We’ve almost made it through all the key tools you need to make great cocktails. One of the final pieces you need for your home bar is a muddler. Muddlers often look like mini-baseball bats and can made out of wood, plastic, and even metal. They vary widely in shape, size, and weight. I once had a muddler that was so big and heavy I kept it more for personal defense than for making drinks. Muddlers are used to extract the essence or juice out of citrus, mint, basil, ginger, and sometimes fruit.

Of all the items in a home bar kit, the muddler is often the most misused tool. Because muddlers look like bats (or billy clubs), people often think that they are used to crush, pulverize, or otherwise obliterate things in a cocktail. In fact, using a muddler requires the same kind of finesse and grace that you bring to stirring a cocktail. Muddling isn’t about crushing things, it’s about extracting. The biggest example of how muddlers are often misused is the mojito. Muddling mint is all about getting the oils and aromatics from the mint into your drink without pulverizing the mint. Most people throw the mint in the bottom of the shaker and pound the living hell out of it with the muddler. This results in a cocktail with little green pieces of mint that clog your straw, stick in your teeth, and generally ruin your drink. A well-muddled and prepared mojito can be a thing of beauty, and a lot of that depends on muddling the mint correctly.

The correct way to use a muddler is to put whatever you’d like to muddle in your shaker and then very gently press the muddler against your ingredient, turning ever so slightly (if you are muddling citrus for a drink like a caipirinha, you may need to press harder). The key is to gently press and not crush.

For one reason or another, maybe because many are made of wood, muddlers often don’t get included in the washing up you need to do between drinks or after you’re done making cocktails.  It’s important to wipe your muddler after you use it, especially if it’s wood, as the wood can absorb oils from what you muddle and bring those oils to your next drink.