The Strainer

As for strainers, the one stop shop is the Hawthorne strainer, or classic coil strainer. The coil is fine enough to keep large ice chunks and the majority of fruit pulp out of your drink and the spring is adjustable to fit most vessels from pint glasses, cocktail tins, and beakers. Whatever you’re using to make your home cocktails, this strainer will be fine.

If you want to get fancy, or you’re very particular about your cocktails (“Hi, that’s me”) you can use a tea strainer, aka fine mesh strainer, to filter out any small ice fragments that may have broken off but not yet melted. When your Vesper Martini looks like global warming in the Arctic with a sea of tiny icebergs, you’ll know that you need a fine mesh strainer.

Hawthorne. Julep. Fine Mesh/Tea.

Finally there’s the classic julep strainer. More commonly used for straining stirred drinks, this strainer was originally used to hold back mint and crushed ice when enjoying a mint julep. Now-a-days, most people use straws, but since straws are the devil's work and end up in the floating plastic islands at sea, I’m hoping that this strainer will become more popular for enjoying crushed ice cocktails. Fin, Noggin’, Duuuude.