If you’ve been knocking around mixology blogs awhile, you’ve seen The Porthole infuser. The award-winning designer Martin Kastner created it for the bar chefs at The Aviary in Chicago. It’s just shy of over-engineered excess and regarded by professional and home mixologists as supercool must-have barware. We agree. Not just because of the array of things you can do with it–imagination is your only limit. But because it looks beautiful, sitting atop your home bar, on a kitchen counter, or at a table shared with friends.
What is the Porthole infuser?
The Porthole is simplicity in form and execution. You can use it to make any cold infusion. Naturally, your mind jumps to spirits, but we want to stress that you can use these for making anything. This gorgeous Porthole can create batch cocktails, infused olive oils, cold brew tea, and coffee. The design includes screens to filter out the solids. You can pour right from the infuser into a glass, mug, or onto a dish—no pouring from a jar, through a fine-mesh strainer, and then through a coffee filter.
The Porthole was featured in a Kickstarter campaign by Kastner in 2013, raising over $700k to bring the project to life.
How Do You Use The Porthole?
While getting the Porthole together takes a little practice, there’s genuinely no wrong way to fill it for infusions. Simply follow these steps:
- Fill the glass vessel with herbs, tea, fruit–both fresh and dried–and spices.
- Close the infuser and fill with spirits, a batched cocktail, olive oil, or cold water.
- Leave the infuser in a cool place for anywhere for a few hours, a day, or a week.
- Pour from The Porthole at the table. Kastner designed it as service wear, to be a part of both everyday table settings and fine dining like The Aviary.
What to Put in The Porthole Infuser
For a casual mixologist, spirits are the natural go-to for creating delicious cocktail ingredients. But infusing can become something of an addiction, so you might end up with a bunch of Portholes filled with all kinds of projects. Here are just a few ideas to get you started:
- Spirit infusions: use fruit, spices, vegetables, teas in every spirit you drink. Some of our favorites are–peach and mint in bourbon, strawberry and basil in gin, or jalapeno and mango in tequila.
- Cocktails: batch a cocktail before infusing to get an even smoother, more complex drink in your glass. Here are a few ideas to get you started–Negroni with whole coffee beans, Manhattan with vanilla beans, or Boulevardier with fresh currants and rooibos tea.
- Bitters: you can make house bitters using infusions. Use either vodka or high-proof grain alcohol that you’ll sweeten and dilute post-infusion. Try these to start–lemon and chamomile, juniper and raspberry, or vanilla and black pepper.
You don’t need, strictly speaking, a fancy piece of equipment to infuse spirits and cocktails or make bitters. But the Porthole adds an extra element to your home bar. It’s a great way to “level up” your home mixology. Challenge yourself to think about cocktails in terms of aesthetics and presentation, along with taste.
