Jiggers
Buy a good jigger. Being able to accurately and precisely measure ingredients will make the biggest improvement to your mixed drinks. Even if you’re making built drinks or stirring/shaking drinks in a Mason jar, a jigger will improve your results more so than anything else you can buy! The more ingredients you have in a drink, the more you’ll need to measure, which leads to a high chance of you mismeasuring. Of course, if you want to stick to recipes with minimal ingredients, Tipply’s filters can help you with that.
likely it is thatTipply allows you to filter recipes by the number of ingredients called for, because sometimes you just want to make something easy. But if you’re in the mood for a complexly layered drink, like an 11 ingredient Captain’s Grog, you’ll not only want to use a jigger, you want one that you enjoy using!
Jiggers are pretty simple and come in six categories:
- Single Conical Jigger: A single conical measure. The angled cone, with a wide opening can be susceptible to spills.
- Double Conical Jigger: Two opposing conical measures, where the larger cone typically holds twice the volume of the smaller cone. The wide openings inherit the susceptibility to spillage. This is the most common style of jigger.
- Japanese Style Jigger: A narrow, taller jigger. This style is less angular than a single/double jigger, which helps for accuracy in measurements.
- Bell Jigger: These are narrower than a single/double jigger and wider than a Japanese style jigger. They have steeper sides than other jigger styles, and a rounded bottom. Sort of a round cone married to a cylinder on top in an effort to provide benefits of both accuracy and ease to fill.
- Stepped Jigger: While many jiggers provide internal markings to indicate sub-measures, the stepped jigger has an altered shape, where the sides step outward. Essentially, this allows for each sub-measure to be composed of a cylinder, which is more accurate for measuring than a cone. It also allows for partial measurements to be more accurate.
- Cup Jiggers: Usually these are part of a set, where each cylindrical cup is a single measure. The cylinder is an easy shape to measure with, as the volume increases linearly with the height of the liquid poured in. These are rare in the US and I’ve only heard of them and never even seen one.
Absent from this list are glass measurers, often represented by the single ounce glass cup that has indications for smaller units of measure. These are not included as “jiggers” because they are used differently. To take an accurate measure from a glass measuring cup (or graduated cylinder), you must view the volumetric level from the side. Jiggers, however, are designed to be measured from above and at an angle. Small details like these can throw off your measurements.If you make a good drink and you want to enjoy that same drink again, good luck doing that if you can't do it consistently. Measuring is extremely important.
Most jiggers are cone shaped. The funny thing about cones is that the more you put in, the more likely your measurement may not be accurate. Since you're pouring the liquid into a cone, the volume does not increase linearly. Let’s say you have a simple 1 ½ ounce jigger, with no internal markings, and you need to measure ¾ ounces. If you add liquid to the jigger so that it reaches 50% of the height, you’ve put in less than 0.3 ounces! You can eyeball it to 75% of the height and be close to ¾ ounces, but there’s a lot of potential for error here. Error being the difficulty for you to reproduce this measurement, assuming you just made the best drink ever. For many ingredients it might cause a small shift in the intended flavor profile. But for other ingredients, like absinthe or allspice liqueur, an inaccurate measurement can sink a drink.
Respect the drink and learn how to make it right, over and over again. To do that, you need to measure right. Don't muck it up without intention.
What to look for in a jigger
- Metal. Jiggers get abused so avoid plastic. Glass is okay, but impractical because of shape and because the markings are typically painted on.
- Accuracy. If you’re measuring you should be able to trust the volumes are correct.
- Rounded internal base. A smooth interior helps to decrease holdback (liquid that is retained in the jigger instead of making it into your mixing vessel).
- Internal indications. Avoid painted markings because they wear off. Deeply etched internal rings, to mark measurements, can be seen clearly with help from the liquid's surface tension.
- Size. 2 ounces over 1 ounce, with internal indications for ¼, ½, ¾, and 1 ½ oz. These measurements account for 88% of all ingredient measures in the Tipply database, and with a little math (e.g., 2 oz + ½ oz), they account for 95% of the ingredient measures. One tool to cover all of that is great!
- Narrow. The narrowness of this jigger increases accuracy. Laboratories use narrow, straight sided graduated cylinders to produce very measurements. Yes, you could use a graduated cylinder, but they are a pain to pour into. A good jigger strikes a balance between accuracy (narrowness) and easy to fill (radius of the opening). I’ll go into the math elsewhere, but if I mess up and underfill this jigger by a height of 2 mm, my jigger only contains 1.4 oz. If I do the same for a wider jigger, my volume is 1.3 oz - a noticeable difference!
- Double-sided shape. Combine two primary measures into one tool for efficiency.
My recommendations
A Japanese-style jigger is a great balance between graduated cylinder-like accuracy and a wider opening for filling convenience. Specifically, I really like 
- 2 oz over 1 oz. Some jiggers are 1 ½ oz over 1, or 1 ½ oz over ¾ oz. For my drinks, I most often use 2 oz of base liquor in a drink. Often, bars will use 1 ½ oz base liquor. This opens up lots of other areas for discussion (glass type, size, wash line, preferences, etc., which I won't get into here).
- It is made well enough. I've read reviews where people complain about spot welded jiggers. I've had a spot welded jigger for 20 years. It was probably one of the cheapest jiggers I could buy in college. While it has never been used in a bar, it's been abused plenty, I've never had a jigger break on me, so I am not concerned about spot welds.
- Internal markings. This jigger can measure ½, ¾, 1, 1 ½, and 2 ounces without any math. These measurements account for 78% of the ingredient measures in the Tipply database, 85% of the ingredient measures if I combine units. I haven't yet found a Japanese style jigger with a ¼ oz indicator.
- I prefer an unpainted, uncoated jigger. Jiggers get abused and that stuff just wears off.
- It is my most accurate jigger.
The 
Normally, for measuring things, I'm an advocate for using an identical tool - unfortunately not all manufactures and models share the same level of precision. Using identical tools minimizes the differences.
A jigger can't measure everything for you, but it'll cover most of them. There are a few things I suggest you don’t purchase for measuring. First, is a barspoon - use a teaspoon instead, since many barspoons are no longer manufactured to hold a teaspoon. Second, don’t buy fancy dasher bottles - other than appearances, these are only minimally better than dashing from the bottle your bitters were bought in. I’ll cover this more in a later article, as well as a great solution for dash measurements. As for measuring drops, for now, just use the tip of a chopstick.
Be accurate, make people happy. Use a good jigger.