Episode #12 - All About Garnishes

In this episode we talk about the world of cocktail garnishes - Some pretty, some practical and some DEADLY.

Transcript

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Nick Boban (00:01):
Th is is the house made podcast. We're your hosts Nick Boban and John Vieira. We're here to cover your questions about home bartending. Let's get into it.

Nick Boban (00:22):
Hey guys. Welcome back to the house made podcast - Another episode. We wanted to talk to you today about garnishes. What are they? Some things you might need to avoid because they're deadly.

John Vieira (00:36):
That makes it sound like a lot larger category than it really is.

Nick Boban (00:39):
I mean, there's a lot of things out there that kill you.

John Vieira (00:41):
One disclaimer, technically.

Nick Boban (00:44):
But anyways, so garnishes. What are they? Well, so the garnish, actually itself, on a cocktail, is meant to be almost the salt and pepper for your drink. So most of the time when we talk about garnish, we're talking about peels. Citrus peels of some kind, or like a rim of some kind like sugar or salt, or even a wedge of citrus. And what those are meant to do is to enhance the drink in a way that's specific to your palate. So when you get, let's say like a lemon drop with a lemon wedge on the side of it, what it's for or meant is so that you can take the drink, take a sip of it. And if you go, "Oh gee, I would like that to be quite a bit more sour." Then you take the little bit of lemon juice they put as a wedge on the side of your drink and squeeze it in there. Same with like salt on a margarita or sugar on any other drink. We always serve them kind of almost as half rims so that you don't have to fully take that as your drink, because then you can take as much or as little as you want with each sip of your cocktail itself.

John Vieira (01:53):
Right. Yeah. So you're essentially you're at the mercy of whoever is making your drink. So a good example of this is the lime wedge that they give you on a margarita. That, now granted a lot of times there's salt on that as well. And the salt doesn't necessarily do anything to the drink besides whether or not you like the taste of salt with it, which I personally really like, I just like salt, but the lime wedge now, some places will give you like a wheel or something. That's not as functional. It's really hard to like actually get juice out of.

Nick Boban (02:24):
But those look pretty.

John Vieira (02:27):
They look fantastic, but the wedge would be essentially, they give you this drink that they are claiming is like, this is what we like the best. This is balanced. This is perfect, essentially for their palate. And so this gives you the option to make it less sweet by introducing more citrus. But essentially what we're talking here with garnishes is functional versus non-functional because some stuff in the garnish world is just to look awesome and it does, and it looks fantastic for a picture and you drink with your eyes, right? It's like that whole thing, if something looks amazing, it's going to taste amazing. Hopefully. But there's a whole bunch of...

Nick Boban (03:05):
Well It'll probably taste better, at least, cause it looks super awesome.

John Vieira (03:09):
Yeah, cause at least you can Instagram it and be like, Oh, this drink was so good. Even if it's trash. But essentially, what these categories break down into is almost everything is gonna act as a functional, edible garnish, but we'll kind of break these things down in a second here. I think the best place to start for this would be the garnishes that are inedible, right? So there's many of these things we've seen some really cool things, especially for like photo-shoots. You'll use, like, I think the black Pearl that we did last year or the year before, whatever we put like little, you know, for the picture we put like little pirate coins and stuff next to, it was like, obviously that drink wasn't served with pirate coins.

Nick Boban (03:54):
Oh, I think there was even a little pirate treasure chest on that one too.

John Vieira (03:58):
And so you'll see a lot of this stuff on Pinterest and they're really great ideas.

New Speaker (04:01):
Little umbrellas.

John Vieira (04:03):
Yeah. For staging and stuff like that, but there's a lot of stuff that you will actually see on drinks, especially in a warm weather as you're, you're getting more tropical drinks and Tiki drinks. So let's talk about a couple of these. We've got drink umbrellas, like you just said. Obviously, we should not have to say this. It goes without saying that you should not eat your drink umbrella. A lot of them are toothpicks though. So you could use it as a toothpick. So it is technically functional.

