Best mixing glasses

A stirred drink is chilled and diluted by ice rotating smoothly through liquid. Nothing is aerated, nothing is emulsified, and the goal is a cold, dense, clear drink with a specific amount of water in it.

The vessel matters for three reasons. Mass: a heavy glass absorbs very little heat from your hand and does not travel across the counter while you work. Shape: straight walls let the ice rotate as a column rather than tumbling. And volume: the ice needs room to turn, which is why a glass that is exactly the size of the drink produces a badly chilled one.

A thin-walled pint glass fails all three. It is light, it warms in your hand, and its taper makes the ice tumble rather than rotate. It also has a rolled rim that dribbles when you pour. It works, in the sense that a drink comes out - it is simply worse at every part of the job.

These are selections based on published specification, construction and reported behavior, not on test results - we have not stirred in all of them. We weighted:

• Mass and base weight. The single biggest determinant of whether stirring feels controlled or fidgety.
• Capacity against realistic use. 500ml for one or two, 675ml and up for a round. Bigger is not better if you always stir one.
• Seam. A molded seam is a ridge the ice catches on, which is what makes a stir rattle. Seamless glass is quieter and costs more.
• Spout. Whether the pour leaves the glass cleanly or runs down the outside.
• Grip. Cut patterns like Yarai are functional as well as decorative - a wet smooth beaker is genuinely slippery.

Buy for the number of drinks you usually make, not the maximum you have ever made. An oversized glass stirred with one drink in it gives the ice too much room, chills unevenly and looks faintly ridiculous.

The corollary is that a bigger glass consumes more ice per session, because the charge has to fill the volume regardless of how much liquid is in it. If you are making clear ice in a mold at four pieces a day, that is a constraint worth thinking about - see best clear ice molds.

A molded mixing glass is pressed in two halves, leaving a faint vertical seam on the interior. It is barely visible and it is not a defect. What it does is give the rotating ice something to catch on once per revolution, which is most of the rattle you hear in a cheap stir.

A hand-blown seamless glass has no such ridge. The ice runs continuously around the wall and the stir goes quiet, which is both more pleasant and a genuine indicator that the rotation is smooth - the noise was the ice being interrupted.

Is it worth the step up? If you stir often and enjoy the process, yes, and it is one of the few upgrades in this hobby you can hear. If you stir twice a month, the molded glass does the same job with a slightly noisier soundtrack.

1. Chill the glass first. Unlike a shaker, a mixing glass has real thermal mass - a room-temperature one spends the first twenty seconds of your stir cooling itself. Fill it with ice and water while you gather ingredients, then dump it.
2. Use large, clear ice. Small cloudy cubes have more surface area and a lot of trapped air, so they over-dilute and cloud the drink. This is the one place your good ice genuinely earns its keep.
3. Fill generously. Two-thirds to three-quarters. Under-icing a stirred drink dilutes it faster, which is the same counterintuitive rule as everywhere else with ice.
4. Let the spoon do the work. The spoon should travel around the wall of the glass, not churn the middle. How to stir a cocktail covers the motion.
5. Strain with a julep. It sits inside the glass and the pour is controlled by your wrist, which is faster and far less awkward than balancing a Hawthorne on the rim.

And if you are wondering whether a given drink should be stirred at all, the rule is simple and mixing glass vs shaker explains why: all spirits, stir. Anything with citrus, dairy or egg, shake.