Best cocktail picks and skewers

How we judged these

• Is the length published at all?

  This is the gate. A pick that does not span the glass sinks into the drink, and 'long enough to fit most cocktail glasses' is not a measurement.

• Published steel grade

  18-8 or 304 is a specification. 'Stainless steel' on its own is a description of the color.

• Shaft thickness, where published

  Two millimeters goes through a firm olive without flexing. Thin picks bend, and a bent pick is a lost pick.

• Care instructions

  Plain stainless is usually dishwasher safe; plated finishes are hand wash. Half of this category publishes neither.

• How many in the set

  Twelve, ideally. Picks are lost at roughly the rate of teaspoons, and per-pick price is the honest way to compare sets.

The five, compared

The lengths cluster between four and four and a half inches, which tells you what this category is designed for: the short glass. None of these is a skewer for a tall drink, and no amount of decorative top changes that.

The last column is the cautionary tale. The gold sword picks are published at 4.5 inches in the retail title, 4 5/8 inches in the bullets underneath it, and 4 3/8 inches by Mercer itself — three figures for one object. None of them is far enough out to ruin a drink, and all three being published at once is the reason we check makers rather than listings.

Why length decides everything

A pick has one job: hold a garnish where you can reach it. If the pick is shorter than the drink is deep, the garnish ends up submerged and you are fishing in a full glass with your fingers.

Four inches is comfortable across the mouth of a coupe or resting in a rocks glass. It is also roughly the depth of a double old fashioned glass, so an olive on a four-inch pick sits at the surface rather than on the bottom. In a 16 oz highball or a collins glass — both a good deal taller than they are wide — the same pick vanishes.

So match the pick to the glass you actually use. Martini and coupe drinkers are well served by everything on this page; highball drinkers should be looking for something longer, and should treat a four-inch pick as a cheese-board accessory rather than a bar tool.

Plated picks and the hand-wash rule

Gold and copper picks are plating over steel, exactly like the rest of the gold bar tools, and the rule that applies there applies here: plated finishes are hand wash, and Mercer says so explicitly while warning against bleach-based detergents.

That matters more on picks than on a shaker, because picks are small, numerous and exactly the sort of thing that gets swept into a dishwasher basket at the end of an evening. If the household will not hand wash twelve small objects, buy the plain stainless sets and put the money into the glassware instead.

Which set to buy

Buy the A Bar Above set if you want the one that is properly documented: 304 stainless, four inches, a 2 mm shaft that will not bend through an olive, and the only published dishwasher-safe claim here.

Buy the Barfly fleur-de-lis set for the best price per pick from a brand that supplies working bars, with the length published on Mercer’s own page rather than guessed at.

Buy the Viski ring picks if you fish garnishes out of full glasses often. A ring gives a wet finger something to hook, which sounds trivial until you have tried to pinch a slippery steel spear.

Buy the Cocktail Kingdom pack for plain, cheap and twelve. Accept that the steel grade is not published and that the maker’s own store shows it sold out, which makes the retail listing the only route to it.

Buy the gold swords only if the bar is already gold and someone is going to enjoy them. Gifts for martini drinkers is the page for the rest of that present, since picks are the classic small addition to a glass set.

One last piece of advice that costs nothing: if you entertain at all, own two sets. Keep the plain stainless twelve-pack in the drawer for drinks and let the decorative set live with the cheese board, because the board is where picks go to disappear. Two twelve-packs together still cost less than a single bottle of decent gin, and it is the only way we know to still have picks in a year.

Pick length against the glasses you own

The specifications on this site make the length question concrete. Using published dimensions for glassware we already cover:

The pattern is about depth rather than height. A stemmed glass is tall but its bowl is shallow, so a four-inch pick lies across it perfectly. A straight-sided tumbler is deep all the way down, and that is where a short pick sinks — garnish, pick and all.

So the rule is simpler than the table: picks for stemmed and short glasses, skewers for tall ones. If most of your drinking is highballs, these sets are for the olives on the cheese board rather than for the drink.

What else goes on a pick

Olives and cocktail onions are the obvious ones — a Gibson is a martini with an onion on a pick, and nothing else changes. Beyond that:

• Cherries. A Manhattan or an Old Fashioned with a good cherry is improved by getting it out of the drink cleanly, which is exactly what a pick does and a cocktail stick does badly.
• Citrus peel. A twist that will not sit on the rim can be folded onto a pick and laid across the glass, which also keeps the oils where you want them.
• Anything on a board. Cheese, charcuterie, cornichons. This is where a twelve-pack earns its keep and where the picks quietly go missing.

One technique note: if you are spearing three olives at once, shaft thickness matters more than length. A 2 mm shaft goes through a firm olive; a thin decorative pick bends, and a bent pick is on its way to the bin.