Nick Boban (04:29):
Okay. That's fair.

John Vieira (04:30):
You've got fancy straws. So just things that look really cool or vibrant or have stripes on them that just kinda make the drink look even cooler than it would. You've got cocktail swords and these are usually a method of holding...

Nick Boban (04:45):
Like a skewer of some kind. For olives or cherries or something.

John Vieira (04:50):
You could have something lit on fire. Right?

Nick Boban (04:53):
Which is great. I mean, technically it's edible.

John Vieira (04:58):
Yeah. But definitely don't try to eat the fire.

Nick Boban (05:00):
Put it out. Yeah. Or let it burnout, cause usually it's like 151 or some kind of other high proof alcohol that doesn't taste very good.

John Vieira (05:08):
It's going to taste like ass. I put this on here cause I don't know if they're technically edible or not. I've never tried to eat one. I feel like it would hurt my throat very badly, but pineapple leaves. Really common with like Tiki style drinks.

Nick Boban (05:20):
I'm sure you could eat it. I'm sure it doesn't taste good. It's very much a nonfunctional garnish.

John Vieira (05:26):
It looks great. It's it's awesome. I definitely wouldn't recommend eating those. So now that inedible is out of the way everything else is technically that we're going to talk about is like garnishes that you might actually see.

Nick Boban (05:39):
Well, we will later touch on Some more inedible stuff too, like poisonous flowers or maybe activated charcoal.

John Vieira (05:48):
Yeah. Activated charcoal. Don't get drinks with that in there.

Nick Boban (05:50):
Let's touch on this. It was popular before the Corona virus. Every drink that was coming out was pitch black and it was due to activated charcoal, which, it looks super cool, and technically it is edible, but what it's doing is it's drawing fluids and whatnot out of your body. And so the biggest one is for anybody that takes like regular medications say like high blood pressure medication or heart disease stuff. What it's doing is literally pulling those antibiotics out of your system, that activated charcoal. So it's actually very detrimental for anybody that's taking medication or just any fluid in your body period. It's literally sucking it out.

John Vieira (06:33):
Yeah. It's a big no-no for various medications. Also it's charcoal. Like I don't really care.

Nick Boban (06:40):
I've had a couple of drinks with those and they're really chalky.

John Vieira (06:44):
Yeah. The texture is all off. Now another thing that I actually didn't really think about until you just started talking about charcoal, that you have to be really careful of. I did a bunch of research into this because I wanted to make a bitters or a syrup that would have a tobacco kind of flavor. There are products that exist, but they do not have actual tobacco in them. You have to be very, very careful because if you used actual tobacco to make like a syrup or some kind of bitters or things like that, you're super concentrating the nicotine in there. And then you continue to ingest it in a form that is not typical for tobacco. So it's incredibly easy...

Nick Boban (07:28):
It turns into a poison essentially, right?

John Vieira (07:30):
It's incredibly easy to get injured or die from nicotine poisoning. Um, it's a super, super big deal. So if you go someplace where they have this really gimmicky, like tobacco thing, like I would look into it, I would just make sure, because you could have a couple sips of that thing and be down for the count.

Nick Boban (07:51):
Yeah. I think that's something to point out too. Just because they're a bar and a restaurant doesn't necessarily mean that they know what they're doing either.

John Vieira (08:00):
Yeah. And you don't have to be a dick about it, but like...

Nick Boban (08:02):
Yeah, but if they have an activated charcoal drink or they got something on the menu that's like, Oh, tobacco syrup, just don't order it.

John Vieira (08:09):
Or at least ask them questions like, Hey, is this real? Yeah. Just know that you can run into a lot of problems with that .

Nick Boban (08:16):
Same stuff with like the flower garnishes and stuff like that.

