Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Frequent listeners to the Ask Me Anything episodes here at Mindscape will know that I am a fan of a good cocktail. It's not something I bring up very often, but it does happen. In fact, I think I did a holiday message one year about cocktails. And certainly we've had plenty of AMA questions thinking about cocktails one way or another.
And there's something fascinating about the idea of a cocktail. I mean, if you like wine, which I also do, what do you do? You look for a good wine, and then you... open it, and you drink it. There's not a lot that you do to the glass of wine. Maybe you decant it or something like that. You make sure to serve it at the right temperature. But mostly, it's just about finding the wine, unless you're the one who's actually making it. Whereas a cocktail, there's a certain amount of...
of effort and even perhaps ingenuity that goes into it. You can make good cocktails and bad cocktails out of the same ingredients. There's something you need to know. In fact, one might even say that it would be good to be educated in the theory of cocktails if there ever were such a thing.
So imagine my delight when I came across a book called Cocktail Theory, A Sensory Approach to Transcendent Cocktails by Kevin Peterson, who is today's guest on the Mindscape podcast. Now, Kevin, I didn't even... know this when I bought the book, but you won't be surprised to learn, has a physics background. He got an undergraduate degree in physics and then got a PhD in mechanical engineering, but now works at a couple of places, Sfumato and Castalia. I'm going to...
try to explain this correctly if I understand what's going on. Sumato is a fragrance store. They sell perfumes. They make their own perfumes, and then they sell them. It's in Detroit, Michigan, and Kevin is part of the designing... of different fragrances and so forth. But then at a certain time of day, it turns into Castalia, which is a bar, which is a mixology bar, an experimental craft cocktail bar where they mix together different...
cocktails. And you'll learn a little bit about in this podcast what that means, you know, what really goes into it. So the... background in physics and engineering comes out very, very clearly in this discussion, not only in thinking about what are the different ingredients that could go in, how do you make the temperature last at the right amount for the right time.
What is the effect of aeration? You know, the little bubbles you get in your drink and the shaking and how much should you shake it? But also just the application of the scientific method. You know, very similarly to when we had Kenji Lopez-Alt here to talk about cooking.
but from an MIT graduate's engineering science background where you're going to experiment. You're not going to say, oh, I found this wonderful old book that has the best recipe in it. You're going to say, well, here's the idea of the best recipe, but let me tell you.
test all of the different ways I could change it and see how that goes, see what works and what doesn't work. That's what we're going to get into, the theory of cocktails and also the experiment of cocktails. Now, I know perfectly well that there's going to be a lot of Mindscape listeners. who are not cocktail people. That's perfectly okay. Not everyone needs to be. There's things that I'm not into. That's okay. But I did do this episode specifically for two reasons. Number one...
Even if you're not into cocktails, I think the lessons are broader. I think that the idea of balance and harmony and the idea of trying different things out and testing them in certain ways, understanding the errors and so forth— extends far beyond the idea of cocktails. I mean, not only obviously would it extend to things like perfume or cooking, but to, you know, art and beauty more generally. I think that this is just an example.
of a much broader phenomenon. And the other reason is, you know, it's my podcast. I've been doing it for a long time. I think this stuff is cool. Sometimes you gotta mix it up. You have to have something very different. You have to throw a curveball in there in the diet of pitches that you're getting.
This is not our usual topic, but I think that the spirit of it you'll find is very much in keeping with what Mindscape tries to do. And at the end of the episode, we even come up with a Mindscape cocktail that you can try at home. If that's not enough to make you want to listen, I don't know what would be. Let's go. Kevin Peterson, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.
You know, it reminds me of a time when I talked to a mixologist who was actually in Vegas, and she explained to us, to Jennifer, my wife and I, that she had been a graduate student in chemistry. And she dropped out to go to tequila college. And her parents were not approving of that, but she turned out okay. So I don't know what your journey was like. How did you get to go, you know, from getting a PhD in engineering, et cetera, to...
being a mixologist. Yeah. So, so I started my working life in the food world. I was back at house for some years. I went to culinary school briefly, thought I was maybe going to be a chef someday. The closer I got to that, the more I realized that wasn't really the life path I wanted to be on. Went back to school, physics undergrad, engineering grad school, worked in the engineering world for about 10 years.
and realized, you know what, I really miss working with people. I really miss kind of the immediacy of the service industry. You know, a lot of what I'm doing in engineering is developing PowerPoints that maybe my boss looks at and maybe not. And that's kind of what I do and it pays well and it's comfortable, but I kind of wanted a different challenge. Yeah, started stocking some money away and then opened a cocktail bar. Okay. I mean, that's a pretty big leap. So had you worked in a bar before?
I mean, I had worked as a cook in places that served alcohol, but I had not been a bartender before. I had not been kind of front of house before. Right. I had been reading a lot. I had been drinking a lot of cocktails, which isn't quite the same as working in the industry. But yeah, I read a book called Liquid Intelligence, which I would kind of describe as the...
scientists or engineers guide to the cocktail and became really enamored with the nuances of it. And I think a lot of people that wind up in this industry come to it from the people side. You get some entry-level job, you work your way up, now you're behind the bar, and then maybe you add some technical details later. I came to it the other way where I had all of the technical skills and none of the people skills. So that was...
A little bit of a harsh learning curve, but more or less made it. I mean, it's clear from your book. Actually, tell us your book. Do you have a book out? Yeah. My book is called Cocktail Theory, A Sensory Approach to Transcendent Drinks. And, you know, written in a couple parts. So it's like, how does a physicist think about a cocktail?
How does an engineer think about a cocktail? How does a perfumer think about a cocktail? And then how do you put all those pieces together to actually make a cocktail for a real person? And it's very clear, not just... that you have an engineering background, but you have an academic background, right? You're thinking about this, like you're theorizing, you're testing your theories. It's not a gimmick, I think. I mean, you're putting the scientific method to work here.
Yeah, I think a lot of what I do, that G word gimmick is one I'm very careful about because there is a lot of gimmickry in the cocktail world, a lot of smoke and mirrors, a lot of Instagram. worthy drinks that you don't actually have any interest in drinking and that's not my interest i want to you know i approach it more from the point of view of your taste buds your olfactory receptors all of your um
you know, all these little sensors that you have in your nose, in your mouth, what are they measuring? What are those signals telling your brain? How can we optimize those signals? Not just the Instagram. Yeah, I know it well. And I like the four categories that you have in the book, the physicist, the engineer, the perfumer, the bar owner. I think that's a great way to just organize what we're talking about here. So let's start with the physicist.
