The Buzz Ball Series: Lifting a Ready-to-Drink Cocktail

The second series we are filming this autumn is for Buzz Ball, and it is a different job entirely. Rusty Barrel is a bottle you build a drink around. Buzz Ball is already a drink. It arrives mixed, chilled and ready, and the question the brand asked us was simple: how do you make a ready-to-drink cocktail feel like one somebody made for you?

It is a good question, and one the industry has mostly dodged. Ready-to-drink is the fastest growing corner of the bar, and most of the advice around it stops at serve cold. We thought there was more to say.

Nothing in the series can take more than a minute or need anything you would not find in a normal kitchen. No shaker, no jigger, no syrups you have to make the night before. If a serve needed a bar to pull off, it went back on the list. The whole point of the product is that it is easy, and the serves have to respect that.

Within those rules there is a lot of room. The right glass changes a drink more than most people expect, and the same liquid poured over fresh ice in a proper tall glass is a different experience from drinking it out of the container. A garnish that takes five seconds, a rim of salt or sugar, a splash of something cold on top, a frozen fruit cube instead of ice: each one is small and together they are the difference between a can and a cocktail.

Eight short films, each built on one Buzz Ball flavour. A spritz-style serve topped with soda and a wheel of dried orange. A frozen version poured straight from the freezer into a coupe, which we expected to be a gimmick and turned out to be the crew's favourite. A hot serve for winter, which took the most testing. A pitcher serve for six that takes two minutes and looks like it took twenty. And a couple we are keeping back until the films are out.

We tasted every flavour on its own first and wrote down what each one needed: more acidity here, more texture there, a little bitterness to cut the sweetness in one of them. The serves are built to add exactly that and nothing else.

Filming a ready-to-drink serve has its own problems. There is no pour to watch, so the interest has to come from the glass, the ice and the hands. We shot most of it close and slow, and spent a surprising amount of time on condensation. A cold glass that looks cold is half the sell.

The series is in production and the first films are due out this winter on Buzz Ball's own channels. We will put them here when they are live, with the serves written out so you can try them at home.

If you make a drink that comes ready in the can or the bottle and want it to look and taste like more than that, we would like to hear from you.