John Vieira (08:20):
Yeah. Let's talk about flower garnishes. Right? These are a new kind of thing that I'm seeing a lot more of. I realize they've probably been around for awhile. Um, they look amazing. They're so pretty, especially for pictures, but there's a lot of flowers that are harmless, completely edible. They look fantastic. Some of them actually taste good.

Nick Boban (08:43):
Most of them tastes like lettuce.

John Vieira (08:45):
They don't really taste like a whole bunch in my experience. I wrote down a few that are popular names that you might see or have heard of, some being New England Aster, Bee Balm, the Carnation, which we're all familiar with, camamilel. And then there's loads of others. There's a bunch of great websites that document all of these food safe, edible flower garnishes. So if you guys are interested in anything like that, you can check it out. Just know, like we gotta do this disclaimer so nobody tries to sue us.

Nick Boban (09:16):
They're not all edible.

John Vieira (09:18):
They're not all edible, but there's many that are considered toxic that look very, very similar to ones that are edible. So if you don't know, or the person giving it to you doesn't know. Do not eat it. And maybe it's one of those things where like, it would just make you a little bit upset stomach, something like that.

Nick Boban (09:35):
Some of it could really mess you up.

John Vieira (09:37):
You just don't know. It's like a snake where some of them are so deadly and then some of them look like so similar, but they have different banding and they're not poisonous at all.

Nick Boban (09:45):
I would say this. If you're walking into a restaurant and they got big flower beds out front, and then your drink comes out with one of those flowers in it, that's bad.

John Vieira (09:54):
I would just... I've had some really good ones. I want to go on record and say, they look great. I am not opposing this idea. You just have to know what you're getting. A lot of these bars are going to special order this stuff and I'm sure it's fine.

Nick Boban (10:05):
You guys all have Google in your pocket. Just take it out and do a quick search.

John Vieira (10:07):
There's probably an app that lets you take a picture of it.

Nick Boban (10:10):
You can search pictures in Google. I don't know exactly how that works, but I know that you can do it.

John Vieira (10:16):
On the other side of kind of floral or herbaceous garnishes we get into a lot more common stuff like mint, basil, and even like thyme or Rosemary.

Nick Boban (10:28):
Yeah. Those are great for drinks. And so those are very functionable garnishes too, because they add aroma, which helps actually change the flavor of the drink because you taste 90% with your nose.

John Vieira (10:40):
Yeah. Especially stuff like thyme and Rosemary. Around Christmas time, we've done some cobblers and things like that that'll have like that really like nice herbacious punch on top. And like, man, it's pretty serious. They get a little dainty. If you try to make them into a syrup or a bitters.

Nick Boban (10:58):
You lose it.

John Vieira (10:59):
You really lose it, but putting it as fresh garnish on top of the drink is awesome.

Nick Boban (11:06):
Now it is something to note though too, when you're putting these herbs on top of a drink, you have to wake them up, if you will.

John Vieira (11:14):
Yeah. So how do you do that?

Nick Boban (11:16):
So you're essentially slapping these leaves. Right? And what you're doing is your breaking the cells apart and you're releasing the oil.

John Vieira (11:26):
So on a scale from like a pat to Chris Brown, how hard are we going to slap these things?

Nick Boban (11:32):
I would do like a very medium love tap.

John Vieira (11:35):
Okay. Like a small golf clap.

Nick Boban (11:39):
Yeah. A little bit better than a golf clap, but not quite like gonna slap your mama.

John Vieira (11:43):
Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. If you slap it too hard, it's like...

Nick Boban (11:46):
Then you just break it in two.

John Vieira (11:48):
Yeah. You might just blow it up.

Nick Boban (11:50):
It's something to, I guess note, that when you're doing it, you can immediately smell the impact.

John Vieira (11:58):
Mint, especially.

Nick Boban (11:59):
If you did it right, It's instantaneous. If you did it too soft, it's not going to be there. You can literally though with like mint in particular, you can literally take the bushel and like lightly like whack it on like the back of your hand, just a few different times and it will continuously kind of open up.

