307 | Kevin Peterson on the Theory of Cocktails

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 https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll. Kevin Peterson received a Ph. D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan. He is currently co-owner of both Castalia https://www.castaliacocktails.com/ (an experimental craft cocktail bar) and Sfumato Fragrances https://sfumatofragrances.com/ in Detroit, Michigan. He is the author of Cocktail Theory: A Sensory Approach to Transcendent Cocktails https://sfumatofragrances.com/products/cocktail-theory. Mindscape Petrichor Negroni (from the episode) 1 part gin distilled from vetiver https://www.britannica.com/plant/vetiver (alternative: herbaceous gin such as Moletto https://www.molettogin.com/) 1 part St. George Bruto Americano https://stgeorgespirits.com/spirits/bruto-americano/ 1 part Antica Formula https://www.carpano.com/en/prodotto/antica-formula-2/?age-verified=d1e48f1b60 vermouth Stir over an ice cube, express with orange peel (not shown).

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:02Sean Carroll?

  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.

• 1:45Sean Carroll?

  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,

• 2:26Sean Carroll?

  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 gonna try to explain this correctly if I understand what's going on. Sfumato 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.

• 3:06Sean Carroll?

  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 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 gonna experiment.

• 3:48Sean Carroll?

  You're not gonna say, "Oh, I found this wonderful old book that has the best recipe in it." You're gonna 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 gonna get into, the theory of cocktails and also the experiment of cocktails. Now, I know perfectly well that there's gonna 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

• 4:31Sean Carroll?

  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

• 5:16Sean Carroll?

  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.

• 5:38Sean Carroll?

  Kevin Peterson, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

• 5:42Sean Carroll?

  You know, it reminds me of a time when I talked to a mixologist, who is 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?

• 6:14Speaker 03

  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, 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.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  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 socking some money away and then opened a cocktail bar.

• 7:06Sean Carroll?

  Okay, I mean, that's a pretty big leap. Did you, so had you worked in a bar before?

• 7:11Speaker 03

  Uh, I mean, I had worked as a cook in places that served alcohol, but I had not been a bartender before. I had not, uh, you know, not been kind of front of house before.

• 7:21Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 7:21Speaker 03

  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 uh, yeah, I read a book called Liquid Intelligence, which I would kind of describe as the scientist's or engineer's guide to the cocktail and became really enamored with the nuances of it and

• 7:42Speaker 03

  you know, I think a lot of people that wind up in this industry come to it from the people's side.

• 7:47Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 7:47Speaker 03

  You know, you, 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's skills. So that was a little bit of a harsh learning curve, but uh, more or less made it.

• 8:06Sean Carroll?

  I mean, it's clear from your book, actually tell, tell us your book. Do you have a book out?

• 8:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, uh, my book is called Cocktail Theory: A Sensory Approach to Transcendent Drinks. And, you know, written in a couple of 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?

• 8:35Sean Carroll?

  And it's very clear, not just that you have an engineering background, but you have an academic background, but 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.

• 8:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, you know, 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, 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 wanna, 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.

• 9:31Sean Carroll?

  Yeah. I know it well. And I like the, you know, 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.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, more of the perspective of a physicist than the literal physics. So, so what, 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.

• 10:36Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  Might be a fun endeavor, 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 daiquiri. 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 like golden ratios of taste inputs, how do you compose a scent? So, so that's kind of what I mean by the physicist approach to the cocktail.

• 11:19Sean Carroll?

  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, you're sort of, what, 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.

• 11:45Speaker 03

  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 one z, two z, it's a very daunting undertaking. Once you start to see those trends, now you can say, oh, 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 now I can make any of these drinks, you know, immediately.

• 12:14Sean Carroll?

  And I have to say that I'm not sure the mixologists are quite as good as, 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.

• 12:28Speaker 03

  Uh, not, not my original phrasing that came from a bar called Death and Co. Uh, in New York. But, um, you know, the, 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, but the phrasing, uh, Mr. Potato Head. As soon as I heard it, I was like, why, you know?

• 12:53Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  We don't need it to look for any other names. This, 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, 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.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  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.

• 13:54Sean Carroll?

  Mm hmm.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  Mr. Potato Head, you know, Mr. Potato Head out the lime, Mr. Potato Head in the orange. You got a delicious drink right there.