But when you say the physicist, they're the physics point of view on cocktails, you don't mean we're talking about... atoms or quantum field theory or whatever, right? It's more like you're looking for a grand unified theory of cocktail design. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, more of the perspective of a physicist than the literal.
physics. So what are some generalized things that we can say about cocktails? What are some rules that apply across... a broad swath of cocktails you know one way to approach cocktails is to say okay i like manhattans let me just dial in the perfect whiskey plus the perfect vermouth plus the perfect bitters and the right ratios and just get one drink really correct
But then you have to do that times all 18,000 classics. Might be fun. Never. But maybe there's some generalized things we can say where, okay, maybe a Martini and a Manhattan. have some similarity because they're both a spirit of vermouth, a dash of bitters, depending on how you make your martinis, of course, you know, sweet and sour drinks, you know, a margarita and a gimlet and a daiquiri.
They have a spirit element, they have a sweetener element, they have a citrus element. And when you start to look at it in that more general sense, there are some trends that come out and almost some ideas like golden ratios. taste inputs, how do you compose a scent? So that's kind of what I mean by the physicist approach to the cocktail.
I want to say that it's actually—it could equally well be described as the philosopher's approach to the cocktail because you're sort of—how philosophers describe themselves is looking to— carve nature at its joints. You're looking for the sort of natural ways of thinking about things. And in the space of all possible ingredients you could mix together, some of them work and some of them don't. That's kind of what you're looking for. Yeah.
Yeah. And I think, you know, when you're working in this world and you're trying to create new drinks or you're trying to memorize a bunch of drinks, when you're doing it onesie-twosie, it's a very daunting undertaking. Once you start to see those trends, now you can say, oh, well, I know that a Pisco sour and a whiskey sour have the same ratios. I don't have to memorize both drinks. I just have to memorize one set of ratios and how I can make. any of these drinks, you know.
Immediately. And I have to say that I'm not sure the mixologists are quite as good at the physicists at naming their theories. So you have the Mr. Potato Head theory of making cocktails. I don't know if that was your coinage or not.
Not my original phrasing. That came from a bar called Death & Co. in New York. But this idea that the different recipes are essentially... sets of ratios and you can sort of sub different ingredients in that idea has been around for a long time but the but the phrasing uh mr potato head as soon as i heard it i was like why you know
We don't need it to look for any other names. It's so intuitive. It's so catchy. But yeah, the idea being you've got a Mr. Potato Head doll. You can put in the googly eyes. You can put in the sunglasses eyes. You can put in the... angry eyes, the happy eyes, as long as there's eyes where the eyes are supposed to be in a nose and a mouth where they're supposed to be, it looks like, I mean, weirdly a humanoid potato. And the idea is.
If you have a sweet and sour cocktail, as long as you've got a sweet component where the sweet should be, sour where the sour should be, spirit where the spirit should be. That could be lemon, lime, orange, grapefruit. That could be honey, maple syrup, sugar, agave syrup. And it unlocks this creativity because now you can...
be more creative in how you combine things. Oh, I, you know, even if you're at home and you're like, well, I want to make this drink that calls for lime, but I only have orange. That's fine. You know, Mr. Potato Head out the lime, Mr. Potato Head in the orange.
You got a delicious drink right there. I got to say, I do have your book, and I've been looking at it, and it influenced one choice that I made. I have a friend who comes over, and he wants a different cocktail every time, and I'm not a super expert, so I have to look at the books.
But I do know how to make a sidecar and, you know, cognac, orange liqueur, lemon juice. And I've always thought they had too much lemon juice in them. So I started lowering the lemon juice. But you want that flavor in there.
And often the sidecar has like a sugared rim, which I think is kind of an abomination. But then I realized I could put a little honey or honey syrup in there, and that would go well with the lemon. And it totally worked. So I think that this was your good influence on me. I don't know if you would think that that would work.
work or not. Yeah. Yeah. You know, one of the ways I think of it is getting a drink right, getting it balanced is getting the tastes correct. So your tongue only perceives bitter, sour, salty, sweet. umami, and every cocktail can be defined as some ratio of those. So an old-fashioned is a ratio of bitter to sweet. A sidecar is some ratio of sour to sweet.
And that's how you make sure the drink is balanced. But then where more of the storytelling, more of the intrigue comes in is on the aroma side, where to the tongue, honey is just a sweetness, but to the nose, there could be... floral elements there could be some caramelized elements there could be you know whatever the bees were eating now you're telling the story of those bees yeah through the cocktail
It reminds me a little bit of the early days of molecular gastronomy, when they had the idea that if they could understand the chemical compositions of the different ingredients in things, they could invent new combinations in... plate of food because, you know, if this always works with that and it could be substituted for something else, maybe no one has done that before. So does this perspective on cocktails let you invent new fun things? Have you had any successes there?
Yeah, yeah. There's an idea in the aroma world that ingredients pair well together when they share some common aroma molecules. And I've actually read a couple books that are more or less just lists of... sort of unexpected combinations of foods that share aroma compounds. So I had a drink on the menu a couple of years ago that was blueberry and horseradish. Oh my God, that does not sound good.
which does not sound good. Right. And it's like, it's more, it's the more, the more terrible it sounds, the more fun it is to actually serve to someone. And they're like, of course, what the heck, this is actually good. You know, the more you can sort of. twist that expectation from well this sounds completely awful I guess I have to order it just to prove you guys are morons and then they take a sip and they're like
Wait a second. Oh my gosh. It's actually okay. So wait, what was the entire drink that involved both blueberries and horseradish? Do you remember? So, so it was, it was a variation on a gimlet. So it was gin, lime and sugar. And then it had a blueberry amaro, and we made a tincture out of horseradish. So we just took the horseradish root, chopped up, soaked that in alcohol for about two weeks.
straight out the chunks. And we just had a little dropper bottle where you could, you know, dose in some horseradish to taste. I do think that maybe this idea of like an eyedropper with little special things is the secret. that true mixologists have there, right? I mean, how many different little things do you have to add literally one or two drops worth of flavor to your drinks? A few hundred. And, you know, and that's...
What, what's shocking is the difference between a good drink and a great drink is often three drops of this four drops of that quarter ounce, you know, like you were saying with the sidecar, maybe the difference between a great sidecar and a good sidecar is. an eighth of an ounce of lemon. Right. You know, and some drinks are quite robust. You can just kind of pour, well, whatever. A Negroni is going to be good almost no matter what you do.
an old fashioned really is balanced on a knife edge in terms of the ratio of bitters to sweet to spirit, which is part of the reason I, I almost never order old fashions when I go out anymore. I'll get a grouty unless I really trust. the person behind the bar. So, I mean, that's, it's very interesting.
I don't know if there's a theory behind that. Some drinks are resilient. Some, you know, like the bartender can be a little sloppy. Others, you had better get it exactly right or it goes dramatically wrong very quickly. It's not a theory I've seen in the literature, the literature being, you know, a few hundred cocktail books that I own. But it's something that I sport in my book. And, you know, in terms of temperature, in terms of dilution.
Some drinks really have to be cold to be good. Some drinks really die quickly once that ice starts to melt. You know, gin and tonics, Collins style drinks, like once that ice starts to go, it really falls off a cliff. Some drinks can melt a little bit more and they kind of stay reasonable further into that sort of melty zone.
