Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 307 | Kevin Peterson on the Theory of Cocktails

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

A lot of science goes into crafting the perfect cocktail. Balancing sweet and bitter notes, providing the right amount of aeration and dilution, getting it to just the right temperature and keeping it that way. And even if you have no interest in cocktails as such, the general principles extend to other activities in art and in life. I talk to scientist-turned-mixologist Kevin Peterson about how to think about the simple magic of a perfect drink. Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/03/03/307-kevin-peterson-on-the-theory-of-cocktails/ Support Mindscape on Patreon. Kevin Peterson received a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan. He is currently co-owner of both Castalia (an experimental craft cocktail bar) and Sfumato Fragrances in Detroit, Michigan. He is the author of Cocktail Theory: A Sensory Approach to Transcendent Cocktails. Mindscape Petrichor Negroni (from the episode) 1 part gin distilled from vetiver (alternative: herbaceous gin such as Moletto) 1 part St. George Bruto Americano 1 part Antica Formula vermouth Stir over an ice cube, express with orange peel (not shown).

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to erase the night before, wherever that happens to be. Instantly covered dark circles and under-eye bags for a brighter, more awake look. This do-it-all formula also contours, corrects, and highlights, all while staying lightweight, crease-resistant, and smooth. It may be the world's greatest eraser. Find your shade of instant eraser concealer at your local retailer. 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'd 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 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, Fumato and Castalia.

I'm going to try to explain this correctly if I understand what's going on. Fumato 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,

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 effective erration, you know, the little bubbles you get your drink and the shaking and how much you do shake it, but also just the application of the scientific method. You know, very similarly to when we had Kenji Lopez-Alte 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 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 do, 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 got to 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 Minescape tries to do. And at the end of the episode, we even come up with a Minescape cocktail that you can try at home. So 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 I started my working life in the food world. I was back a house for some years. I went to culinary school briefly.

I 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. And, yeah, started sucking some money away and then opened a caucus.

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. I had been reading a lot. I had been drinking a lot of cocktails, which isn't quite the same as working. 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 know, 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 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, you're, it's not a gimmick, I think. I mean, you're putting the scientific method to work here. Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of what I do, that, that G-word gimmick is one I'm very careful about, because there is a lot of gimmickery in the, 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, you know, all these little sensors that you have in your nose and your mouth. What are they measuring? What are those signals telling your brain? How can we optimize those signals? Not just the Instagram, you know. 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 to organize what we're talking about here. So let's start with the physicist. But when you say the physicist, 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, 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 Manhattan's. 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. Yeah. Might be fun and ever. 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 daiquary. You know, 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, you know, almost some ideas of like golden ratios of 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 look 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 1Z2Z, it's a very daunting undertaking.

once you start to see those trends, now you can say, oh, well, I know that a piece go 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 now 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 coined it or not. Not my original phrasing that came from a bar called Death and Co. In New York. But, you know, this idea that the different recipes are, you know, essentially sets of ratios and you can sort of sub different ingredients in. That idea has been

around for a long time. But the phrasing 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, 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

spirit should be, that could be lemon, lime, orange grapefruit, that could be honey, maple syrup, sugar, agave syrup. And it, 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. Mr. Potato had it. You know, Mr. Potato had out the lime. Mr. Potato had 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, right? 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 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 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 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 a 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 that 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, you know, 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 horse radish.

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, the more fun it is to actually serve to someone. And they're like, of 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 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, you know, the horseradish root, chopped up, soaked that in alcohol for about two weeks,

straighted out the chunks. And we just had a little dropper bottle where you could, you know, dose in some horseradish to taste. When people turn to telehealth or weight loss, they're looking for real support. That's why more people are choosing orderly meds.com. Orderly meds connects you with real doctors and access to proven GLP1 medications like semaglutide and terseptatide. No guessing, just a more supportive experience.

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This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary, massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science, and what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth? I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yeah, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me and I left it on the mic.

That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to EIRSA, the Audible and IHeart Audio Book Club on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. 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'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 side car is an eighth of an ounce of a lemon. Right. You know, and some drinks are quite robust. You can just kind of, well, poor, well, whatever. a ngroni 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 almost never order old fashions when I go out anymore.

I'll get a mcrony unless I really trust the person behind the bar. So, I mean, that's very interesting. And 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 slug. Loppy, 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. 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 martini's and I could not hide my horror from that. And I normally try to be polite when people are serving days. I can't deal with that. The temperature really matters. And 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. are you when you when you when you talk about the sensitivity of um the taste buds and things like that are you completely empirically driven you've 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 30F at 60F at 90F.