• 14:02Sean Carroll?

  I gotta say, the, um, I, I do have your book and I, I've been looking at it and it influenced one choice that I made. I was, I have a friend who comes over and like, 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, uh, you know, cognac, uh, 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. Uh, 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.

• 14:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. You know, one of the ways I think of it is getting, 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, 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

• 15:28Speaker 03

  the story of those bees through the cocktail.

• 15:32Sean Carroll?

  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?

• 16:00Speaker 03

  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 of 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 horseradish.

• 16:23Sean Carroll?

  Oh, my God. That does not sound good.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  Which does not sound good, right? And it's like, it's more, it's the more, how should I say? The more terrible it sounds, the more fun it is to actually serve to someone. And they're like, 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.

• 16:53Sean Carroll?

  So wait, what was the entire drink that involved both blueberries and horseradish? Do you remember?

• 16:57Speaker 03

  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, you know, the horseradish root chopped up, soaked it in alcohol for about two weeks, straightened out the chunks and we just had a little dropper bottle where you could, you know, dose in some horseradish to taste.

• 17:22Speaker 00

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• 17:51Sean Carroll?

  I do think that maybe this idea of like an eyedropper with little special things is the, is the secret that, 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?

• 18:10Speaker 03

  A few hundred. And, 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.

• 18:30Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  You know, and, and some drinks are quite robust. You can just kind of, ah, pour, wow, 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.

• 18:48Speaker 03

  Which is part of the reason I I almost never order Old Fashioned when I go out anymore. I'll get groggy unless I really trust the person behind the bar.

• 18:56Sean Carroll?

  So, I mean, that's it'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 sloppy. Others, you had better get it exactly right, or it goes dramatically wrong very quickly.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  Uh, 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 but it's something that I explored 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.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  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.

• 19:48Sean Carroll?

  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. But 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.

• 20:09Speaker 03

  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 30 F or 35 F, and if it's at 70 F, it's not the right drink anymore.

• 20:35Sean Carroll?

  Are you, when you, when you, when you talk about the sensitivity of 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?

• 20:54Speaker 03

  I have read about how taste buds work. You know, 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?

• 21:10Speaker 03

  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, 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, but

• 21:35Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 21:35Speaker 03

  the, you know, the way your brain or taste bud interprets that has changed a lot.

• 21:40Sean Carroll?

  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.

• 21:55Speaker 03

  Few hundred might be low thousands.

• 21:58Sean Carroll?

  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, the lessons go deeper than that. So, so what is a daiquiri? And what are the things you varied to sort of be a scientist?

• 22:15Speaker 03

  Sure. So, so in what, you know, 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.

• 22:24Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 22:26Speaker 03

  The classic daiquiri is rum, lime and sugar, 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, 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, where they're good. So I, I held two ounces of rum constant. You know, so I'm looking at a ratio now and not necessarily an absolute number.

• 23:07Sean Carroll?

  Sure.

• 23:08Speaker 03

  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.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  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 quarters 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, as you're shaking the drink, that ice is melting. When you pour everything into the tin initially, we would call that zero percent dilution. As you're shaking, if, if you just shake a normal drink for 10 to 12 seconds, you're going to get about 30% dilution.

• 23:56Sean Carroll?

  So it's considerable.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, which, which is surprising. It's like, hey, I paid 15 bucks for this and 30% of this is water.

• 24:04Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 24:05Speaker 03

  Can you charge me 30% less, please?

• 24:09Speaker 03

  But, uh, yeah, so, so within all those variables, you know, there, there are some acceptable ranges and.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  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, uh, 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.

• 24:58Sean Carroll?

  And one thing is, you know, the, 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?

• 25:24Speaker 03

  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 grab 1500 dac. So, um, yeah, there is a section on uncertainty, actually, data 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? Um, I, 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?

• 26:09Speaker 03

  How, you know, 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, there's something like a five to 10% variability in pour, um, pour level. So, so yeah, there's some analysis there. And basically what I said was, um, you know, there, 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.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  90% of the people that I talked to fell, 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, uh, you know, so don't, don't take it as, okay, down to the last milligram. But, 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?

• 27:37Speaker 03

  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.

• 27:50Sean Carroll?

  And just for the audience, which is, 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.

• 28:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So, so it's a nod, I mentioned a little bit earlier, but that 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.