I had a friend who is still mad at me because I went over to his house and he served room temperature martinis. And I could not hide my horror from that. And I normally try to be polite when people are serving things. I can't deal with that. The temperature really matters. And I, I guess I hadn't even appreciated that until I got the room temperature martini. Well, yeah, sometimes you got to show people how it's wrong to let them appreciate how it's right.
You know, and one way that I would describe that is that your taste buds are temperature dependent. And when something's warmer, you're sending a different ratio of signals in. So even if you ostensibly made the right drink. that right drink was intended to be served at 30F or 35F and if it's at 70F it's not the right drink anymore. When you talk about the sensitivity of the taste buds and things like that, are you—
completely empirically driven? You've tried different things and this is what works? Or is it actually useful to you to dig into like reading about how taste buds work? I have read about how taste buds work. Um, you know, I've, I've done a little bit of testing. It didn't make it into the book, but, you know, say what is the optimal sugar concentration at 30 F at 60 F at 90 F.
But, but I think just anecdotally, you probably know the answers to a lot of these, like the amount of sugar in ice cream is great when the ice cream is frozen. If you take, you know, once that ice cream melts and it's at.
whatever even 50 60 f it's like oh my gosh this is unbearably sweet or a can of coke you know all those ratios are skewed once it's room temperature the amount of sugar in the can hasn't changed but yeah the you know the way your brain or TasteBud interprets that has changed a lot.
So let's do the worked example. I mean, again, I can't improve on what you did in the book. You made daiquiris and you played around and you tasted. I don't even want to know how many daiquiris you tasted. It seems like a lot. A few hundred might be low thousands. So what is a daiquiri for those who don't know? I think I didn't say it explicitly, but I'm hoping that people will get something out of this, even if they're not cocktail aficionados. I think that the lessons go deeper than that.
So what is a daiquiri and what are the things you varied to sort of be a scientist? Sure. So a distinction I do want to make, there's the frozen daiquiri, which... a lot of modern bartenders would consider a bit of an abomination. Right. Um, the classic daiquiri is rum, lime, and sugar, uh, shaken with ice. And. If you look in 10 different cocktail books, you're probably going to see 10 different recommendations of...
Should it be two ounces of rum? Should it be an ounce and a half of rum? Should it be half an ounce of lime? Should it be three quarters ounce of lime? You know, and they're all within a certain range, but there's... And there's probably more disagreement than agreement on what exactly those numbers should be. So I said, well, let's just settle this once and for all. I'll just drink all of them and see where they're good. So I held two ounces of rum constant.
Um, you know, so I'm looking at a ratio now and not necessarily an absolute number, but I said, okay, we'll do a quarter ounce lime, quarter ounce sugar, and then we'll vary everything in quarter ounce amounts until the drink is terrible in some direction.
and I wound up with a range where I said, okay, you know, kind of the ideal is two ounces of rum, three-quarter lime, three-quarter simple syrup, but there's a little bit of wiggle room on either side, a little bit more in this direction, a little bit less in that direction. I then did again with temperature and said, okay, where is it ideal? I did it again with dilution. So as you're shaking the drink, that ice is melting.
When you pour everything into the tin initially, we would call that 0% dilution. As you're shaking, if you just shake a normal drink for 10 to 12 seconds, you're going to get about 30% dilution. So that's considerable. Yeah, which is surprising. It's like, hey, I paid 15 bucks for this and 30% of this is water. Can you charge me 30% less, please?
Within all those variables, there are some acceptable ranges. What was intriguing to me was some anecdotal wisdom did actually point towards the thing that... empirically said, Hey, we're right in the middle of where we want to be. There were some other points where I was like, Oh boy, if you know, we're right on the edge here. So when you normally shake a cocktail,
Turns out about 35% dilution is where you kind of fall off that cliff. So if you pre-chill some of your ingredients, you melt a little bit less ice, you wind up more in the middle of that kind of ideal zone for dilution. So actually at home, I started keeping my rum in the freezer just to, you know, cut back on that dilution when I shake a daiquiri. And one thing is, you know, you're super scientific about what you are tasting, but then...
It's you tasting it. So I know that in some areas of science, like psychology, et cetera, we have the reproducibility crisis. Can you... Do you know whether or not if someone else were tasting it or even if you were sort of blind tasting the same thing, would you reliably get the same answer for how good it was? Yeah, very, very good question. And that's, you know, probably the biggest caveat with the whole book is.
I couldn't pay somebody else to also grant 1500. Yeah, there is a section on uncertainty actually did uncertainty. So, so a couple of things I did. Yeah, I did go back and recheck myself on certain. points and say, okay, three months ago, I thought this was terrible or good or right on the cusp. Do I still think that? I had some of my staff. I tested them as well.
And then even like measurement uncertainty, when you're using a jigger, is that accurate to 0.1 ounces, 0.01 ounces on a Saturday night? How different than when you're doing it? for the sake of your testing. So, so I actually, yeah, I had some of my staff, I was like, all right, pour two ounces as quick as you can. Like, you know, and I poured into different tins and, you know, we masked it out and.
Yeah, there's something like a 5% to 10% variability in poor level. So yeah, there's some analysis there. And basically what I said was... You know, there are some real outliers, people who just want zero sugar or the ultimate bitter thing or the whatever. And I'm not trying to.
capture those people in this data. 90% of the people that I talked to fell, probably 95, most of the people I talked to fell within this range where they said, yep, I pretty much agree. Or maybe there's one point where I'm... a quarter ounce more lime juice than you, which is, you know, getting into that measurement uncertainty realm. So I kind of said, if you just kind of like squint your eyes a little bit when you look at my graphs, I think we're all going to agree here.
And, you know, so don't take it as, okay, down to the last milligram. But the other thing that I wanted to do was to just bring some of this thinking into the cocktail world and say, okay. A thousand years from now, are people going to look back and say, yes, that was the true Daiquiri form? Maybe, maybe not. But I hope they can say it's cool to bring this level of meticulousness and... analysis to the cocktail world in a way that it hasn't been brought before.
And just for the audience, this is an audio podcast, so they can't see a graph. But given that you keep the amount of rum fixed, what you're varying is the citrus, the lime juice, and the sweetener, whatever that is. And then you get... plots of, you know, here is the region in this parameter space where everything works. And one of the interesting things is the region is not like a circle.
Right? It's a tilted ellipse. You can trade off a little bit. And in retrospect, it makes sense. If you have more lime juice, you can make up for that a little bit with more sweetener. Yeah, yeah. So it's a nod. I mentioned a little bit earlier, but that idea of a golden ratio, there's a certain relationship between the lime and the sugar that's more important than the relationship between the lime and the rum. Right.
or I should say the overall quantity of sweet-sour to spirit, you can make a little juicier daiquiri, you can make a little drier daiquiri, as long as the lime and sugar are in the proper proportion. you can have a little more spirit, a little less spirit. And then given what you said before about the sort of families of cocktails, the Daiquiri is a...
paradigm for a certain kind of cocktail, right? Spirit, citrus, sweet. So number one, what are the other kinds of cocktails that fit into that pattern? And then number two... do they behave similarly in the diagram of what works and what doesn't? Yeah, yeah. So some other examples would be something like an old-fashioned, which is predominantly bitter and sweet.
something like a Negroni, which again is mostly bitter and sweet, but now it's got vermouth in it, which is a wine-based product. So you've got some sourness and some umami in much smaller amounts, but a little more complex ratio. And what I found was that those more complex drinks tended to have wider tolerability bands. Oh, that's interesting. That's exactly the opposite of what I would have guessed. Yeah.