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, 60F, it's like, oh my gosh, this is unbearably sweet. Or a can of Coke, you know, all the ratios are skewed once it's room temperature. The amount of sugar in the can hasn't changed. Yeah. The, you know, the way your brain or taste butt 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 dackeries and you played around and you tasted. I don't even want to know how many dairies you tasted. It seems like a lot. A few hundred might be low thousands. So what is a daughery 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 of fissionados. I think that the lessons go deeper than that. So what is a dacchery and what are the things you varied to sort of be a scientist? Sure. So in what a distinction I do want to make, there's the frozen dachry, which a lot of modern bartenders would consider a bit of an abomination. Right.

The classic dachry is rum, lime, and sugar, shaken with ice. And if you look in 10 different cocktails, 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 a rum, should it be half an ounce of lime, should be three quarters ounce of lime, you know, and they're all within a certain range, but there's, you know, 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.

You know, so I'm looking at a ratio now and not necessarily an absolute number. Sure. 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 than 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 it's considerable. Yeah, which is surprising. It's like, hey, I paid 15 bucks for this and 30% of it. is water. Yeah.

Can you charge me 30% less, please? But, yeah, so within all those variables, you know, there are some acceptable ranges. And, yeah, 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, it 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 daughery. 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. 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 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 $1,500.

yeah there is a section on uncertainty actually did uncertainty so so a couple 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, you know, different than when you're doing it for the sake of your testing. 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, I had a point in different tins and, you know, we masked it out. And yeah,

there's something like a 5 to 10 percent variability in poor. 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. Okay. Yeah. 90% of the people that I talked to fell, well, probably 95. You know, 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 is 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 Dacquery 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, which 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 daughery. You can make a little drier daughery 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 daquiry is a paradigm for a certain kind of cocktail, right? Spirit, citrus, sweet. And then do, 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, you know, 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

ngroni, 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 bans. 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 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 daquery is the template also is the template for. or the gimlet, the whiskey sour, other things like that. And do they behave similarly in the tradeoff plot? Yeah, yeah. So I started by doing a bunch of daqueries and saying, okay, now I've,

and the daquery is a drink that a lot of authors have sort of taken as like, okay, let's analyze the heck out of this. Oh, okay. 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 bees knees, a gimlet, a lot of these sweet and sour drinks are the same template. Well, do they behave the same or like, or is there a different science of the gimlet?

Is there a different science of the bees' knees? And what I found was when you looked at the ingredients in that more generalized sense, spirit, sweetener, citrus, rather than lime specifically or um, 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 a side, it sounds like the idea from biology of a model organism, the idea that everyone studies a daquery over and over again. Like everyone studies little white mice or, you know, sea 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 dacri, I guess that makes perfect. sense. Yeah. And then the, so let's just do one example to make it clear. What is, if that's the

Dacquery template, um, spirit citrus, um, sweetener, then what is the Nogroni template, for example? Yeah. So, so the literal build would be an ounce of gin, an ounce of Kampari, an ounce of sweet vermuth, 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. Hey, everyone, it's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and I-Heart Audio Book Club.

This week on the podcast, I'm sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary, massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science. And what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth? I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yeah, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betrayed.

the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me and I left it on the mic. That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and IHeart Audio Book Club on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can see the idea of balance coming in, right?

because the Kampari is bitter. The bitters are bitter. Amari are bitter. You want something sweet to bounce 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 is too much gin right

the Nogroney held up to both colder and warmer temperatures than most cocktails it held up to both more and less dilution the most cocktails so yeah I wasn't actually trying to write a book in praise of the Nograini groaning, 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, 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 in one of the ideas there is what you, you know, 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 of aeration. And when you think about it that way, so kind of the ideal shake is about 12 seconds, which is way longer than most home users shake and frankly longer than most bartender's 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 I can't, 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 grony instead. So, so yeah, the technique is how you set those engineering variables. And with a couple 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.

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. Yes, let's see 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 an 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, It says, make me a martini. I'm like, uh-oh. Tell me what you 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. It's like, yep, I do that for you. Absolutely. That is not what I would have guessed. So that was, yeah, it was actually a little bit of an intentional choice to, avoid the martini because there's so many strong opinions there.

Yeah. 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. I do 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 fewer, the less vermouth you have, the better until the point where it's just you're, 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, that's a part of the cocktail world. What glass do you serve the drink in?