John Vieira (12:21):
So if you have... If you're doing like mules or mojitos for some kind of party or event that you're doing, you're going to have these nice little tight bushels that are gonna look great as garnishes. You don't want to really smack the crap out of it too much because you're going to kind of make it look less good and flatten it. That tapping on the back of your hand or on your wrist or something like that works really, really well. It wakes it up and you really don't need to assault it too much. Now basil, a lot of times, if you use it as a garnish, you're using like a single leaf.

Nick Boban (12:52):
And a big one. Those ones you'll have to give a little bit harder smack to it.

John Vieira (12:55):
You might need to spank it a little bit. It's harder to grab the base of the stem and get any traction with that, but it just depends on the situation.

Nick Boban (13:05):
Any of those herbs that you're putting on your drinks, wake them up. Give them some... smack them around a little bit and break their oils or break their oils. I want to say like collagen, but you're essentially...

John Vieira (13:17):
It's like the capillaries, right?

Nick Boban (13:18):
Yeah. You're essentially breaking their capillaries apart.

John Vieira (13:21):
Yeah. So a few of the categories... We have kind of like this big, main category that we want to touch on, but real quick before we get there, let's talk about a couple of the other ones that we all know and we've seen. Olives and onions, right? It's like Gibson's, Martinis and you've got different kinds of olives, specifically. So, you know, blue cheese stuffed, jalapenos stuffed, delicious things like that.

Nick Boban (13:45):
So with that, backup. Gibson. I didn't know this forever. A Gibson is literally a martini and instead of putting olives on it, you put little cocktail onions on it. That's it.

John Vieira (13:56):
It is the exact same drink, technically speaking, because you have all of the common modifications as you do with any martini, which would be things like asking for it dry, which means little to no vermouth in it. Asking for it dirty, which means it's going to include some of the olive brine in it. And then the typical options between gin or vodka. There's not really a wrong answer. I suppose you could technically make a martini with other spirits, like rum and stuff too. It's definitely not common. But yeah, Gibson is essentially the same drink. It's just a cool name that somebody gave the first time they decided to put onions in it instead of olives and they just put their stamp on it.

Nick Boban (14:36):
Yeah. Which is fine. Also talking about these olives in particular. So we use a Spanish olive all the time, with the little red pimentos in them. They're super delicious on their own. However, if you wanted to do stuffed olives, you don't need to buy the really expensive, fancy jar of it. Just literally go through with a toothpick, pull those, pimentos out and pop in whenever you want.

John Vieira (15:00):
Way more cost-effective. You guys can go and buy a little brick of blue cheese.

Nick Boban (15:04):
Garlic, jalapeno. You can make your own stuffing.

John Vieira (15:08):
Absolutely. And I was just going to say, if you actually do a little mixture of your own with cream cheese as a base, now ratios are gonna depend on what you're doing. A little bit of blue cheese. You could use a little bits of jalapeno, garlic. You can actually, you could essentially make like one olive to rule them all.

New Speaker (15:28):
Yeah, I've done that. I've done that with a ricotta too. So like cream cheese, ricotta, blue cheese.

John Vieira (15:35):
And if you guys were doing like a brunch sort of thing and you wanted to do like a bloody Mary bar or like a, you know, a simplified sort of thing like that with, with your garnish, you could go crazy with your olives too. Cause then you have like... You've got your bacon. You could have celery. I mean, like with bloody marys there's no end in sight. Right?

Nick Boban (15:55):
Dude, you could do a bloody Mary with just like a skewer of olives, but every olive stuffed with something different.

John Vieira (16:00):
Totally. You could, yeah. You could get wild.

Nick Boban (16:03):
That'd be so awesome.

John Vieira (16:04):
Which, maybe I'll do that this weekend. It sounds awesome, because I love olives. I know some people don't, I get that.

Nick Boban (16:09):
Yeah. See, I didn't like olives and I didn't like blue cheese until I put them together and now I like both.