You know, you can maybe liken it to, say, when you're making a curry and there's 26 spices in it, like, well, I accidentally put too much. coriander in there there's enough other stuff to make it good when when it's just yeah it's like in the most simple drinks there's nowhere to hide okay i see that does make sense now that you now that you explain it good and so but the daiquiri
is the template also is the template for the gimlet, the whiskey sour, other things like that. And do they behave similarly in the trade-off plot? Yeah, yeah. So I started by doing a bunch of daiquiris and saying, okay, now I've... And the daiquiri is a drink that a lot of authors...
have sort of taken as like, okay, let's analyze the heck out of this. So I took that as like, okay, well, if I'm going to write a book, this is kind of where it's got to start. And so I did all this analysis, but then I said, Yeah, as you mentioned, okay, a bee's knees, a gimlet, a lot of these sweet and sour drinks are the same template. Well, do they behave the same or is there a different science of...
The gimlet is there a different science of the bee's knees. And what I found was when you look at the ingredients in that more generalized sense, spirit, sweetener, citrus, rather than lime specifically or rum specifically. a lot of those plots actually fall directly or almost directly on top of each other. That's good. I mean, it's a reassurance that we're on the right track here. Yeah. And also just.
As an aside, it sounds like the idea from biology of a model organism, the idea that everyone studies a daiquiri over and over again. Like, everyone studies... Little white mice or C. elegans or E. coli or whatever, because there's too many organisms. And if everyone studied different ones, you wouldn't know what was common. But if everyone is trying to make the perfect daiquiri, I guess that makes perfect sense. Yeah. And then...
So let's just do one example to make it clear. If that's the daiquiri template, spirit, citrus, sweetener, then what is the Negroni template, for example? Yeah, so the literal build would be an ounce of gin, an ounce of Campari, an ounce of sweet vermouth. But I would generalize that to say an ounce of spirit, an ounce of Amaro, which is like a bittersweet.
liqueur, typically Italian, and an ounce of vermouth, which could be sweet or dry. And there's, you know, even within a single category, sweet vermouth, there's a lot of variation in sweetness or dryness. And you can see the idea of balance coming in, right? Because the Campari is bitter. The bitters are bitter. Amari are bitter. You want something sweet to balance it off. Yep.
Yeah. And like I mentioned, it was intriguing that that added complexity gave you more wiggle room. I guess my intuition was actually where yours was at, was that... oh, now there's more moving parts. If anything gets out of place, the system is more likely to fall apart. But there was actually more resilience there.
more resilience in terms of ingredient ratio. You could be further off. Oops, I accidentally put too much gin in. Right. Hey, you know what? No such thing as too much gin. Right. The Negroni held up. to both colder and warmer temperatures than most cocktails it held up to both more and less dilution than most cocktails so yeah i wasn't actually trying to write a book in praise of the negroni but that's essentially
what I wound up writing. So what are the things we're looking for? I mean, if we're inventing... the way to describe cocktails, right? I mean, there's sort of balance between bitter and sweet, the temperature, the flavor. Like, is there some checklist of things that you care about? Yeah, I think balance is kind of what gets you in the door. Like if it's not balanced, send that drink back. Like there's no saving it.
So, you know, the way I often describe it when I'm teaching cocktail classes is most people get the ingredients right. You find some recipe in a book, you find it online. Okay, you bought the right gin, you bought the right... Citrus, you know, I buy the same limes as you, you know, there's not like special bartender limes or something. But what a lot of people don't get right are kind of the engineering variables.
So the temperature, the texture, and the dilution primarily. And a lot of what that comes down to is did you shake it right or did you stir it right? And one of the ideas there is when you're shaking or stirring... Yes, you're mixing the ingredients, but that's not primarily what you're doing. Shaking for two seconds will pretty thoroughly mix most ingredients or stirring for a couple seconds.
the way i like to think about that is what you're doing is you're setting the temperature you're setting the dilution you're setting the level of aeration and when you think about it that way uh so so kind of the ideal shake is about 12 seconds which is way longer than most home users shake and frankly, longer than most bartenders shake. You know, I've been doing this long enough that now a timer just starts in my head. The minute I start shaking, it's just, I can't stop it. One, two, three.
And my body refuses to stop until I hit 12. I'm not saying that's a good thing. I'm just saying it's a thing. And that's how long it takes for enough ice to melt, enough dilution to happen, enough chilling to happen. And you have to shake it quite hard to integrate air bubbles into the drink. So, you know, that's a red flag if you're out on the town and you get a shaken drink and the bartender just kind of...
Lazily, I'll shake this. Okay. The ice is kind of slopping back and forth for a few seconds. Like, let me stop you right there. I'll get a Negroni instead. So yeah, the technique is how you set those engineering variables. And with a couple of rules of thumb, which I lay out in the book, but yeah, the biggest one is shake for 12 seconds and shake it hard. And you actually filmed yourself so you knew how far you were shaking it back and forth. True. And what is the ideal amount?
So about an 18-inch shake is ideal. That's serious. So that's like a long distance and a lot of time. Like your cocktail has to travel quite far to really get to the perfect point. Indeed. And I would say you could probably get away with shorter. Really what you want is the impact of the ice into the end of the tins. So it's got to travel far enough that you can really kind of slam it, slam the ice into the end. So you get a good. Okay.
You know, there's almost like an auditory cue more than a say. Which also means that you don't want your shaker to be too full of liquid. Also true. Yep. Yeah, let's say you fill your shaker 90% full with liquid. There's not enough room for everything to slop around and...
integrate the air. So this is definitely moving us into the engineering territory, and I do want to talk about that. But it's also a perfect segue to mention that you don't actually talk about martinis that much in the book. I didn't know whether this was a... intentional choice, or it's just that there's not that much to say about martinis? There's a lot to say about martinis. And the thing is, it's a minefield, because everybody thinks their version of a martini is the correct version.
And there's so many variations out there. And this is a little bit of an age thing. I'm kind of right at the cusp where like I drink martinis. I find a lot of guests that are older than me drink martinis. A lot of guests that are younger than me don't drink martinis. And, you know, and so normally when somebody comes in and says, make me a martini, I'm like, tell me what you want, like in very specific terms. And I can totally do that.