• 28:39Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  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.

• 28:55Sean Carroll?

  And then, given, 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. 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?

• 29:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So, 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, and what I found was that those more complex drinks tended to have wider tolerability bands.

• 29:50Sean Carroll?

  Oh, that's interesting. That's exactly the opposite of what I would have guessed.

• 29:53Speaker 03

  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.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  Coriander in there.

• 30:07Sean Carroll?

  There's enough other stuff to make it good.

• 30:09Speaker 03

  When, when it's just, yeah, it's like in the most simple drinks, there's nowhere to hide.

• 30:14Sean Carroll?

  Okay, I see. That does make sense now that you, now that you explain it good. And so, but the daiquiri is, the, the template also is the template for the gimlet, the whiskey sour, other things like that. And do they behave similarly in the, in the trade-off plot?

• 30:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So, so I started by doing a bunch of daiquiris and saying, okay, now I've, and, and, 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.

• 30:42Sean Carroll?

  Oh, okay.

• 30:43Speaker 03

  So, so I took that as like, okay, well, if I'm gonna write a book, this is kind of where it's gotta start. And so, so I did all this analysis, but then I said, yeah, as you mentioned, okay, a bee's knees, a gimlet, uh, 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 bee's knees? And what I found was when you look at the ingredients in that more generalized scents, spirit, sweetener, citrus, rather than lime specifically, orum specifically, a lot of those plots actually fall directly or almost directly on top of each other.

• 31:24Sean Carroll?

  That's good. I mean, that, that, it's a

• 31:26Speaker 03

  Reassuring, right?

• 31:27Sean Carroll?

  Right, reassuring, so we're on the right track here, yeah. And also, just as a, as a aside, it sounds like the idea from biology of a model organism. Um, the idea that everyone studies a daiquiri over and over again, like everyone studies little white mice or, you know, 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.

• 31:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:55Sean Carroll?

  And then, the, so, let, let's just do one example to make it clear. What is, i- if that's the daiquiri template, um, spirit, citrus, um, sweetener, then what is the Negroni template, for example?

• 32:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, 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, even within a single category, sweet vermouth, there's a lot of variation in sweetness or dryness.

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• 33:09Sean Carroll?

  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.

• 33:20Speaker 03

  Yep. Yeah. And, and like I mentioned, it was, 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's 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.

• 33:50Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 33:51Speaker 03

  Hey, you know what?

• 33:52Sean Carroll?

  No such thing as too much gin, right?

• 33:56Speaker 03

  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.

• 34:13Sean Carroll?

  What, so what are the things we're looking for? I mean, if we're inventing the, 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, of things that you care about?

• 34:31Speaker 03

  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.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  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.

• 35:04Speaker 03

  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 of seconds. What 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, so kind of the ideal shake is about 12 seconds,

• 35:49Speaker 03

  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 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, 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, 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,

• 36:30Speaker 03

  "Oh, 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.

• 36:43Speaker 03

  So, so yeah, the, 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.

• 36:55Sean Carroll?

  And you actually filmed yourself, so you knew how far you were shaking it back and forth?

• 37:00Speaker 03

  True.

• 37:01Sean Carroll?

  And, and what is the ideal amount?

• 37:05Speaker 03

  Uh, so about, about a 18 inch shake is ideal.

• 37:10Sean Carroll?

  That's serious. I think so. That's like a long distance and a lot of time, like your, your cocktail has to travel quite far to really get to the perfect point.

• 37:18Speaker 03

  Indeed. And, and I, 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

• 37:33Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 37:34Speaker 03

  You know, there's almost like an auditory cue more than a say.

• 37:38Sean Carroll?

  Which also means that you don't want your shaker to be too full of liquid.

• 37:42Speaker 03

  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.

• 37:52Sean Carroll?

  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, um, uh, intentional choice, or it's just that there's not that much to say about martinis.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  There's a lot to say about martinis. And the thing is there, it's a minefield because everybody thinks their version of a martini, the correct version. And there, there's so many variations out there. And then 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.

• 38:34Sean Carroll?

  Ah.

• 38:34Speaker 03

  And, you know, and, and so normally when somebody comes in and says, make me a martini, I'm like,

• 38:41Sean Carroll?

  Uh oh.

• 38:42Speaker 03

  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, 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. Uh, that is not what I would have guessed. So.

