Smoke top vs smoking gun

This is the difference people cite most and it is worth being precise about. A torch applies flame a couple of inches above the glass for perhaps fifteen seconds. Some of that heat reaches the top of the drink.

In an old fashioned over a large ice cube, it is irrelevant - the ice has vastly more thermal mass than the small amount of heat involved and it re-equalizes within seconds. In a stirred drink served up, with no ice to buffer it, a warmed top layer is more noticeable.

So the honest version: if you smoke drinks over ice, the heat objection is largely theoretical. If you smoke drinks served up, the gun's cold smoke is a real advantage. That maps neatly onto which drinks people actually smoke, and most of them are over ice.

With a lid, your variables are how many chips you use and how long you leave it. Both are coarse, and the second one keeps running after you think you are done because smoke continues to be absorbed while the drink sits.

With a gun, you also control flow rate, which means you can introduce a small amount of smoke slowly and stop precisely. On the Pro's variable-speed setting that difference is substantial - a thin veil is achievable in a way it is not with a lid.

That matters because over-smoking is the standard error in this category and it is not recoverable. If you have tried a smoked cocktail somewhere and found it tasted like an ashtray, that was too much smoke rather than the wrong idea.

A lid smokes a glass. That is the whole scope, and within it the lid is faster and easier than the gun.

A gun smokes anything you can cover. A decanter of spirit, a sealed bag of ingredients, a bowl covered with film, cheese, butter, a plate of food under a cloche. That breadth is the reason a gun ends up in a drawer with the other useful kitchen tools rather than in a cupboard with the occasional-use objects.

There is one bar-specific use worth knowing: smoking a bottle or a batch. Smoke a decanter of whiskey once and every drink you pour from it for the next hour is lightly smoked, with no per-drink step. That is a genuinely useful party trick and only a gun can do it.

Start with the lid unless one of the gun's specific advantages is the reason you are here. It is cheaper, it is faster for the drink almost everyone wants to smoke, and its limitations only show up at the edges.

Buy the gun instead if you want to smoke things other than drinks, if you smoke drinks served up, or if you have already tried a lid and found the control too coarse. Breville Smoking Gun Pro review covers the commercial version, and best cocktail smokers covers the full field including boxes.