Well, I always make it with a quarter ounce of vermouth. I always make it with this, you know, and it's like, I always make it with this gin or that vodka or whatever. And it's like, yep, I can do that for you. Absolutely. That is not what I would have guessed. So, so that was, yeah, it was, it was actually a little bit of an intentional choice to avoid the martini because there's so many strong opinions there and there's so many.
opinions that don't line up with each other that I was like, maybe I'll just have to write a different book about martinis at some point. I think a short book just on the martini would definitely be worth it. I would buy it. You get one customer, but also... There is this weird thing, and here is my own personal take, but I think people get too macho about martinis, especially in the dryness of them, right? Like the idea that...
The less vermouth you have, the better, until the point where you're just drinking gin or vodka, and that's completely missing the aspect of balance that you were talking about before. Agreed. Agreed. Yeah. And certainly that's a part of the cocktail world. What glass do you serve the drink in? What color is the drink? We don't list the color of the drinks on the menu. I've totally had guests, husband and wife, where the husband had to switch drinks with his wife because his drink was too pink.
Which sounds silly, but I've witnessed it, you know. And yeah, now, you know, I'll say when I got into this world, yeah, I had a bit of that. And at this point, I've drank every... dainty and pink and whatever drink along the gender spectrum you want to think about and i i don't you know it barely crosses my mind anymore but yeah then with guests i'm like oh okay people care yeah i don't love the fact that there are that
gender connotations with drinks and glasses, but it's reality. And do you have any feelings on the shaken versus stirred question vis-a-vis the martini? Oh boy. Yeah. That's another thing is if you ask people to name one cocktail fact, what are they probably going to say? Well, it's shaken, not stirred. I've gone back and forth myself, let me just say. I do now have a belief, but I'm very willing to change my mind about this particular question. So I guess my first answer would be...
Well, how do you take your martini? Shaken or stirred? Okay, great. That's exactly what I'm going to do. You know, my opinion is to stir it. And I would actually take a step. further and say it's not that one is right or wrong it is stirring and shaking give you different amounts of temperature drop dilution textural change
What is it that you want in the final drink? And what are the ratios of the ingredients that you put in there? You know, is that going to give you a balanced drink at the end? Some ratios might need a little more dilution. Some ratios might need a little lower temperature. So I'm really just kind of ducking the question here. That's fine, yeah. You know, my martini is basically a Manhattan build.
two parts spirit, one part vermouth, a couple dashes of bitters, stirred, that's not, you know, that's a rarity that I get a request to make a martini in that exact way. And so just so we can be very specific, I presume that the shaking both lowers the temperature more effectively but increases the dilution. So that's a trade-off. Exactly. Yeah, chilling and dilution go hand in hand, where the chilling of the drink comes from melting the ice. So to get a colder drink, you have to melt more ice.
Yeah. So you're just picking a point along kind of a dialed in line, colder and more diluted or less cold, less diluted. But you also mentioned texture. How does that work? Yeah, so the air bubbles that you shake into the drink. And what they tend to do is boost aroma. So they trap, you know, little aroma molecules or something.
atomization that happens there uh and then they pop when you drink and go up into your nose and you know and this is a really noticeable effect you might think it'd be pretty minor i've done it both ways and it's like oh wow that's
You know, you could stir a drink to the same temperature. You just have to stir it a lot longer than you would shake a drink. And it's a completely different drink. Even though the temperature and dilution are the same, the presence of those air bubbles dramatically alters the drink.
And the other thing that it does is it inhibits some of your tasting of the drink, meaning some of those air bubbles cling to your tongue and basically it sort of blocks some of the liquid from interacting with taste buds. So the shaking boosts aroma and drops the level of taste. So as a weird thought experiment, I said, well, could you make a shaken old fashioned that's balanced?
Which again, most people would say terrible abomination. Sorry, sorry. Tell people, tell me what an old fashioned has in it. So the way that I build an old fashioned is two ounces of whiskey. usually something in the $25 to $30 range, a quarter ounce of simple syrup, and three dashes of Angostura bitters. And then I would stir that for 10 seconds over a big ice cube, and there's your old passion.
And if you wanted to create that same balance in a shaken drink, so because shaking inhibits some of that taste signal, you have to boost the amount of taste ingredients. meaning you have to add a little more sugar, you have to add a little more bitters, but it also enhances the aromatic elements of the drink. And in an old fashioned, a lot of the aroma is coming from the whiskey.
So really what I found there was I had to use better whiskey because like, you know, part of the point of an old fashioned is you've got this kind of mid-level. or entry-level whiskey, and you can make it really delicious with a quick tweak. It's maybe not something I would sip neat, but I would totally sip it as an old-fashioned. Once you shake it, all those off notes really come out in a more dramatic way.
And you've now got to bump up to, say, a $40, $50 bottle because the aromatic profile of a nicer whiskey is just more pleasant. And that's what you're playing up. Something I did, I got this impression from your book, I don't know if you said it explicitly, but the difference between the less expensive spirits and the more expensive spirits is not...
More exquisiteness when you get more expensive, but fewer flaws. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great way of saying it. That's not my quote, but maybe you're welcome to it. You know, and I think, yeah, that's a great way of thinking of it is maybe a complimentary idea is. A lot of things could be good or bad, could be a flaw or a feature depending on the percentage. So it's almost like the dose makes the poison.
a little bit of this molecule enhances aroma, but once it goes too far, now it takes over the drink and now it's, you know, now it's, it's made the drink terrible. So for instance, one of the big compounds in whiskey is called ethyl acetate, which has a little bit of a green apple note. And when it's present in low amounts...
It sort of helps you appreciate everything else. It's almost good up to the point where you consciously notice it. And then once it crosses that threshold, you start to say, oh, there's kind of a solventy. nail polish remover, like off note in this whiskey, some clear spirits have it in abundance. So something like a Pisco or an unaged brandy, it really overwhelms.
Which is, you know, not a lot of people drink pisco neat, or at least I don't. But you shake it up in a cocktail. Now, the lower temperature, more dilution, the other ingredients. can bring that molecule into an appropriate range where it becomes a feature instead of a flaw. Good, good. So I'm remembering we need to close the loop on the texture of the martini and how it relates to the aeration.
Right. So if you have a stirred martini recipe that you find to be balanced and you wanted to shake it instead, you would have to boost the level of the taste ingredients. meaning more bitters, more vermouth. And you would have to use nicer aromatic elements, which would also include the vermouth, but predominantly the spirit. So if you're getting away with a 20, $25 bottle of gin, all right.
open up the wallet, you know, buy something a little higher on the shelf. But in terms of texture, does it become either like smoother or rougher? Or maybe I'm just taking the word texture too literally when you shake it.
Yeah, texture, I'm mostly meaning the amount of air bubbles that are included. And what I found was that it's kind of an all or nothing thing. When you're putting air bubbles in there, you kind of just want... a bunch there there's not a drink where it's like okay a few air bubbles is good but a few more is worse it's like it's either zero or if you're going to start putting them in there you might as well just go all the way and shake the heck out of it
Given the importance of temperature and the competition between that and dilution, is there any... advantage to be gained by these fake ice cubes? You know, you get these rocks that don't melt, or the classic move of chilling the glass? If... If I had written my book before I built my bar, I would have put a lot more freezer space in and I would chill every glass. Yeah. Chilling the glass is a great idea. Those whiskey stones are those kind of like non-melting.