John Vieira (16:15):
Wow. That was just like a total doorway for you. Huh?

Nick Boban (16:17):
It was, and it was because I was working behind the bar with this pregnant girl and she had a hankering for blue cheese and apparently you're not supposed to eat those soft cheeses when you're pregnant. And she would, uh... She was a character, but she was just, "I don't give a... I'm eating this blue cheese olive!" And just eat a bunch of these. And then she was giving me a bunch of crap for not liking them. I'm like, ah, I'm fine. And she's like, yeah, give me a bunch of crap. So I was like, all right, I'll try it. And I was like, Oh wow. I actually really liked it.

John Vieira (16:53):
It is really good. I love the garlic stuffed ones. I'm just an absolute garlic freak though. Some people... That might be like way overkill for some people. Pickled garlic, though, is a lot more tame. So like by the time it's the all of Brine process and it sits in there, like it is nowhere close to just cracking into a head of garlic and just taking a bite. Okay. Yeah. The other small categories before we get to the big one would be sugars and salts. Very self-explanatory.

Nick Boban (17:23):
Rimming type stuff.

John Vieira (17:24):
Yeah. Usually uses a rim. You've got like your big fat, kosher salt that you would use on something like a margarita. We use smoked Celtic sea salt at the bar for a specific bourbon drink called the boarding pass that's amazing. And we just smoke it ourselves. You guys can do this really easily. It tastes great with a bloody Mary as well. Adds to that savory kind of punch that you get. So you've got granulated sugar, obviously on lemon drops, things like that, but you've also got powdered sugar. So you could throw that on the top of certain things to make it look really nice, especially if it does have like a mint bouquet or something like that.

Nick Boban (17:58):
We've done coblers before where it's got like three or four berries on top, a little bit of mint and then powdered sugar over top of it. It looks awesome.

John Vieira (18:06):
It looks amazing. And so, and there's a bunch of other salt blends too. So you can get like jalapeno salt, things like that. If you're doing like fancy margaritas, so there's a bunch of stuff out there, or you can kind of make your own too. That might be a cool experiment. And then below that, sugars and salts. Below that we have treats essentially so whipped cream...

Nick Boban (18:27):
Or like pairings even.

John Vieira (18:29):
Yeah. Like some, some drinks are paired with like those little like sandwich cookies, like things like that, candied nuts. But this would be almost more like coffee style drinks, right? Like you think of like, okay. Whipped cream. Nutmegs, cinnamon...

Nick Boban (18:44):
Not entirely though. Cause like we did any kind of punches with nutmeg on top, which is really awesome.

John Vieira (18:50):
Nutmeg you can do on a lot of stuff and it's a great Aromatic.

Nick Boban (18:52):
Nutmeg by itself is killer.

John Vieira (18:55):
But the, the big thing that we're going to talk about here, which is the most common than what you're going to see the most of is citrus and fruits, right? And this goes back really heavily to our functional aspect of things. When you talk about citrus peels, this is a really big one. So something like an old fashioned, Negroni's, Martinis. Classic Martinis that don't have the olives, they might have like a lemon twist or something. When you talk about citrus peels, you're talking about the oil that you get, right? Which is totally this aromatic function. And so you're expressing the oil over the top of this drink and just to touch on because I've seen a lot of people do this really, really weird. You don't want your hands or your fingers anywhere inside of this person's drink, whether it's a customer or a guest in your house. The oil travels very easily. You need to be like literally eight to 12 inches away from this thing. And it needs to grace, the top of the glass, you don't need to get like deep inside.

Nick Boban (20:02):
I think a lot of that just comes out of not knowing, right? So like to get the best oil off of your rind, one, you have to have a fruit that has a great rind on it. Not all fruit is created equal. So when you're shopping around in the fruit section at the supermarket, the rinds with the most oils are the ones that look like a poor old man's crater, acne scarred face. They've got huge dips and valleys or ridges on them. And literally when you pick it up and you just give it a little light squeeze and you set it down, your hands are covered in oil.

