{"id":100186,"date":"2018-12-11T12:04:33","date_gmt":"2018-12-11T18:04:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artofmanliness.com\/?p=100186"},"modified":"2021-06-04T17:29:43","modified_gmt":"2021-06-04T22:29:43","slug":"diy-travel-cocktail-kit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/leisure\/food-drink\/diy-travel-cocktail-kit\/","title":{"rendered":"Fly the Merrier Skies: How to Make a DIY All-in-One Travel Cocktail Kit"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Travel<\/a><\/p>\n

As the holiday season quickly approaches, over 50 million Americans will take to the skies to spend Christmas and\/or New Year\u2019s with friends and family. Of course, traveling by air these days tends to be a less-than-enjoyable experience. So, understandably, many of those 50 million people try to make the experience merrier with in-flight drinks! While most airlines don\u2019t mix up cocktails (unless you\u2019re in first class or on a luxury carrier), beer, wine, and spirits of all kinds are often readily available. <\/span><\/p>\n

With that fact in mind, sets of purchasable, pre-made travel cocktail kits<\/a> emerged several years ago that are pretty clever: an Altoids-like tin contains the supplies needed to make a particular cocktail; just mix these contents with a tiny bottle of booze you buy from the flight attendant, and you’ve successfully upgraded your in-flight drink. For example, a kit might include bitters, sugar, and citrus, to which you add some whiskey, and you’ve got yourself an Old Fashioned! <\/span><\/p>\n

The problem with these kits is that they’re <\/span>really<\/span><\/i> expensive, even before you add in the spirit that you’ll need to purchase in-flight (you aren\u2019t legally allowed to provide your own alcohol on an airplane). At $20+ for a kit that makes two drinks, by the time you buy the mini bottles of booze (about $6 each), you\u2019re looking at $16 or so per cocktail. That’s around twice the average price of a drink you’d buy at a bar, and you had to mix it yourself and drink it from a little plastic cup. <\/span><\/p>\n

Another con of these gifts is that they only provide ingredients for one type of cocktail. How do you know what you\u2019re going to want while traveling, before you\u2019re actually traveling? <\/span><\/p>\n

As these kits are largely given as gifts, we wanted to see if we could make them both less pricey and<\/em> more functional — something you can give to many people in your life without breaking the bank, and that will be appreciated by recipients as more than a novelty. <\/p>\n

How to Make an All-In-One DIY Travel Cocktail Kit<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"Materials<\/p>\n

Some of the contents that come in the pre-made kits, like linen coasters and fancy mini muddlers, hardly seem worth it. In my humble opinion, adding a linen coaster to a crappy little fold-down tray and stirring your drink with a little metal spoon is not going to make you feel like you\u2019re living in luxury. Those extra flourishes are mostly there simply to up the “cutesy” factor of the gift.<\/span><\/p>\n

We’re going to pare down the kit to the practical essentials, and by DIY-ing them, lower the cost to just $4 each — 1\/5 the price of the retail variety!<\/p>\n

At the same time, we’re going to up the functionality level of our DIY kits. <\/span><\/p>\n

Why have a kit that’s only equipped to create a single cocktail, when you can actually make a pretty robust all-in-one kit capable of creating a whole variety of them? Again, dedicating a kit to a lone cocktail is about upping the cutesy factor — “I know you like gin and tonics, so here’s a kit that makes a gin and tonic!” But people rarely only like one single kind of cocktail, and an all-in-one kit furnishes its own fun factor, allowing your loved one to decide on the, ahem, fly, which cocktail they happen to be in the mood for that day.<\/span><\/p>\n

Below I present how to make this super easy, inexpensive, one-of-a-kind, all-in-one DIY travel cocktail kit. You can either enjoy it yourself, or make a handful (the ingredients are actually hard to buy for making just a single kit) and gift them to friends and family members.<\/span><\/p>\n

What You’ll Need<\/h3>\n

The key to really making this work is to utilize the magic technology of the consumer food industry: packets. You can find almost anything your heart desires in a packet these days. It\u2019s pretty incredible, really, once you start digging around on Amazon. <\/span><\/p>\n

And what really makes a cocktail, in many cases, is the citrus \u2014 lime, lemon, orange, etc. Some airlines offer fresh citrus; most don’t. So while you could theoretically slice and bag a lemon or lime on travel day, it’s not real convenient. With citrus packets that replicate one wedge per packet, you have a world of cocktails available to you. I did some testing at home to ensure quality (tough gig, I know!), and while the packets aren’t perfect replications, they certainly get the job done and make for a tastier drink than you would otherwise get on an airplane.  <\/span><\/p>\n

The materials listed below for an all-in-one kit will make a pretty wide variety of the most popular cocktails (you’ll find specific suggestions for drinks to make with them in the next section):<\/span><\/p>\n

The Tools<\/b><\/p>\n