Chilling components, they're great. They just don't have a lot of heat capacity. So they don't actually buy you that much temperature change or that much time in terms of keeping your drink cold. Which is, you know, the big advantage of ice is that... you know, as it melts or as it freezes, there's so much energy transfer there that you get a huge temperature change with a little bit of...
ice melt. I'm glad you said that because I've tried various versions and none of them really work. And I'm just back to like, I have the thing that makes the big spherical ice cubes, which I think is great if you need ice at all. It looks pretty and it also... Melts more slowly, right? Yeah, there's a surface area consideration there. You know, sphere is kind of the lowest surface area to volume ratio. There you go, math.
And, you know, and the visual component can't be denied. Like, you know, most of my book centers on getting the molecules in the glass right and the temperature and, you know, these engineering parameters. Well, a pretty garnish and, you know, and the human element tells somebody a funny story, connect with them in that way. Like that literally does make the enjoyment of the drink that much more. You know, as an engineer, that's not my specialty.
No, no, but we can all get better, right? We can all learn. I presume most engineers don't have a specialty in perfumery either, but this is playing a very big role in your book. I was interested to see that. Obviously, there is a scent and aroma to cocktails, but I never thought of that as one of the major things to keep in mind. Yeah. Part of the idea in the book was, can we decompose flavor into different components and say, well, let's optimize each one individually.
put them all back together and see if that kind of creates an optimal cocktail for us. So a lot of the discussion we've had so far is let's optimize the taste. Let's optimize the temperature, texture, dilution. The last big component.
not the only remaining component, but probably the biggest remaining one is the aroma. And so every time you're putting ingredients together in a cocktail, you've got some gin aromatics, you've got some vermouth aromatics, you've got some bitters aromatics, you're creating a martini. perfume, that's not how most people think of it. But what can perfumery teach bartenders about how to compose better scents?
and in their worlds that don't interact very much. But I think, you know, that's really perfumery is the art that has studied the molecules that go together and the harmonies and the notes, bass notes, top notes.
all that stuff and a lot of times in bartending you say well this works and maybe this works a little bit better and you know it's more guess and check more than us um an iterative analytical approach to building a fragrance you get the drink balanced you taste it it smells pretty good you say okay you know let's go with that yeah um and and i i like to basically do another round of...
optimization on the aroma side. It seems like there would be a natural affinity between wine tasting or wine making and perfumery. I don't know if that's true, but they're both examples where you have weird collections of many, many complicated molecules that do things in unexpected combinations. Yeah, that I mean, that that's really the tricky part is that scent is so complex.
In taste, you can kind of measure sugar amount and bitters and sour. And, you know, you can put some pretty firm numbers on these. But then you have somebody smell something and one person smells celery and the other guy says it's fenugreek and the third person says it's maple syrup. And you're like, well, okay. We can't even agree on what this is, let alone.
what the number is that's supposed to go with it. So it becomes a more sort of metaphorical, qualitative approach, which isn't to say it's not important or it can't be. honed or improved but it yeah you you get into more hand wavy arguments in the you know for a physicist that loves numbers i'm like Man, there's just not a lot of numbers when it comes to scent composition. I did do an interview once with Ann-Sophie Barvich, who is a...
philosopher of smell. Do you know her work? Yeah, I read the book. Smellosophy, right. And it was great. She was brilliant enough to choose that as a specialty because it's great to have a specialty that nobody else does.
a neuroscientist, so she has a lab and so forth. But maybe the most important thing I learned from that conversation was the contextuality of smells. Like something can be literally exactly the same smell, and not only do different people identify it differently, but the same... Absolutely, absolutely. There's a Chinese spirit called Baiju.
that has some molecules that appear both in foot fungus and in Parmesan cheese. Yes, exactly. You have to be very careful which thing you're going to say it smells like, you know, yeah. And so I presume that this is also something that you need to take into account. But when you're taking into account, when you say like the perfumery aspect, it's not that you're literally...
putting perfume into the cocktails. It's that you're thinking like a perfumer when you're balancing or deciding what plays nicely with other things in the cocktails. Correct. Correct. I mean, there are some essential oils or perfume components that are food safe. For the most part, I'm using literal herb spices or things out of a bottle meant to be consumed more directly.
But yeah, applying that perfumery mindset to composing the aromatic side of the drink. But despite the fact that perfumery is the inspiration, the thing I got out... most clearly from that section was the music analogy of the high notes, the low notes, the middle notes, the bass notes. Yeah, yeah. Like I said, because there's...
I mean, for one, not many numbers, but two, not even many words. You know, when you think about how to describe a smell in a verbal sense, let's say an orange could be bright, could be sweet, could be warm. Well, that's a visual reference, that's a taste reference, and that's a temperature reference. None of those are actually snow words. And so, you know, it's like this weird black box that you're like, I can't even...
put any words, numbers, anything. Like, how do I even think about this? So you get into this realm of metaphor. And, and some of these metaphors I think are quite intuitive where. You know, a lot of people can smell something very light and bright, more on the citrusy side and say, okay, I can see how that would be a top note. You smell some deep, dark, heavy...
wintery scent pipe tobacco or bonfire and say, okay, yeah, that's more base note. And, and maybe it's not language you've used, but I think, you know, I've, I've done classes with people and, you know, talk to novices and. People are like, okay, yeah, within a half hour, I'm kind of like on the same page with what you're saying. It's not, this speaks to me as well. And then that opens up all of the ideas of how do you create.
How do you go from notes to chords? How do you create harmonies? How do you create dissonances? Are you composing a children's song where everything just goes together nicely? Orange and vanilla and all happy scents. Do you put a little bit of a jazz note in there? Ooh, this black licorice kind of throws some people, but maybe that's what makes it interesting.
And so let's make it tangible with some kind of example. Could you have a good example of where this perfumery mindset is very helpful in thinking about the cocktail? Well, I guess kind of taking that jazz note idea, so all the aromatics in an old-fashioned are pretty harmonious. If you're using, say, a darker sugar, those aromatics go nicely with the bourbon or the whiskey.
A lot of bitters are more baking spice forward. And like all of these different components kind of have a fair amount of overlap with each other. But then when you make a Sazerac, you're essentially making an old fashioned, but you're putting in a little bit of that black licorice note through the absinthe. And so it's almost like, you know, you had your like kind of normal.
whatever harmonious thing. And then you said, what if I make this one note do this? I like that. Yeah. And all of a sudden it's like. A lot fewer people like it, but it's way better. Old fashions. I'm sorry. I guess my musical tastes are showing through here. Yeah. Yeah. And.
