Cocktail smoker wood chips guide

The single most useful thing on this page is the second row. Cherry is the wood people most often discover they prefer, and it is in almost every kit and almost never used.

• Bourbon old fashioned. Oak for the classic, cherry if there is an orange twist. Both work; cherry is the more interesting.
• Rye old fashioned. Maple or oak. Rye's spice takes a sweeter smoke well.
• Manhattan. Cherry, lightly. The vermouth's botanicals can carry it if you keep the smoke thin.
• Boulevardier. Oak or pecan. Bitter and spirit-forward, so it stands up to something assertive.
• Aged rum drinks. Pecan. The nutty character suits the sugar-cane sweetness.
• Anything with peated whisky. Hickory, if anything at all - the drink is already smoky and a light wood is lost.

The general principle: match intensity, do not stack it. A delicate drink with an aggressive wood tastes of wood. A robust drink with a light wood tastes of nothing new.

A fine chip is what you want for cocktails. It catches quickly from a torch, produces smoke almost immediately, and burns out before it has a chance to turn to char. Coarse chips and chunks are made for a barbecue, where they sit in sustained heat for an hour.

Keep the tins sealed. Wood chips take on ambient moisture and stale smells, and a damp chip smolders unevenly and takes far longer to catch. If yours have been open in a kitchen for months, replace them before you blame the device.

A pinch per drink is the quantity. A small tin lasts a very long time at that rate, which is one reason a variety pack is such good value relative to everything else in this hobby.

• Never burn softwoods. Pine, fir, spruce and cedar contain resins that produce acrid smoke and are not intended for food use.
• Never burn treated or painted wood. Obvious, and worth stating because people improvise.
• Do not use barbecue chunks. Too coarse for a torch; they char at the surface and never smolder properly.
• Do not soak the chips. That is a barbecue technique for slowing combustion over an hour. In a cocktail smoker it just stops them catching.

And the honest limit: if your smoked drinks taste harsh, changing wood will not fix it. That is over-smoking or char, and the fix is technique - fewer chips, a smaller flame, less time. How to use a cocktail smoker covers it.

If your drinks taste of the last wood you used regardless of what you load, that is resin in the barrel or the lid, and that one genuinely is a gear problem - see best cocktail smokers.