You hear the word “weed” followed by the word “cocktails” and instantly your mind floods with childlike wonder. But this is no dream. Weed cocktails are real, tasty and deliver a heady, comfy high along with booze’s expected buzz.
Now if you were perhaps envisioning a highball with a nug floating cherry-like in a mix of Midori, gin, and tonic, adjust your expectations. The term “weed cocktail” applies to any mixed drink with a marijuana-infused alcohol as its base or, alternately, a few drops of pot tincture, weed syrup or cannabidiol oil. You won’t find leaves floating amid the rum and sour mash.
For those of you who want to step out for your libations, fully prepared weed cocktails are available in a small clutch of bars and restaurants in pot meccas such as California and Colorado. For home mixologists in legal states, pot tinctures are usually on the shelf at any decent licensed dispensary. Thankfully, even those in non-legal states can DIY the key ingredients.
We won’t get deep into the methods for making weed alcohol and weed tinctures, but they’re both pretty much the same and equally straightforward. In essence, you carefully chop and bake marijuana, boil it in your liquor of choice (rum and vodka are popular options), and strain out the plant matter. Some methods require nitrous-oxide powered whipped-cream whippers. Others double boilers. Most take an afternoon. Others require you steep your liquid for days.
We suggest you start here with this handy tutorial for making a tincture.
Afterwards, you’ll have small batch of dark liquid tincture you can add to any drink (and many foods!) a milliliter at a time or, with the larger infusion method, the base alcohol for a pot drink with strong herbal notes. Note that pot tinctures are perhaps even more effective dropped directly on the tongue in smaller doses, though that’s a bit less stylish than using them in cocktail form.
Less popular methods for creating cocktails include mixing cannabinol oil directly into the drink or using a weed syrup as you would a simple syrup. Weed syrups are, again, available at many licensed dispensaries and may indeed be easier to make than weed-infused alcohol or tinctures. Whichever of these many methods you use, whatever you do, we recommend you use average weed for your first time out as experimenting with the expensive stuff may not pay off.
The prevailing mixological wisdom with cocktails based on weed-infused alcohol or weed tinctures suggests you play into the herbal taste of the spirits used instead of fighting against it. There’s also something to be said for the flavors already present in the weed you’ve used to make your base. This daiquiri, for instance, uses the strawberry notes in Skywalker OG to create a fine fruit pallet. The second recipe over here pairs weed-infused vermouth with bourbon and bitters for something herbal and oaky. Leafly preferred to go with ginger cannabis syrup and honey when it made a bourbon-based tipple.
And how do weed cocktails make you feel? Well, that certainly will depend on how you ingest them. If you go ahead and down your pot alcohol as a muscle bro would Yeager Bombs, you’ll find yourself annoyingly drunk, then annoyingly and perhaps frighteningly too high in your mind and body 30 to 45 minutes later. It’s not recommended.
If you enjoy a weed cocktail like an adult, perhaps just one over the course of an hour, you’ll find yourself pleasantly buzzed by the alcohol and impressed with its floral and herbal tasting notes. About 30 to 45 minutes later, you’ll begin to feel a warm sensation around your temples, in your joints, and up your spine followed by a gentle high in your head and a wonderful tingling throughout your body—a buzz that follows another buzz. It is, by all reports, a supremely relaxing, heady experience, though one that comes with a couple of cautions.
As I said before, drinking too much too quickly is not advised, particularly since you won’t know how the weed portion of your drinking experience will treat you for at least 30 minutes. Also, weed tends to heighten some alcohol effects, particularly the losses of inhibition, balance, and coordination. All this is to say, sip wisely, slowly, stay away from the driver’s seat of your car, and make sure you enjoy both parts of your buzz in a safe space.