• 39:05Speaker 03

  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.

• 39:12Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 39:13Speaker 03

  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.

• 39:21Sean Carroll?

  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 you know, 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.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  Agreed, agreed. Yeah. And, and, and certainly, that's, that's a part of the cocktail world. What, what glass do you serve the drink in? What color is the drink? I've, I've, you know, we don't list the color of the drinks on the menu. I've totally had guests, you know, husband and wife, where the husband had to switch drinks with his wife because his drink was-

• 40:15Sean Carroll?

  Too pink?

• 40:17Speaker 03

  Which sounds silly, but I've witnessed it, you know, and, uh,

• 40:23Speaker 03

  yeah, now I, you know,

• 40:26Speaker 03

  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, okay.

• 40:42Sean Carroll?

  People care, yeah.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  I don't love the fact that there are the gender connotations with drinks and glasses, but it's reality.

• 40:50Sean Carroll?

  And do you have any feelings on the shaken versus stirred question vis a vis the martini?

• 40:57Speaker 03

  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.

• 41:08Speaker 03

  And

• 41:09Sean Carroll?

  I've gone back and forth myself. Let me just say, like, I do, I do now have a belief, but I'm very willing to change my mind about this particular question.

• 41:18Speaker 03

  The, 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 gonna do.

• 41:29Speaker 03

  You know, my opinion is to stir it.

• 41:34Speaker 03

  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, but

• 42:08Speaker 03

  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.

• 42:24Sean Carroll?

  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.

• 42:35Speaker 03

  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.

• 42:59Sean Carroll?

  But you also mentioned texture. How does that work?

• 43:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the 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 some 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 I've done it both ways and it's like, oh, wow, that's.

• 43:27Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 43:27Speaker 03

  You know, you 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 and the other thing that it does is it uh 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. Uh, so so as a weird thought experiment, I said, well. Could you make a shaken old fashioned?

• 44:07Sean Carroll?

  Mm hmm.

• 44:07Speaker 03

  That's balanced, which again, most people would say terrible abomination.

• 44:12Sean Carroll?

  Um. Sorry, sorry. Tell people, tell people what an old fashioned has in it.

• 44:18Speaker 03

  So the way that I build an old fashioned is two ounces of whiskey. Usually something in the twenty five to thirty dollar range. A quarter ounce of simple syrup and three dashes of Angus syrup bitters. And and then I would stir that for ten seconds over a big ice cube. And there's your old fashioned. And when you, if 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.

• 44:53Sean Carroll?

  Hmm.

• 44:55Speaker 03

  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 if like, you know, what 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, you know, a quick, quick tweak. It's, 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 forty, fifty dollar bottle. Because the, the aromatic profile of an iser whiskey is just more pleasant. And that's what you're playing up.

• 45:39Sean Carroll?

  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 exquisite ness when you get more expensive, but fewer flaws.

• 45:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, that's a, that's a great way of saying it. That's, that's not my quote, but maybe.

• 46:02Sean Carroll?

  You're welcome.

• 46:08Speaker 03

  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 are could be, 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, it's made the drink terrible. So for instance, one of the, the big compounds in whiskey is called ethyl acetate, which has a little bit of a green apple note.

• 46:53Speaker 03

  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, once it crosses that threshold, you start to say, oh, there's kind of a solvent nail polish remover like off note in this whiskey. Uh, 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. Um, 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

• 47:38Speaker 03

  a feature instead of a flaw.

• 47:39Sean Carroll?

  Good, good. So I, I'm remembering we need to close the loop on the texture of the martini and how it relates to the aeration.

• 47:49Speaker 03

  Right. So if you have a stirred martini recipe that you find to be balanced, uh, 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.

• 48:20Sean Carroll?

  And 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, when you shake it.

• 48:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. Texture, I'm mostly meaning the, the amount of air bubbles that are included.

• 48:33Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 48:33Speaker 03

  And, and what I found was that, um, it, 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.

• 49:26Sean Carroll?

  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 are that don't melt or the classic move of chilling the glass?

• 49:44Speaker 03

  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.

• 50:23Sean Carroll?

  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?

• 50:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, there is a surface area consideration there. You know, sphere is kind of the lowest surface area to volume ratio, so.

• 50:47Sean Carroll?

