Welles tried his first one in 1947, he commented, "The bitters are excellent for your liver, the gin is bad for you.

Flavoured with extracts of mandarin, orange, lemon, lime and grapefruit. Launched in 1988, the success of Absolut Citron paved the way for the popularity of citrus-flavoured vodkas throughout the ...

Read about cocktail measures and measuring.

The development of cocktail culture and so, by default gin based cocktails, were much aided by three developments: artificial carbonation of water (1767), commercially traded ice (1800) and ...

The 1990s turned into the decade of the V-shaped glass and any cocktail served in such a glass could be, and usually was, christened a member of the Martini family. With the fashion for 'fresh' so the ...