Upgrade Your Cocktails By Firing Up The Grill

Say you're hosting a grill-out and preparing a medley of ingredients on the fire, and you're wondering about components that can be creatively shaken or stirred into the drinks you serve alongside. The flame is a wonderful opportunity to enhance your drinks, adding new complexity into your glass. The concept may feel like a bizarre contrast to the typically chilled nature of cocktails, but the grill works wonders with many classic drink ingredients.

Fruit is the most logical candidate — its sugars will caramelize, thereby imparting more sweetness, a palatable bitterness, and pleasant notes of smoke and fire. Plus, the heat brings out the juice in fruit, making it easier to squeeze out a little extra into your shaker, so throw cocktail classics like lemon, lime, and grapefruits onto the flame. Iconic cocktails like sours, daiquiris, gin and tonics, margaritas, and tiki-influenced drinks such as a hurricane will all shine with such a makeover.

However, don't sleep on grilling unexpected foods, too: Vegetables, herbs, and even seafood can all cooked up for a creative cocktail. Whether these ingredients function as an improved garnish or redefine the flavor foundation in the form of a syrup, there are many ways to imbue a whole new grilled dimension to your favorite stiff drink.

To impart the most intense grilled flavor into your drink, turn to sugar-laden, sturdy fruit. Pineapple is an excellent candidate — with a nice sear, it'll bridge the gap between sweet and savory notes. The fruit mingles perfectly with the earthy flavors of mezcal and tequila in a punch or riff on a margarita, and can hold up to spicier components like pepper-based poblano liqueur or zesty basil. Naturally, pineapple's delicious caramelized flavor can lean into something more tropical, adding a caramel-like richness to a rum-based mojito or mai tai. Don't neglect to shake up a reimagined piña colada, too, which can even inspire a tasty grilled pineapple upgrade for dessert.

While not all stone fruits will stay sturdy on the grill, grilled apricots and peaches are another fantastic opportunity to reinvent cocktails. The floral and sour notes plus the slightly meaty texture of apricots shines post-grill, and does well alongside bold spirits like rye whiskey, bourbon, or brandy. Muddle in a few pieces to enhance a fizz, sour, or craft an apricot-tinged old-fashioned. 

Similarly, peach season coincides with grilling weather, so don't neglect using this fruit in cocktail-making, too. Prepared over medium-hot coals or even smoked, fire-tinged peaches amplify everything from a pitcher of sangria to a bourbon smash with smokey summer flavors. Regardless of the fruit you use, you might want to coat it with a neutral oil to prevent sticking, and perhaps a sugar coating for added caramelization.

More savory grilled cocktail components can accentuate your drinks with a nice charred note. Start with a simple garnish: Sear olives for a smokey take on a martini, or throw on some rosemary twigs to upgrade a gin or bourbon cocktail. The grill's also an opportunity to make the best Bloody Mary you've ever tasted: Cook some shrimp, peppers, avocados, or even a slice of bacon and pile them on top. Bacon can also top off an old-fashioned or a savory take on a margarita, melding in that fat and smoke with the booze.

Concocting a syrup is another way of capturing the fire's essence. A grilled ingredient soaked in sugar will not only be more tempered in flavor, but you can use small amounts of the syrup at a time, letting more delicate cocktails ingredients shine. Nearly any fruit that's fit for grilling can be prepared in this manner: Think figs, melon, strawberries, watermelon, and more. Simply steep the grilled result in simple syrup and use both in your cocktails.

Don't sleep on crafting grilled garnishes or syrups with more unorthodox ingredients, like spicy grilled peppers, rosemary, cinnamon, or nutmeg. To avoid burning more delicate ingredients like herbs, you can always fire up the smoker — the spiced, smokey bold notes will pair well with the rum in tiki drinks. There's plenty of room for experimentation, so start by shaking up a single round and tweak your grilled drinks from there.