  There you go, math.

• 50:48Speaker 03

  And the, you know, and the visual component can't be denied, like, you know, most of my books 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.

• 51:21Sean Carroll?

  No, no, but, you know, 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. I don't, I, 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.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. One of, 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. 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.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  That's not how most people think of it, but you know, what, uh, what can perfumery teach bartenders about how to compose better scents? 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 middle 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, an iterative analytical approach to building a fragrance.

• 53:10Speaker 03

  You get the drink balanced, you taste it, it smells pretty good, you say, okay.

• 53:14Sean Carroll?

  Let's go with that.

• 53:18Speaker 03

  And I, I like to, you know, basically do another round of optimization on the aromaside.

• 53:26Sean Carroll?

  It seems like there'd be a natural affinity between wine tasting or wine making 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.

• 53:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, that, I mean, that, that's really the tricky part is that scent is so complex. In, 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 smells 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, um, 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

• 54:26Speaker 03

  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, to scent composition.

• 54:45Sean Carroll?

  I did do an interview once with Anne-Sophie Barvitch, who is a philosopher of smell. Do you know her work?

• 54:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I read the book.

• 54:54Sean Carroll?

  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.

• 55:26Speaker 03

  Absolutely, absolutely. There, there's a Chinese spirit called Baijiu that has some molecules that appear both in foot fungus and in Parmesan cheese.

• 55:37Sean Carroll?

  Yes, exactly.

• 55:38Speaker 03

  You have to be very careful which thing you're going to say it smells like.

• 55:43Speaker 03

  You know, yeah.

• 55:44Sean Carroll?

  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, or, you know, deciding what plays nicely with other things in the cocktails.

• 56:06Speaker 03

  Correct, correct. I mean, there, 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.

• 56:26Sean Carroll?

  And, but, but despite the fact that perfumery is the inspiration, the, 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, the middle notes, the bass notes.

• 56:40Speaker 03

  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, 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 smell words.

• 57:05Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 57:05Speaker 03

  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, wintry scent, pipe tobacco or bonfire and say, okay, yeah, that's more bass 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, talked 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.

• 57:50Speaker 03

  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?

• 57:59Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 58:00Speaker 03

  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, you know, kind of throws some people, but maybe that's what makes it interesting.

• 58:19Sean Carroll?

  And so let's, let's, uh, make it tangible with some kind of example is that could you have a good example of where, you know, this perfumery mindset is very helpful in thinking about the cocktail?

• 58:32Speaker 03

  Well, I guess kind of taking that jazz note idea. So, so all the, 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. 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.

• 58:56Speaker 03

  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, uh, 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.

• 59:16Sean Carroll?

  I like that. Yeah.

• 59:17Speaker 03

  And now all of a sudden it's like a lot fewer people like it.

• 59:22Sean Carroll?

  But it's way better. Sazerac is enormously better than old fashions. I'm sorry. I guess my musical tastes are showing through here. Yeah.

• 59:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:31Sean Carroll?

  And, uh, but I do worry about myself. Like, yeah, I have not thought that much about the, uh, 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?

• 59:50Speaker 03

  There, 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 the 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.

• 1:00:28Sean Carroll?

  I see. Okay.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  You make better verbal connections. You have a more rich vocabulary of description. So yeah, you watch, you know, a sommelier 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 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.

• 1:00:52Sean Carroll?

  It smells like wine. Yeah.

• 1:00:53Speaker 03

  But.

• 1:00:55Sean Carroll?

  But that's a good kind of training, like that conceptual map, actually, I suspect does help you distinguish between things that otherwise would be, you know, just lumped together somehow.

• 1:01:06Speaker 03

  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 rye? Is this a weed? Is this a whatever? And it's.

• 1:01:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a different experience when when you're not trained in that world. It can feel overwhelming because yeah, it's it's just a bunch of random stimuli. 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, picture these inputs.

• 1:02:11Sean Carroll?

  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 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

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  Congratulations. You'll do it.

• 1:02:34Sean Carroll?

  So let's, you know, let's just be very down to brass tacks. Like, if you're the typical not-too-ambitious home mixologist, what are the what are the things you need? Like, what is the most basic thing? What are the, you know, spirits you should have in your liquor cabinet?