John Vieira (20:38):
You can literally just smell the fruit.

Nick Boban (20:40):
Oh yeah. And so, but then second is actually peeling the fruit properly with enough pith on the bottom is that white stuff in between the rind and the actual fruit itself, to give your rind some kind of stability. Right? Give it a firmness.

John Vieira (20:57):
You're gently folding it. And those oils just shoot out. If you don't have enough pith on there and it's not firm enough, it's just going to fold in half...

Nick Boban (21:03):
And you're not going to get anything out of it. Cause yeah, literally that's... I think people watch videos and they think that it's some like weird muscular effort that just squeezes the citrus apart, but it really all just has to do with how you peel the fruit to begin with, because with literally almost no effort whatsoever. And you're just gently folding the rind in half.

John Vieira (21:25):
You do not need to force or try to project. I mean, it's going to spray. Literally, even when you just go to peel these fruit...

Nick Boban (21:33):
Your hands are gonna be covered.

John Vieira (21:35):
Just the act of peeling it, you're going to get an explosion of the citrus oil on your face and it's going to smell phenomenal.

Nick Boban (21:41):
Oh yeah, and it is highly flammable just in case anybody didn't know that.

John Vieira (21:44):
Flaming orange peels is awesome. That's kind of a Dale DeGroff special there. I mean, that guy used to flame an orange on every drink known to man and he did it because he had style and he's the man, but a lot of that has come to be pretty standard in the, in the bar world with certain drinks too. Especially like something like a Vieux Carre. It's pretty common to have a flamed orange peel on there. Okay. So we've got peels. That's sort of self-explanatory I think we've all kind of experienced that. You know that it's like that citrus oil that's really lending itself.

Nick Boban (22:18):
I will say this, sorry, before we depart from the peels, it might just be my own preference, but you definitely don't need to wipe the peel around the glass after you've expressed it. Because now all you're doing is leaving excess oil around like rimming the glass, if you will.

John Vieira (22:36):
You really shouldn't.

Nick Boban (22:37):
Cause what we're looking for is a nasal thing, not a taste thing. It will impart some flavor once you drop it in there, but sorry...

John Vieira (22:47):
If you're going to do it with anything, orange would be the best choice because it has enough of the natural sweetness that it may not...

Nick Boban (22:52):
It's not as bitter.

John Vieira (22:53):
It may not be alienating. However, if you do it with a lemon, almost 100% of the time, it's not going to be a pleasant effect.

Nick Boban (23:02):
But I just see that, especially with like new bartenders and stuff like that.

John Vieira (23:05):
Well, it looks cool... Rub it around. It's really not a thing.

Nick Boban (23:12):
It is a thing. It just shouldn't be a thing.

John Vieira (23:14):
I think just seeing the oil being expressed over the drink, cause it's clearly visible.

Nick Boban (23:18):
VERY visible.

John Vieira (23:20):
That is way cooler as like a finishing touch on a cocktail than to be like, "Now let me wipe it on where your mouth is going." I just don't think that's as cool. Yeah. So next in line here we have wedges and we talked about this briefly at the beginning, as far as functionality and that is given to you so that you can add a little bit of juice and the entire wedge, which you'll get some of the oil, some of this tart from like the rind itself to your drink if you see fit. Never ever do this before you taste it. Taste the drink. A lot of people, they'll literally just grab it first thing and put it in.

Nick Boban (23:57):
I see it all the time. They set, you set it down and they're like, can I get four limes? And you're like, yeah. And they just squeeze all four into their drink. And you're like, why didn't you ask me? I literally squeezed limes all day to put in your drink. I just put more in there. Yeah.

