If you've ever ordered a Sazerac, you might've noticed your bartender pour a quarter shot of absinthe into the glass, swish it around, and then dump the liquid into the sink. This isn't some ceremonious act of wastefulness—it's a bartending technique called "rinsing" that incorporates the flavor of a strong alcohol into a drink without having it take up any space in the glass.
While the rinse is most ubiquitous with the Sazerac, according to Esquire's David Wondrich, other applications include rinsing malted Scotch into a Manhattan, mezcal into a margarita, and Campari into a cosmo. Of course, there's still tons of rinse-based exploration to be done, and we encourage you to try anything that your bartending brain believes in.