• 1:02:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:03:03Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:03:18Speaker 03

  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 dai green, the Negroni, 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 1,000 different spirits and I'm just going to work my way through one by one, good luck.

• 1:03:46Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  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 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 a different bitters and kind of build out from comfortable territory. And.

• 1:04:14Speaker 03

  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 gotta buy a $35 bottle of Crim de Violet.

• 1:04:23Sean Carroll?

  It's a problem. Yeah.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  You get a 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, there's better ways, uh, you know, more, 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

• 1:05:08Speaker 03

  explore a row or explore a column rather than trying to just explore the entire table off the bat.

• 1:05:15Sean Carroll?

  That makes perfect sense. Yeah. But, uh, as a good contrast to that, if you are a professional bartender, mixologist, bar owner, um, you can be more ambitious. So I thought, uh, I would love to hear more about the Cocktail Genome Project. Probably not as, as well funded as the Human Genome Project, but, uh, maybe, maybe we'll bring more pleasure to more people. I don't know.

• 1:05:38Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, the Cocktail Genome Project. So, so really as I was writing, uh, my book, Cocktail Theory, that was really like, how do you, how do you create the perfect drink? Whether it's a gin and tonic or a Collins or a whiskey sour or a 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 like, as I was writing this, I was like, oh, man, I'm gonna have to write a second book about, you know, how do you match a drink to a person? And 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.

• 1:06:22Speaker 03

  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, 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 if you told me about your preferences?

• 1:06:59Sean Carroll?

  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.

• 1:07:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, if you go to the doctor and they say, well, here's the menu. Do you have Russell-Weck syndrome? Do you have leprosy? Do you have gonorrhea? You're like, I think.

• 1:07:14Sean Carroll?

  That's not the way it works. Yeah.

• 1:07:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, so flipping that script in, in the, the key for me has been, well, what are the questions that I should ask? Um, 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, it often gets you to the right place, but it's not. It, it's maybe more reflection of your habits and 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.

• 1:07:53Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 1:07:54Speaker 03

  Maybe if I asked you the right questions, I would realize, oh, actually, you know, you don't like the bubbles. You like 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, um.

• 1:08:29Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:08:52Speaker 03

  But it, you know, I was able to kind of piece together these components of flavor to ideally suit him and he loved it.

• 1:09:01Sean Carroll?

  And so how, 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?

• 1:09:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, so it follows a lot of the same thinking of my book where I decompose the flavor,

• 1:09:22Speaker 03

  you know, 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, 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, you know, meat in mushroom dishes? Do you like, even, 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.

• 1:10:07Speaker 03

  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, a little bitter. I drink black coffee all the time and I eat green vegetables. And then you give them some Campari and they're like, oh, this is terrible.

• 1:10:24Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, okay, good. There's, there's subdivisions there, yeah.

• 1:10:27Speaker 03

  And, you know, so, 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.

• 1:10:52Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 1:10:54Speaker 03

  Which is a high bar, but people are drinking, so maybe they forget some of those top 10s too. Lower, lowers the standard a tad.

• 1:11:05Speaker 03

  And, and yeah, you know, what I'm, what I'm shooting for, you know, there, there could be a couple of 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 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, 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.

• 1:11:49Speaker 03

  Maybe we want to, you know, 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 drank 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.

• 1:12:34Speaker 03

  My life would have been a lot different had I not.

• 1:12:37Sean Carroll?

  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?

• 1:12:48Speaker 03

  Sure, would love to, yeah.

• 1:12:49Sean Carroll?

  Uh, I'm not gonna suggest anything, but I will answer any questions that you have about what that might be.

• 1:12:55Speaker 03

  Okay, okay. Um, so, so kind of the three categories I try that I find are most

• 1:13:04Speaker 03

  important, you know, you kind of made this difference between features and flaws. So you don't want to have a flaw. So you gotta 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 Fashioned, 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?

• 1:13:28Sean Carroll?

  Let's go spirit-forward.

• 1:13:30Speaker 03

  Spirit-forward. Um, and then do you like more sourness in your drinks? Uh, you know, do you like that citrus element in there? Do you prefer to be more of a, um,

• 1:13:44Speaker 03

  you know, um,

• 1:13:47Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:13:57Sean Carroll?

  No, I'm, 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.

• 1:14:12Speaker 03

  I think Mindscape, you know, uh, the spirit-forward drinks, I feel like lend themselves a little more to kind of sitting, pondering.

