Before we get into the bitter, sweet and spirituous elements of The Bitter Southerner No. 5, we must discuss method for a moment, because with Miles Macquarrie, good method matters just as much as good ingredients.

“Technique's always been the biggest thing, I’ve learned, that changes how drinks work,” Macquarrie says. So I stopped in at Kimball House one afternoon to talk technique with Miles.

Because the No. 5 contains no fruit juices that need to be emulsified, it is stirred, not shaken. Stirring up a cocktail seems easy enough. Dump the ingredients and ice into a glass and stir until cold, then strain it into the glass you’ll drink it from.

In the world of Macquarrie, however, it’s not that simple.

“I was always asking the question why,” he told me. “Temperature and dilution, I think, are one of the big things that are hard to nail.” But during his years at Leon’s and through the opening of Kimball House, he studied temperature and dilution hard. “We started putting our mixing glasses in the freezer and cracking ice cubes for stirred drinks, and years down the road we started taking temperatures of drinks, asking like, how cold can you really get it?”

The answer, Macquarrie says, is 24 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s right, when the ideal cocktail hits your lips, it should be 8 degrees below the freezing point of water (an achievement made possible, of course, by the fact that the freezing point of pure ethanol alcohol is -114 degrees).

As for dilution, it’s easy enough to figure out that by stirring a drink, you not only chill it but also dilute it as the ice melts. But how much dilution is enough? Too little dilution can leave a cocktail with too much alcoholic bite, and too much dilution leaves the drink watery and uninteresting.

The answer, Macquarrie has determined after years of research, lies in the ice you use, how precisely you use that ice and how long you stir to reach the right temperature and dilution.

To illustrate, I asked Miles to explain precisely how he would make a Manhattan, one of the basic stirred drinks.

“I think the best way to make a Manhattan is keep your mixing glass in the freezer,” he said. “Say we start making a Manhattan. We'll do an ounce of vermouth in a completely frozen mixing glass. Then we'll add our bitters. Then we'll crack four one-inch cubes of ice. If you crack it, you have all of this surface area that's completely dry, you know, because the cubes are dense. Even if you have water dripping off of the outside, if you break it, that inside's never seen air. It's completely dry. Now you have all of this super cold surface area.

“So we'll crack four cubes and then add more (uncracked) cubed ice on top of that, and then add the 2 ounces of bourbon so it touches all the ice as you pour it in and starts the dilution process. Then we'll stir it for about 45 seconds to a minute. If I'm making drinks at home and I get the ice straight out of the freezer, I'll stir it for longer because it’s coming straight out of the freezer. It’s super cold so it's going to take forever for it to melt.”

Macquarrie’s theory is that for stirred drinks, getting the temperature down to between 24 and 28 degrees means your dilution is perfect. Now, that doesn’t mean that you’ll see bartenders at Kimball House stick a thermometer in every drink before it’s served.

“You can watch your wash line,” he says. “If you see the cubes sink down and your liquid come up when you're stirring a drink, that's basically your wash line. You know that you're getting dilution. When we're training new bartenders on stirred stuff, we keep one of those little thermometers and they'll stick it in and we always say 28 degrees Fahrenheit and you're good.” After that training, though, the bartenders work just by watching their wash lines rise.

After you try it a few times with a thermometer, you’ll be able to go without, too, just by watching what’s going on in your mixing glass.

“If it's not 28, you have to keep going,” he says. “It'll get down to 24 sometimes and then, it's awesome. It's super silky and really ice cold. Then if you serve it in a frozen glass, you've preserved the temperature.”

My question, of course, was: Is all this trouble worth it? So I went home and stuck a mixing glass and a cocktail glass in the freezer for a while and got out my trusty kitchen thermometer. Then I made a Manhattan with the same bourbon and the same vermouth I always use, but following the Miles Method to a T. I put vermouth and bitters into the frozen mixing glass. I cracked four ice cubes into the glass, and then topped that with more whole cubes. I then poured the bourbon slowly over the ice. I stirred for a full minute and strained the drink into my frozen cocktail glass.

I stuck the thermometer into the finished drink and watched it settle at precisely 24 degrees. So Macquarrie was right about the temperature, but how would the drink taste?

In a word, perfect. The silkiest, loveliest, coldest Manhattan I’d ever stirred up.

As you make your own Bitter Southerner No. 5 at home, follow the Miles Method. It turns mere greatness into perfection.

So herewith, the bitter, the sweet and the spirituous of The Bitter Southerner No. 5.