John Vieira (24:09):
Well, and we've actually had drinks sent back too because they were like, "this doesn't taste very good." And I was like, yeah, that's cause you just squeezed a shit ton of limes in there. Anyway. Wedges are meant to be that in garnish form because when you look at wheels, those are not easily squeezed. They're hard to get juice from. They're meant to look pretty. If you get a cocktail that has a wheel on it, that means the person that made that drink for you does not feel like giving you the option to add more citrus. It's meant to look really, really pretty. But then you've also got strips of things and I think this is most common with something like cucumber. It looks really, really nice and fancy if you take that same Y peeler you got to do your citrus peels and you make little strips and you can throw them inside of a tall skinny glass and kind of swirl them around. It looks fantastic. You may get a little bit of the flavor from the cucumber, but I'd say generally it's going to be a visual thing. It's not so much functional.

Nick Boban (25:11):
No. Although if it's living within your drink, it will continue to impart some flavor. Yeah, definitely. But the cucumber one's really cool because you see, especially those strips and stuff like that, folded into all kinds of shapes. Cucumbers are a great one to make little animals and stuff. I was just on Pinterest and I saw like a cucumber Christmas tree folded onto a toothpick set onto the edge of the glass.

John Vieira (25:36):
And this goes back to the thing we were talking about too, where like for the sake of photography, you can do some amazing things. Like I've seen some Instagram and some Pinterest posts that are just like, wow, this is insane.

Nick Boban (25:48):
But to actually drink that drink, you have to take all that off of it to begin with. Before you even stick it in your mouth.

John Vieira (25:54):
Right. And just realistically the time it takes to do those garnishes and how good or how long those garnishes may stay good, I should say.

Nick Boban (26:03):
For a bar setting it's not realistic.

John Vieira (26:06):
Right. So even if... But going back to peels since this is so common. If you have some guests over and you are making something like old fashions, something you're using peels for. Don't make a bunch of peels that you may not use because the fruit will stay better and you'll be able to juice it later if it has more of the skin intact.

Nick Boban (26:27):
Well, and it'll hold more oil in it too. Cause if you peel a whole bunch of off and then don't use them and you don't use them at night, just throw them away. Cause they're not good tomorrow, anyways.

John Vieira (26:36):
If you know you're going to be using a ton of these things like, yeah, you can make some peels, like you can peel a couple fruit worth. If you don't know though, I would just peel it to order because you're going to get much jucier, nicer fruit garnish from this. So the last little category that I put in here was chunks. This is not super common to have in your drink. However, there's drinks with stuff muddled in it. So especially like cucumber, berries, things like that. You're going to have some chunks. It can look really pretty. It can definitely add to the flavor. They're functional in the sense that they are hopefully adding to the flavor and that as you drink that drink down, you could eat the chunks as well. Definitely don't stick your hands in there trying to get them. And on that note, let's talk about cherries, specifically luxardo cherries. We put those in our whiskey sours. The cherries are fantastic. It doesn't work very well, with the ice cubes and everything that's in there, is after you finish this drink to try to dig your whole hand in there to get the cherry. Something like a skewer or like a straw would be a really great way to do that. So especially if you're on a date. Take note guys...

Nick Boban (27:52):
My favorite is when they take the drink and it's just like, they're throwing the ice against their face, trying to shuffle it around to get the cherry out.

John Vieira (28:02):
I mean, we've all been there. I get it. If you're just with a bunch of friends and nobody cares, like whatever, but man, if you're trying to make an impression, just be careful. Okay. And then lastly, just really quick, on this whole little list that we talked about - peels, wheels, wedges, chunk, strips. These are some of the most common fruit that you will see. Not limited to this list. This is just what is most common. Options for you if you're planning something at home or even working on creating your own drink? Things like oranges, lemons, limes, obviously. But you also have grapefruit. Grapefruit is really cool. It's really tasty.

Nick Boban (28:42):
Especially the rind and the oil.