What color is the drink? I've, you know, we don't list the color of the drinks on the menu. you, I've totally had guests, you know, husband and wife where the husband had to switch drinks with his wife because his drink was too pink, which sounds silly, but I witnessed it, you know, and yeah, now I've, 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 don't, you know, it barely crosses my mind anymore. But yeah,

then with guests, I'm like, okay. People care. Yeah. I don't love the fact that there are the 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 like what, you know, if you ask people to name one cocktail fact, what are they probably going to say? well, it's shaken, not stirred. I've come 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 have,

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. Some really just kind of ducking the question here. But, you know, my martini is basically a Manhattan build. Two-part spirit, one part of 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, shaking and dilution, or sorry, 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. And you, 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 mention texture. How does that work? Yeah, so the air bubbles that you shake in. to the drink. And what they tend to do is boost aroma. So they trap, you know, little aroma molecules or some atomization that happens there. 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 dilutionary 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 boost 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 people 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 Angus syrupitters. And then I would stir that for 10 seconds over a big ice. cube and there's your old fashion.

And when you, 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 fashion, a lot of the aroma is coming from the whiskey. so really what I found there was I had to use better whiskey. Because 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 an 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 share it. You know, and I think, yeah, that's a great way of thinking of it is, and maybe a complimentary idea is a lot of things could be good or bad, could be a flaw or a feature depending on the,

the percentage. So it's almost like the dose makes the poison. You know, 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 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 solventee 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 Piscoe need, 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 erration. 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 $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. Okay. 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'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. When people turn to telehealth for weight loss, they're looking for real support. That's why more people are choosing orderly meds.com.

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Individual results may vary not. Medical advice. Eligibility required. Seasite for details. Hey, everyone, it's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and I Heart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary, massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science, and what happens

when you wake up alone very far from Earth? I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm really. narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yeah, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me and I left it on the mic. That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too.

Listen to EIRSA, the Audible and IHeart Audio Club on the IHart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Given the importance of temperature and the competition between that and dilution, is there any advantage to be gained by like these fake ice cubes? You know, you get like these rocks that don't melt or the classic move of chilling the glass? 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 or 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. sphere is kind of the lowest surface area to volume ratio. There you go, math. 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. Tell somebody a funny story, connect with them in that way. like, that literally does make the enjoyment of the drink that much more. And, 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. things to keep in mind. Yeah, yeah. One of the, you know, 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. And 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, you know, what can perfumery teach bartenders about how to compose better? sense and in the 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 little notes, base 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 in 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. And I like to, you know, basically do another round of optimization on the aroma side. It seems like there would be a natural affinity between wine tasting or winemaking and perfumery. I don't know if that's true, but it's, 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, you know, isn't to say it's not important or it can't be

honed or improved, but it, yeah, you get into more hand-wavy arguments in the And 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 Anne Sophie Barbich, who is a philosopher of smell. Do you know her work? Yeah, I read the book. Smellosophy, right. And it was great, very, very, like, she was brilliant enough to choose that as a specialty

because it's great to have a specialty that nobody else does, right? And she's also 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 person will react either positively or negatively, depending on what's going on elsewhere in their sensorium. 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 when you're balancing or, you know,

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, you know, meant to be consumed more directly. But, but yeah, applying that perfumery mindset to composing the aromatic side of the drink. And, but despite the fact that perfumery is the inspiration, um, the thing I got out most clearly from that section was the music analogy of the, you know, the high notes,

the low notes, the middle notes, the base 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 no words. Right. 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 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, sent pipe tobacco or bonfire and say, okay, yeah, that's more base note. And maybe it's not language you've used. But I think, you know, I've done classes with people and, you know, talk to novices and people are like, okay, yeah, you know, within a half hour, I'm kind of like on the same page with what you're saying. It's not, you know, 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

Great 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, you know, 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. Is it, could you have a good example of where, you know, this perfumery mindset is very helpful in thinking about the cocktail? Well, I guess kind of taking that jazz note idea, so all the, all the aromatics in an old fashion are pretty harmonious. If you're using, say, a darker sugar, those aromatics go nicely with the bourbon or the whiskey notes. 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 sazorac, you're essentially making an old fashioned, but you're putting in a little bit of that black licorice note through the absinth. 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 now all of a sudden it's like a lot fewer people like it. But it's way better. Cesaricler, enormously better than 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 sense 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, you know, which 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 fly here. But 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 Somalié pick a part of 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 gurnhose and this and that. And you're like, you know, you smell the same wine. And you're like, this just smells like wine. It smells like wine. Yeah. But that's a good kind of training. Like that conceptual map actually, I, I say.

