Creating your own cocktails

Pick the shape first: sour, Old Fashioned, Martini, highball. That decides your ratios before you have chosen a single ingredient, which is precisely the help you want.

Then make one substitution. Swap the spirit, or the sweetener, or the acid — one of them. A sour with an unusual sweetener is a recognisable drink; a sour with an unusual spirit, sweetener, acid and garnish is four experiments at once and you will not know which part failed.

Make the original first if you have not recently. You cannot judge a variation against a memory.

Every ingredient in a template has a job — the five variables from the balance guide. When you swap something in, ask what job it is doing and whether the replacement does it. Honey syrup and simple syrup both sweeten, but honey also adds body and a faint bitterness, so a straight volume swap will land differently.

Watch for hidden functions. Vermouth in a Martini is not only diluting the gin; it is adding sweetness, acidity and botanicals. Replace it with something that only dilutes and the drink loses more than a third of its ingredients list suggests.

Sweetened ingredients are the usual trap. Liqueurs, cordials and flavoured syrups all bring sugar you did not account for, so a drink that gains a liqueur usually needs to lose some sweetener.

Write down what you did, in millilitres, before you taste it. A drink you cannot reproduce is not a recipe, and you will not remember.

Taste before you strain, while you can still adjust. Once it is in the glass with a garnish on top, your options are worse.

Then make it again the next day. Almost everything tastes exciting the moment you invent it; the honest test is whether you want it again when the novelty has gone. Most ideas fail that test, and the ones that pass are worth the ones that don't.

Finally, name what it is. If you cannot say "it's a Daiquiri with X instead of Y", you probably have not made one thing — you have made several at once.