What to use instead of a cocktail shaker

Check first: does this drink even get shaken?

Before improvising anything, look at the ingredient list. The working convention behind most cocktail recipes is simple, and it removes half of these situations outright.

• Shake anything with citrus, juice, egg white, cream or dairy. Those ingredients need to be aerated and fully combined, and only a hard shake does that.
• Stir anything made only of spirits, vermouth, bitters and sugar — a Manhattan, a Martini, a Negroni, an Old Fashioned. Shaking those clouds and over-dilutes them.

If your drink is on the second list, put it in any glass with ice, stir with a long spoon for about twenty to thirty seconds, and pour it off the ice. No shaker, no stand-in, no problem. A mixing glass is the tool that job is built around, and it is a different purchase entirely.

The criteria for a stand-in

If the drink genuinely needs shaking, judge whatever you are about to use on the same three jobs a real shaker does. In order of how badly things go wrong when they are missing:

• It seals without your hand holding it

  The non-negotiable one. A hard shake breaks any seal that depends on grip, and the failure mode is a drink on the ceiling. A screw lid passes; two stacked glasses do not.

• It has room for ice to move

  A shaken drink occupies roughly 5-6 oz once ice is in, and the ice needs empty space around it to chill and dilute. A container filled to the top cannot shake anything.

• Metal or glass

  Steel conducts, so a tin gets cold fast and frosts over when the drink is ready. Glass insulates - it chills more slowly and never gives you that visual cue.

• You can strain out of it

  A real shaker has a strainer built in or sold alongside. A jar has none, which means ice shards and pulp come out with the drink unless you plan for it.

What works, and what does not

Here is the usual list of household stand-ins, judged against those criteria. These are the physical properties of each container, not results we measured.

The pattern is that the seal decides everything and the rest is compromise. A jar wins because a screw band holds itself shut, and that is the only property here that stops a hard shake from ending badly. The two-glasses trick is a bartending technique that only works with a steel tin over a glass, where the metal contracts as it chills and grips; two glasses have no such grip and nothing to hold them together but your hand.

Shaking in a jar, properly

If a jar is what you have, a few details make the difference between a good drink and a mess.

• Make one drink at a time. A 16 oz pint jar has room for one shaken drink. Two would fill it, and the ice would have nowhere to move.
• Fill it about halfway with ice, add the ingredients, and screw the band down fully before you shake — a band that is not fully tightened is where jars leak.
• Shake hard, and count. Without a steel tin you lose the frost that tells you the drink is cold, so time it instead of judging by feel.
• Hold something over the glass as you pour. A fine mesh strainer catches ice and pulp from any vessel. Without one, crack the lid slightly against the rim and let the liquid past — which stops ice, but nothing smaller.

That last point is the single biggest quality gap between a jar drink and a shaker drink. A jar has no strainer, and a drink poured straight out of one carries shards and pulp. The strainer types are explained on their own page, and the fine mesh cone is the one that works with anything, because it does not have to fit the container.

When to stop improvising

A jar is a perfectly good answer to one evening. It stops being a good answer the moment you reach for it a second time, because by then you are choosing a workaround instead of solving the problem.

The threshold is lower than most people think. A basic three-piece shaker — the kind with a strainer built into the lid — solves both of the jar’s problems at once: it seals, and it strains, and because it is steel it chills fast and frosts over when the drink is ready. The three shaker styles differ in how much they ask of you, and using one well takes about ten minutes to learn.

Which one to buy

Tonight, use a jar. If you do not have a wide-mouth pint in the cupboard, the Ball wide-mouth pint is the cheapest legitimate answer on this site — with the honest caveat that Ball sells it as twelve, so you are stocking a pantry to shake in one. Add the OXO fine mesh strainer if you want the drink to come out clean.

If you will do this again, buy the Barfly three-piece. Twenty-four ounces, two drinks at a time, and the strainer is in the lid, so it arrives complete. It fixes every shortfall the jar has in a single object.

If you already know you are going to keep making drinks, buy the Koriko weighted tins instead. They are what working bartenders use, and there is nothing in them to wear out — but they need a separate strainer, so they are the second shaker for most people rather than the first. The shaker sets page compares both properly.