The Case for Adding Salt to Your Cocktails

Recall the first time you tasted a perfectly ripe tomato sprinkled with salt or ate a French fry that wasn’t properly seasoned, and it’s immediately clear how salt transforms our food. Just a pinch or two can make a dish go from pretty good to something truly great. 

While that knowledge has been fully adopted in the kitchen, it hasn’t been totally embraced behind the bar until recently. While you may not have considered seasoning a cocktail before taking a sip, the best bartenders know that just as salt can be used to take a restaurant dish up a notch, it can also level up a drink. 

Bartenders across the globe are employing salt in everything from bitter Negronis to tart Daiquiris and Margaritas. It can be dropped into a glass or stuck along the rim, and whether it’s listed on the menu or more covert, salt is the secret ingredient making our drinks taste extra delicious.

How to incorporate salt into cocktails

“Salt makes everything taste like its best self,” says Mariena Mercer Boarini, master mixologist at Wynn North America. “Putting a little bit of salt in a beverage is like fine-tuning the microscope knob, and suddenly everything becomes bright and alive.”

Adding it to the rim of a cocktail was once the primary way salt showed up in drinks, and it remains a proven method to add a concentrated burst of salinity to a drink. Boarini oversees the cocktail menu at more than 40 Wynn venues in Las Vegas and says her team makes flavored salt combinations like the Wynn Signature Salt that adds cilantro, basil, chile, and lemon. Other seasonings are tailored to a particular cocktail, like truffle salt that’s applied to an ultra Dirty Martini at the Italian steakhouse Sartiano’s.

A salty rim doesn’t belong on every cocktail, so bartenders opt for a more subtle way to incorporate salt: saline solution — a simple mixture of salt dissolved in water, typically prepared at a ratio of 1 part salt to 4 parts water. Veteran bartender Ivy Mix says she always has a 20% saline solution in a dasher bottle at her side when developing cocktails for her Brooklyn bar, Whoopsie Daisy. “It’s just a flavor enhancer,” she says. “So I try to put salt in literally everything.”

Saline solution is the best way to introduce salinity because other methods don’t offer the same precision, according to Mix. If you add a pinch of salt to a drink, it’ll likely fall to the bottom of the glass, whereas saline can seamlessly integrate into a drink to punch up the flavor.

What does salt do to cocktails?

For sour drinks like citrus-based Daiquiris and cocktails with a bit of sweetness, salt sharpens the flavors and can help bring out ingredients used in lesser quantities that may otherwise be overlooked. It also helps to create complexity, resulting in more depth and a smooth mouthfeel. Salt also masks more bitter flavors, so it can be used to balance out a Negroni that turns out a bit too intense. “If I can be perfectly honest, I think there are very few drinks that don't do better with salt,” says Mix.

As more bartenders add salt to their cocktails, spirits brands are building salinity right into their bottles. Fishers Gin uses botanicals from the eastern coast of London, which add a touch of sea salt. Other products, like Bold Coast Spirits from Maine, infuse the spirit with a salty ingredient, like the brand’s Marine 01, an oyster shell–infused vodka. 

Brian Catapang, beverage director and co-owner of Magnus on Water in Biddeford, Maine, likes Marine 01 because it comes “properly seasoned” straight from the bottle. “I do not think of it as adding overt savory notes so much as contributing texture and minerality,” he says. “In a great Martini, texture is everything. The difference between something exceptional and something forgettable often comes down to mouthfeel.”

Using salt in drinks at home

Bartenders say that many people are wary of using salt in cocktails at home because they don’t want a cocktail that’s too savory. “Too often, salt is misunderstood as something that simply makes a drink taste salty,” says Catapang. “In reality, it functions more like a quiet, transformative force behind the bar.” 

The next time you shake up a Piña Colada or stir a Martini that doesn’t quite pop, try adding a bit of saline solution. It can be made at home by blending one part salt and four parts hot water. After it cools, start small with a dash or two, tasting along the way. Sometimes a bit of salt is all you need to make a drink that tastes cocktail bar-worthy.