John Vieira (28:43):
Exactly. And so it adds a different element. So if you're playing around, you're like, "man, I really like old fashions, but it'd be cool to do one with like rum and a grapefruit peel." Obviously. Do it. But we've also got things like pineapple, cucumber, which is great for the warm weather that we're kind of dealing with right now. And then there's pretty much no end past there to exotic fruit options. Right? So you got dragon fruit, papayas, mangoes, things like that.

Nick Boban (29:13):
Oh yeah. And if anybody hasn't actually had a passion fruit. Go buy one and try it. Cause it's not what you think.

John Vieira (29:18):
It's really not. And neither is dragon fruit.

Nick Boban (29:19):
So sour and bitter and nasty.

John Vieira (29:21):
Yeah. Neither is dragon fruit. It's really weird. Dragon fruit almost doesn't taste like anything.

Nick Boban (29:25):
Yeah. That's the white one with the like black, stark black seeds through it? It looks like poppy seeds.

John Vieira (29:29):
It looks like a zombie Kiwi.

Nick Boban (29:31):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, it literally tastes like nothing.

John Vieira (29:34):
And it tastes like nothing. It does look cool though. It does look cool and it might be awesome for a photo shoot. So if you're one of these people that's like let's document everything we're doing. Let's take really, really bad-ass pictures of everything for later use. Dragon fruit is awesome. It looks super cool. But man, I think that pretty much touches on...

Nick Boban (29:56):
What garnishes are. The podcast is a hard one to try and do a tutorial on how to make garnishes.

John Vieira (30:03):
Let's do like a video component for it. A little video tutorial kind of thing. We'll throw it up on the website. Housemadesyrup.com. That's kind of your landing page for everything.

Nick Boban (30:15):
We did a... It's called citrus manipulation. It's live on YouTube right now. Yeah. That touches on a lot of it.

John Vieira (30:20):
That talks about your wheels, your wedges, peels, things like that.

Nick Boban (30:25):
It's literally taking lemon, lime and orange and getting the maximum yield out of it. So peeling them all and then cutting them into wheels and wedges and then juicing the remainders to make drinks.

John Vieira (30:38):
So yeah, the possibilities are endless. It's kind of just whatever you guys want to come up with. So, man, I don't know what we're going to be talking about next time, but...

Nick Boban (30:49):
I did want to give a shout out to another listener that gave us some really cool feedback. Joey Harris. He is @gunrunner40 on Instagram. Thanks Joey for your feedback. We super appreciate you.

John Vieira (31:09):
Yeah, absolutely. This show is in the very infantile stages of its existence here and so any feedback that you guys have is greatly appreciated? I feel like we're getting a little bit better with each episode. A little bit more used to it and just the platform and the limitations. But if you guys have suggestions or comments or just stuff that you want to see, let us know, cause it's going to make our lives a lot easier. When we sit down and we kind of storyboard some of this stuff, like what should we talk about? What do people want to know? It'd be a lot easier if you just told us.

Nick Boban (31:48):
Greatly appreciated. Reach out. housemadesyrup.com. You can email us from there. Also, Facebook. I think we are housemadeofficial or housemadesyrupofficial or something like that. Facebook locked me out of our first page so there's two that are floating around. Also on Instagram @housemadesyrup and on Pinterest and YouTube.

John Vieira (32:12):
We have it all. The easiest way for you guys is just go to the website. It's completely mobile friendly and you can literally click the links and it'll just take you right there. Like, subscribe, leave us comments. It all just really helps us grow and put more episodes out and helps the show a lot. So if you guys like this kind of content and you like tuning in and just listening to us blab about random stuff, um, please do those things. Try to get people that you know, that would be into this kind of content too, to tune in as well.

Nick Boban (32:44):
Yeah. Hey, thanks for listening guys. Catch us next week when we go over something else we haven't thought about yet.

John Vieira (32:51):
We should probably do like another tasting or something, but we'll figure that out later.

Nick Boban (32:56):
All right. Cheers.

Speaker 1 (33:05):
[inaudible].