expect does help you distinguish between things that otherwise would be, you know, 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 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 on 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 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 of these inputs. And then, you know, the fourth 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 a, inspired them to become cocktail people or at least try some things out. Congratulations. You'll do it. So let's, uh, yeah, let's just be very down to brass tax. Like if you're the typical not too ambitious home mixologist, what are the, what are the things you need? Like, what, what's the most basic thing? What are the, you know, 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 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 daigreen, the nongeroni, 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, okay, well, let me try it with a different whiskey. Let me try it with a different sweetener. Let me try it with the different bitters and kind of build out from comfortable territory. And, you know, I know people that get into this world and there's so many spirits to buy, oh, I want to try one, aviation. Now I got to buy a $35 bottle of crimed violet. It's a problem. Yeah. You use it a course. quarter ounce at a time, you just buy yourself 100 aviations. Do you want to drink 100 aviations? Do your friends, family want to drink? You know, there's better ways,

you know, more economical ways to get into it. And I think either picking, you know, 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 as 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 will I make it? And so, like, as I was writing this, I was like,

oh, man, I'm going to have to write a second book about, you know, 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 gave you a menu and I say,

good luck, read through all these weird ingredients, and maybe I throw you a couple, 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, a couple years. 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 resploid 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, most, you know, it often gets you to the right place, but it's not, it's maybe more reflection of your habits. And well, gin and tonics are easy.

I keep a bottle of gin and 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. 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? So, you know, I had a customer who loved tequila, who loved bittersweet drinks, and who grew up in Belgium and ate these violet candies, 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 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? Like 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 meat and mushroom dishes? Do you like 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 Furnet or Malort, which are all bitter liqueurs. So, you know, I've been burned a few times where some people. He was like, yeah, a little bit of earth. I drink black coffee all the time. I eat green vegetables.

Yeah. And then you give them some capy and they're like, oh, this is terrible. Yeah, okay. Good. 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, all them 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, but people are drinking, so maybe they forget some of those top tens do. Lower is the standard a tad. And yeah, you know, what I'm shooting for, you know, there could be a couple outcomes. 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 Clinton 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 out of gin rabbit hole last time. Should we keep going that way?

looks like you also kind of appreciate some cognates. 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 guess. 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 Nogroni 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 much, Skate 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 I try that I find are most important. You know, you kind of made this different 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, Negronis, Manhattan's, or do you prefer more drinks where other flavors are more forward, like Adac, rea, genitonic, something like that.

Let's go spirit forward. Spirit forward. And then do you like more sourness in your drinks? Do you like that citrus element in there? Do you prefer to be more of a, you know, let's say like sourness versus bitterness. Do you prefer something more like an old-fashioned of 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 like not just be me, but, you know, 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 for 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. Where, you know, you've already said you prefer more complexity. when 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 Minescape 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 Bidju before? No. Do you like Bajou? I don't know. Yeah. Why are you ordering this drink?

Because it's, you know, because I've never had it. 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 like storytelling feature. So is there some happy scent memory you could share? Happy scent memory.

Maybe a flavor, maybe a candy, maybe walking in the garden, or like the smell of 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, Petricor. Okay, I didn't know. Which is the scent of, yeah, the earth after the rain. Petra is stone, Icar is blood. So petricor is like, perfect.

The blood of a stone. Okay, so we're going to make a petrachore, uh, Nogroni. Okay. So, 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. Uh, you know, we're going to need some forest elements. I think we kind of get that from the juniper berries with the, uh, the gin.

Let's use 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 fur note, like for a tree. Yeah. And

and let's use Antica Vermuth, which has kind of this deep, dark, a little bit sweet, a little bit vanilla note to it, but I think that's going to nicely offset our kind of rougher, more aggressive aromatics. We're going to serve that. So let's do that in the whole 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 an errone. 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. I'm not going to be able to make my own. So what, like 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 muletto gin is based around tomatoes, and it's kind of this very like herbaceous outdoor garden vibe. So not quite forest, but 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 of a moose than I usually put it in there. And I think that I'm over average, but I'm absolutely going to give it a try. So Kevin Peterson, thanks very much for being on the Mindscape podcast. Loved it. Thanks for having me. Pasadena, are you ready to see what your money can do?

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