Raise a glass with Ellen Visser, head bartender at Paradise

Try playing around with unusual flavours to add a little chef-like flair to your cocktails, says Ellen Visser, head bartender at Paradise, London

A great cocktail should be balanced, with every ingredient having a purpose, with no singular ingredient overpowering the others.

If you’ve ever tried authentic Sri Lankan food, you’ll know that the ingredients are so vibrant and concentrated in their flavour that it’s an explosion for the tastebuds. This can be both an advantage and a hindrance when trying to incorporate these flavours into cocktails.

In my opinion creating drinks is sometimes more about being a chef than it is about being a bartender. You need to understand flavours and how they work together before you can start development, so our bar team work closely with the chefs at Paradise and share knowledge of both cooking techniques and ingredients, something I think is important when creating drinks.

If you want to add some Sri Lankan flair into your drink, I recommend trying these ingredients and having a play around with them next time you’re feeling adventurous.

I’ve categorised them into flavour profiles:

For sourness Try tamarind, goraka, coconut vinegar or dried hibiscus.

For sweetness Try jaggery, kithul or coconut sugar.

For spiced flavours Use coriander seed, cardamom, cinnamon, ginger or fenugreek.

For herbaceous flavours Try pandan, curry leaf, lime leaf, lemongrass or moringa.

For freshness Try coconut, rambutan, mango, plantain or soursop.

And if you haven’t come across the Sri Lankan spirit Arrack (not to be confused with Arak), it’s worth giving a try as a base spirit in an Old Fashioned, Negroni, Sour, or even as a split base in a Margarita.

Arrack is made from the sap of the coconut flower that has been fermented and then distilled, producing a beautiful white spirit that tastes like a white rum-whisky hybrid. The method of making Arrack requires hours of hard work from ‘toddy tappers’, whose job it is to climb up each individual coconut tree to recover the sap from the coconut flowers, then tightrope across to the next tree to get the sap there.