You know the classic James Bond line “Martini, shaken, not stirred” is there an actual difference in the taste of the drink from shaking it vs stirring it?
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When stirring (w/ ice) you are cooling the drink and adding water.
When shaking (w/ ice) you are
* Cooling the drink
* Adding water
* Aerating the drink
* Muddling fruit pulp + other solid ingredients
* Adding ice chips which will melt faster, incorporating more water as you drink (than if you stirred)
Rule of thumb without getting into the weeds: if you are making a liquor-focussed drink like a martini or Old fashioned, stir. If you are making something fruit-focussed like a Daiquiri or Whisky Sour, shake.
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At a higher level, there are multiple different types of shakes that mostly come down to how much you want to agitate the ingredients. “Rolling” is when you poor the drink back and forth between two glasses and is really gentle, this is good when you want to avoid ice chips. Some ingredients will also do poorly in an other wise shaken cocktail, such as mint leaf which becomes bitter or anything carbonated. In general when mixing cocktails you need to consider every ingredient, how they behave when shaken/stirred/rolled/muddled/blended/strained/floated. And don’t be afraid to “build” the drink one step at a time. Shaking some ingredients, muddling others, and then rolling them together is arguably as common a technique in bars as just stirring.
At an even higher level you can start considering the chemistry at play, as there are many active components. Acid, alcohol, salt, sugars, oxygen, water, and more are all very active and react with eachother. Some drinks are even built with the intent of the chemical reaction affecting the drink over the 10-15 minutes it takes to consume the drink.
That quote from James Bond is mocked endlessly in the mixology community because shaking a martini makes no fucking sense, and absolutely would not make you look higher class.
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