• 1:14:19Sean Carroll?

  Exactly, thinking deeply.

• 1:14:21Speaker 03

  You gotta kind of mull it over.

• 1:14:23Sean Carroll?

  Yes, that's right. So yeah, a little, little bitterness, like the sourness is a bit more challenging for me, but the layers of complexity we're definitely looking for.

• 1:14:34Speaker 03

  Okay, so, so yeah, novelty and complexity I find are big.

• 1:14:37Sean Carroll?

  There you go.

• 1:14:38Speaker 03

  Where, um, you know, you, you've already said you prefer more complexity. When, if you look at a menu, do you order a drink?

• 1:14:48Speaker 03

  Uh, say, say a drink has an ingredient that you are not familiar with. Do you avoid that drink? Or do you order that drink?

• 1:14:54Sean Carroll?

  I think the Mindscape spirit would be ordering the thing I've never heard of before.

• 1:14:59Speaker 03

  Cool.

• 1:15:01Speaker 03

  You know, and that, that was a new feature to me when I opened the bar. I, I would put some weird spirit on there. Oh, have you had Baiju before? No? Do you like Bajiu? I don't know.

• 1:15:11Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:12Speaker 03

  Why are you ordering this drink? Cause it's, you know, cause I've never had it.

• 1:15:15Sean Carroll?

  There you go.

• 1:15:17Speaker 03

  Awesome. Here we go. Um, 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?

• 1:15:38Sean Carroll?

  Happy scent memory?

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  Maybe a flavor, maybe a candy, maybe walking in the garden or like the smell of a grandmother's cooking or.

• 1:15:51Sean Carroll?

  There is something about, you know, being in like a, a forest or something like that right after the rainfall.

• 1:15:59Speaker 03

  Oh, perfect. So, so there's a word for that. Petrichor.

• 1:16:03Sean Carroll?

  Okay. I didn't know.

• 1:16:04Speaker 03

  Which is, which is the scent of, yeah, the earth after the rain. Petra is stone, Icar is blood. So Petrichor is like.

• 1:16:12Sean Carroll?

  Perfect.

• 1:16:13Speaker 03

  The blood of a stone. Okay. So we, we're going to make a Petrichor Negroni.

• 1:16:19Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 1:16:21Speaker 03

  So, so we're going to have to distill our own gin using vetiver.

• 1:16:25Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 1:16:25Speaker 03

  Which is this grass that grows in India and Haiti, and it smells very much like, you know, dirt after rainfall.

• 1:16:35Speaker 03

  You know, we're going to need some forest elements. I think we kind of get that from the juniper berries with the, uh,

• 1:16:42Speaker 03

  the gin.

• 1:16:45Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:16:55Sean Carroll?

  Oh, good tree. Yeah.

• 1:16:58Speaker 03

  And, uh,

• 1:17:01Speaker 03

  and let's use.

• 1:17:05Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:17:20Sean Carroll?

  We're gonna serve that.

• 1:17:21Speaker 03

  Let's do that in parts, stir it over an ice cube, and I think we're good to go.

• 1:17:24Sean Carroll?

  Do we need like a twist or anything?

• 1:17:27Speaker 03

  I think a little orange peel, you know, expressed over the top never hurts, never really.

• 1:17:33Sean Carroll?

  This sounds perfect, and I have one of the ingredients. I have the Antica. I'm gonna have to work hard to get the other.

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

  I'll have to make it out of her gin, but.

• 1:17:40Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, I'm not gonna be able to make my own gin. So what, like, like off the shelf, what's the closest one can come to that?

• 1:17:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, deep, dark, kind of foresty gin. Um.

• 1:17:55Speaker 03

  Boy, let's see. Well, this is a little bit of a different direction, but Miletto 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, pretty delightful.

• 1:18:16Sean Carroll?

  Intriguing and weird. These are good words to have in the description of our cocktail. So I'm gonna try this. I can't try it tonight, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to put it together. I think tonight I'm gonna try the two-parts gin, one-part vermouth stirred martini that you're recommending. That's, that's even more vermouth than I usually put in there, and I think that I'm over average, but I'm absolutely gonna give it a try. So Kevin Peterson, thanks very much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.

• 1:18:42Speaker 03

  Loved it. Thanks for having me.

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