But I do worry about myself. I have not thought that much about the olfactory side of things when it comes to cocktails. And I don't think I'm very good at distinguishing scents and things like that. Is this something where you can become better at it? Can you train? or are people just different? I mean, there's certainly a genetic component, how sensitive you are, literally which olfactory receptors you have.
There are a few hundred and not everybody has the same ones, but there have been some studies done, which I can't necessarily cite you the paper on the fly here. What people have found is that as you train your sense of smell, you are not necessarily getting more sensitive or you don't learn to pick things out at a lower threshold, at a lower concentration. What you learn is how to describe them better.
I see. Okay. You make better verbal connections. You have a more rich vocabulary of description. So, yeah, you watch, you know, a sommelier pick apart a wine and they're, you know, doing all these. one weird motions but then they're saying oh i get tennis balls and i get warm weather and i get garden hose and this and that and you're like you know you smell the same wine and you're like this just smells like wine smells like wine yeah but uh
But that's a good kind of training. That conceptual map actually, I suspect, does help you distinguish between things that otherwise would be just lumped together somehow. Yeah, and I think another part of it too is... your expectations get refined. Where now I've read enough about whiskey that I know, okay, these notes come from the barrel. These notes come from the grain. These notes come from this and that. When I'm smelling a whiskey, it's not like...
Like my mind is a blank canvas and somebody's just putting something up there and I'm trying to pick it apart. I'm looking for a green apple note. I'm looking for a nutmeg note. I'm looking for a cinnamon note, which... You know, maybe not in a conscious way, but like I've been primed through years of drinking whiskey to say like, oh, is this a rise? Is this a weed? Is this a whatever? And it's. Yeah, it's a different experience when when you're not.
trained in that world it can feel overwhelming because yeah it's just a bunch of random stimuli and you're like i don't know how to differentiate these or what facets go together and what facets don't And somebody that's done it for years and years can more quickly categorize, describe, picture these inputs. And then the fourth...
Another angle you take in the book is the bar owner's perspective on these things. And, you know, probably most of our listeners are not bar owners. Maybe some of them are out there. I don't know. But I'm going to pretend that some of our listeners are not cocktail people. and now you have inspired them. to become cocktail people or at least try some things out. Congratulations. You'll do it. So let's just be very down to brass tacks. Like if you're the typical not-too-ambitious home mixologist,
What are the things you need? The most basic thing. What are the spirits you should have in your liquor cabinet? Well, maybe I can actually take a step back further and say this. If you're thinking about opening a bar and you're a good home bartender... you're already doing all the fun parts, including drinking the drinks. If you are thinking about opening a bar, yes, there's coolness to it, but you're going to be adding a lot of unfun parts.
as well. So keep that in mind. Yeah. In terms of like, Hey, I'm, I'm at level three and I want to be at level four. Like how do I, how do I level up my game in terms of a home bartender? The way I approach it is, you know, find a drink that you love, whether it's the daiquiri, the nigroni, the old fashioned, whatever it may be, and work your way out from there.
If you say, oh, there's 10 different cocktail families and there's a thousand different spirits and I'm just going to work my way through one by one. Good luck. Yeah. You know, what I would say is, okay, you're an old fashioned drinker. Great. Try it with a little more sweetness. You know, do some of these ingredient ratio studies. Find your perfect old fashioned and then say, OK, well, let me try it with a different whiskey.
Let me try it with a different sweetener. Let me try it with a different bitters and kind of build out from comfortable territory. You know, I know people that get into this world and there's so many spirits to buy. Oh, I want to try one in aviation. Now I got to buy a $35 bottle of creme de violet. It's a problem. Yeah. You use it a quarter ounce at a time. You just buy yourself a hundred aviations. Do you want to drink a hundred aviations? Do your friends, family want to drink, you know?
So there's better ways, more economical ways to get into it. And I think either picking a spirit and saying, okay, I'm a whiskey person. Let me try.
a sour drink with whiskey let me try a bitter drink with whiskey let me try a bubbly drink with whiskey or just picking a category and saying i'm a bittersweet person let me try a bittersweet whiskey drink let me try a bittersweet gin drink let me try a bittersweet Cognac drink, you know, that's the way, and in my book, there are some tables where, you know, I would say kind of explore a row or explore a column rather than trying to just explore the entire table off the bat.
That makes perfect sense, yeah. But... As a good contrast to that, if you are a professional bartender, mixologist, bar owner, you can be more ambitious. So I thought I would love to hear more about the Cocktail Genome Project. Probably not as well-funded. is the Human Genome Project, but maybe we'll bring more pleasure to more people. I don't know. Yeah, the Cocktail Genome Project. So really, as I was writing my book, Cocktail Theory,
That was really like, how do you create the perfect drink, whether it's a gin and tonic or a Collins or a whiskey sour or whatever. But if you don't like gin and tonics. That gin and tonic is not the perfect solution for the situation, no matter how well I make it. And so as I was writing this, I was like, oh man, I'm going to have to write a second book about how do you match a drink to a person?
And the way that we typically do that is it's on you. You come into my bar, I give you a menu and I say, good luck. read through all these weird ingredients and maybe I throw you a couple of phrases. Oh, creamy. Oh, bitter. Okay. I can kind of like pick where I think I'm supposed to be, but you know, I'm the one who's been making drinks.
you know, thousands, tens of thousands over the last few years, even if you drink a lot, it's probably not 10,000 drinks in the last, you know, couple of years. So, so it's like, you've got knowledge of your preferences. I've got knowledge of the drinks.
Can we kind of flip the script and say, well, what if instead of me telling you about the drinks, what have you told me about your preferences? It's like going to the doctor, like they have the medical expertise, but you know your body and how you feel, right? And you better meet somewhere in the middle.
Yeah. If you go to the doctor and they say, well, here's the menu. Do you have restful leg syndrome? Do you have leprosy? Do you have gonorrhea? You're like, I think that's not the way it works. Yeah. Yeah. So flipping that script, and the key for me has been, well, what are the questions that I should ask? You know, one way to do it is to say, well, what do you normally drink? Which I think is like the cheapest.
It often gets you to the right place, but it's maybe more a reflection of your habits. Well, gin and tonics are easy. I keep a bottle of... gin in my cupboard and a bottle of tonic in my fridge and I pour them together well do you like that the best or is it just the easiest to make and you know maybe if I asked you the right questions I would realize oh actually
you know you don't like the bubbles you like the bitterness from the tonic we can separate those two and combine them in a different way and you know create you a drink that's more ideally suited to you The other cool part of this is I've been asking people about a lot of their culinary and scent history. What was your favorite candy as a child? What cuisine did you grow up with? What's a happy scent memory?
You know, I had a customer who loved tequila, who loved bittersweet drinks, and who grew up in Belgium and ate these violet... which was some brand I had never heard of, but I basically made him a tequila violet Negroni and he absolutely loved it. Not a drink I probably would have ever made, you know, off the top of my head. But, you know, I was able to kind of piece together these components of flavor to ideally suit him, and he loved it.
