The right barware can be just as important as your booze when making cocktails at home. Knowing your coupe from your martini glass, understanding the merits of a whiskey decanter (and using one anyway), and identifying what types of cocktail shakers you really need can all go a long way toward transforming your living room into the place to be. But, sometimes we plan, and the spirits gods laugh — and one must make do with more crude implements. Mason jars, for example, are an obvious and commonly suggested shaker swap. But, if you don’t have a proper cocktail shaker on hand, the odds you’ve got a bunch of Mason jars laying around are correspondingly low. So we tapped journalist and cocktail expert Caroline Pardilla for a few (actually infinite) solutions that she shared exclusively with Chowhound.
“You can basically use any sealable container to shake up cocktails. If it has a lid that can snap tightly in place with a good seal, you can use it as a shaker,” Pardilla said. She is also the author of “Margarita Time: 60+ Tequila & Mezcal Cocktails, Served Up, Over & Blended,” lending even more gravitas to this frankly forgiving tip. “Yes, a Mason jar is a popular swap,” she said. “But I’ve used someone’s protein shake bottle when I was at a cabin in the woods and wanted to shake up a margarita.”
The world is your shaker: Vessels for margs and more
“At Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant in San Francisco, Julio Bermejo, creator of the Tommy’s Margarita, has been using the blender pitcher for decades to shake up his famous cocktail,” Caroline Pardilla told Chowhound. This brilliant, liberating switcheroo cannot even be called a hack, but rather an exemplar of resourcefulness. Look around with this new view, and you’ll see saucepans, takeout containers, and even workout water bottles (if you like your drinks infused with a little irony) that can all be repurposed for some DIY mixology.
If you’ve got something you can fashion into a funnel, or just a super steady hand, you can even make a batch of margaritas in a nearly empty, standard sized bottle of tequila, which holds just over 25 ounces at capacity. As long as it still contains at least a couple of ounces of alcohol, you can add another ounce of lime juice and an ounce of orange liqueur for a self contained — though, maybe, visually concerning — drink. If you’ve got closer to eight ounces of tequila left over, you can actually scale up and make four drinks at once. That exceeds the number of cocktails that you can make in a typical shaker at once. All things considered, this homespun cocktail shaker situation turns out better than the last resort it seems to be.
