rolling and tossing are both techniques employed by a bartender to mix, aerate, and/or chill drinks.
Rolling is very simple: one simply pours the liquid, ice and all, back and forth between two halves of a Boston shaker or other two-part shaker, held next to each other. This cools and mixes the liquid without aerating it and is traditionally used when pineapple or especially tomato juice is in the mix, because hard shaking breaks down the integrity of the juice, causing it to foam up so much that the texture loses its weight on the tongue. See Bloody Mary.
Tossing, or “throwing” a drink, as Jerry Thomas refers to it in his seminal book, How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon-Vivant’s Companion, requires some skill and practice. The technique requires a two-part cocktail shaker—a Boston shaker or the like. Both parts must be large enough to hold the ingredients to be mixed with plenty of room left over. The process begins once all the ingredients, plus ice, are assembled in one half of the shaker set and it is topped with a strainer. The two containers start out very close together, the container with the liquid on top and ready to pour. The bartender begins pouring the liquid from the top container into the empty one below while quickly pulling the top container up and away from the bottom one. This move gives the appearance of a ribbon of liquid connecting the two vessels. Some practitioners add an extra bit of flair by turning their bodies in an arc or even spinning totally around while pouring. Once the original container is almost empty, the bartender quickly brings the two containers together again, pouring the liquid back through the strainer into the original container. He or she will repeat the process four or five times for full effect.
Modern craft bartenders have resurrected and mastered this technique, once almost lost. While its origin is American, the last place it was being practiced was Barcelona, where Miguel Boadas had brought it from Cuba, where the bartenders had originally learned the “swinging movement that can be acquired only by long practice” (as one observer put it in 1899) it from Americans. See Boadas, Miguel; and Ribalaigua y Vert, Constante.
There is a traditional variant of the process where mugs are used instead of cocktail shakers. The technique is similar to rolling, but the liquid being tossed from one container to the other is hot and on fire. It gives “the appearance of a continued stream of liquid fire,” to quote Thomas, its evangelist. He unfortunately provides little guidance as to how to pull off this feat but makes one salient observation: “To become proficient in throwing the liquid from one mug to another, it will be necessary to practice for some time with cold water.”
If you want to make Thomas’s signature Blue Blazer cocktail, you’ll need to master the art of throwing. In the 1862 edition of his book, he includes an illustration depicting a bartender fixing the drink and demonstrating the death-defying act, which is probably the first time it was shown in print. See Blue Blazer.
Some nineteenth-century barflies wrote enthusiastic descriptions of American bartenders who could toss a flaming liquid in an arc over their heads. Frankly, that defies the rules of gravity, and the enthusiasm of the scribes who documented that move may have been related to the number of drinks they imbibed while enjoying the spectacle.
See also Thomas, Jeremiah P. “Jerry”, and Boston Shaker.
Dietsch, Michael. “10 Bartending Terms You Might Not Know.” Serious Eats, December 12, 2013. http://drinks.seriouseats.com/2013/12/bartending-terms-glossary-behind-the-stick-buyback-bartender-slang.html (accessed March 31, 2021).
Ward, Fannie Brigham. “Many Odd Things in Cuban Cities.” Washington Times, February 5, 1899, 3.
By: Dale DeGroff