And so how far are you along in the quest to understand the genome of cocktails? What are the questions that you should ask? Do you have a checklist or is this something that is still in development? Yeah, so it follows a lot of the same thinking of my book where I decompose the flavor into taste, into scent, into some of the more conceptual elements. Now, a lot of people...
don't necessarily know what umami is or what their preferences are around it. So a lot of my work has been, well, how do I ask these questions in the right way to get the data I need from people? rather than asking about umami in a general sense i can say do you like barbecue potato chips do you like uh you know meat and mushroom dishes do you like yeah
Even with bitterness, it's complex because it can be acquired in a very narrow band. Maybe you dislike bitterness, but you've drank enough coffee that you love coffee. But that doesn't mean you're going to like Campari or Fernet or Malort, which are all bitter liqueurs. So, you know, I've...
I've been burned a few times where somebody's like, yeah, I drink black coffee all the time and I eat green vegetables. Yeah. And then you give them some capari and they're like, oh, this is terrible. Yeah. Okay, good. There's, there's subdivisions there. Yeah. And. You know, so a lot of that has been kind of this back and forth where a lot of my kind of trusted regulars, I'll send them the survey of 30 or 40 questions. I'll then design them drinks and I'll have them rate them and say,
You know, is this good? Is this bad? And what I'm really going for, I let people give a gold star to the drink if it's one of the top 10 best drinks of their life. Okay. Which is a high bar. Yeah. People are drinking, so maybe they forget some of those top 10s too. A little lower, lowers the standard a tad. And yeah, what I'm shooting for, there could be a couple outcomes. Maybe...
Maybe you make a reservation at my bar and I text you the eight most pertinent questions. And I've got enough lead time that the minute you walk in the door, I just hand you something that's your... You know, the queen you grew up with times the, you know, flavor profile you like times your favorite spirit. Maybe you're part of my secret club that we have your profile on, you know.
in our customer relationship database. And I say, okay, well, we were kind of going down a gin rabbit hole last time. Should we keep going that way? Looks like you also kind of appreciate. Some cognacs, maybe we want to dip over that way. And, you know, it's tricky because the ideal cocktail, it's both a moment in time, but it's also...
It evolves over time. What I drink five years ago is not what I drink today or 10 or 20 years ago. And being able to sort of push people one step beyond where they're at today is one thing. I look for in a cocktail experience. And one thing I try to provide to my guests. So even if you maybe don't love the drink in this moment, you look back and say, that was actually a pivotal experience for me.
I hated the first Negroni I drank, but it was a very pivotal experience and I'm glad I had it. My life would have been a lot different. Well, maybe this might be unfair, so please feel free to tell me if it's unfair. But maybe for the last thing, I thought I could ask, could we design a Mindscape podcast cocktail? Sure.
We'd love to, yeah. I'm not going to suggest anything, but I will answer any questions that you have about what that might be. Okay, okay. So kind of the three categories that I find are most... important, you know, you kind of made this differentiation between features and flaws. So you don't want to have a flaw. So you've got to get the amount of alcohol right, or kind of like the concentration of alcohol, the bitterness and the sourness level.
So do you prefer more spirit forward drinks like old fashions, Negroni's, Manhattan's, or do you prefer more drinks where other flavors are more forward, like a daiquiri, a gin and tonic, something like that? Let's go spirit forward. Spirit forward. And then do you like more sourness in your drinks? You know, do you like that citrus element in there? Do you prefer it to be more of a, you know?
let's say like sourness versus bitterness. Do you prefer something more like an old fashioned Manhattan or do you like a bit of citrus juice in there? I know you mentioned the sidecar earlier. No, I'm much more the bitterness than the sourness. Although I'm trying to not just be me, but I'm trying to channel the collective spirit of the Mindscape podcast. But it's still bitterness. Yeah, bitterness.
I think Mindscape, you know, the spirit forward drinks, I feel like lend themselves a little more to kind of sitting, pondering. Exactly. Thinking deeply. You've got to kind of mull it over. Yes. That's right. So yeah, a little bitterness. The sourness is a bit more challenging for me, but the layers of complexity we're definitely looking for.
Okay. So yeah, novelty and complexity I find are big. There you go. You've already said you prefer complexity. If you look at a menu, do you order a drink? Say a drink has an ingredient that you're not familiar with. Do you avoid that drink or do you order that drink? I think the Mindscape spirit would be ordering the thing I've never heard of before. Cool.
You know, and that was a new feature to me when I opened the bar. I would put some weird spirit on there. Oh, have you had baiju before? No. Do you like baiju? I don't know. Yeah. Why are you ordering this drink? Because it's... You know, cause I've never had it. Oh, there you go. Awesome. Here we go. Okay. So we're more on the, you know, so spirit forward, more bittersweet, more complex, more novelty. And then.
We need some aroma element that's going to be kind of our central storytelling feature. So is there some happy scent memory you could share? happy scent memory um maybe a flavor maybe a candy maybe walking in the garden or like the smell of uh grandmother's cooking or... There is something about, you know, being in like a forest or something like that right after the rainfall. Oh, perfect. So there's a word for that, petrichor.
Okay, I didn't know. Which is the scent of, yeah, the earth after the rain. Petra is stone, ichor is blood. So petrichor is like the blood of a stone. Okay, so we're going to make a petrichor. Negroni. Okay. So we're going to have to distill our own gin using vetiver. Okay. Which is this grass that grows in India and Haiti and it smells very much like...
You know, dirt after rainfall. You know, we're going to need some forest elements. I think we kind of get that from the juniper berries with the gin. Let's use, instead of Campari, let's use St. George Bruto, which is also a red, bitter liqueur, but it's got a very prominent fir note, like fir tree. And... And let's use Antica Vermouth, which has kind of this deep, dark, little bit sweet, little bit vanilla note to it. But I think that's going to nicely offset our...
kind of rougher, more aggressive aromatics. So let's do that in equal parts, stir it over an ice cube, and I think we're good to go. Do we need like a twist or anything? I think a little orange peel, you know, expressed over the top never hurts. This sounds perfect. And I have one of the ingredients. I have the antique. I'm going to have to work hard to get the other. Yeah, I'm not going to be able to make my own gin. So off the shelf, what's the closest one can come to that?
Yeah, deep, dark, kind of foresty gin. Boy, let's see. Well, this is a little bit of a different direction, but Mileto gin? is based around tomatoes and it's kind of this very like herbaceous outdoor garden vibe so not quite forest but uh yeah as an intriguing and weird off-the-shelf gin
Yeah, from Italy. Pretty delightful. Intriguing and weird. These are good words to have in the description of our cocktail. So I'm going to try this. I can't try it tonight, but I'm going to try to put it together. I think tonight I'm going to try the... two parts gin, one part vermouth stirred martini that you're recommending. That's even more vermouth than I usually put in there, and I think that I'm over average, but I'm absolutely going to give it a try.
Kevin Peterson, thanks very much for being on the Mindscape podcast. Loved it. Thanks for having me.