Kevin Peterson
speaker
173 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Kevin Peterson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.
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 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 cocktail bar.
Uh, I mean, I, I'd worked as, 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 I had been reading a lot. I had been drinking a lot of cocktails, which isn't quite the same as working.
But, uh, yeah, uh, read it, 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, um, I think a lot of people that wind up in this industry come to it from the people side.
You get some entry-level job, you work your way up, now you're behind the bar, and then maybe you add some technical details later. I came to it the other way where I had all of the technical skills and none of the people skills. So that was a little bit of a harsh learning curve, but more or less made it.
Yeah, my book is called Cocktail Theory, A Sensory Approach to Transcendent Drinks. And, you know, written in a couple parts. So it's like, how does a physicist think about a cocktail? How does an engineer think about a cocktail? How does a perfumer think about a cocktail? And then how do you put all those pieces together to actually... make a cocktail for a real person.
Yeah, I think a lot of what I do, that G-word gimmick is one I'm very careful about because there is a lot of gimmickry in the cocktail world, a lot of smoke and mirrors, a lot of Instagram-worthy drinks that you don't actually have any interest in drinking, and that's not my interest. I 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.
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, more of the perspective of a physicist than the literal theory. 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? One way to approach cocktails is to say, okay, I like Manhattans.
Let me just dial in the perfect whiskey plus the perfect vermouth plus the perfect bitters and the right ratios and just get one drink really correct. but then you have to do that times all 18,000 classics.
Might be fun. Never, but maybe there's some generalized things we can say where, okay, maybe a martini and a Manhattan have some similarity because they're both a spirit of vermouth, a dash of bitters, depending on how you make your martinis, of course, you know, sweet and sour drinks, uh, a margarita and a gimlet and a daiquiri.
They have a spirit element, they have a sweetener element, they have a citrus element. And when you start to look at it in that more general sense, there are some trends that come out and almost some ideas like golden ratios of taste inputs, how do you compose a scent? So that's kind of what I mean by the physicist approach to the cocktail.
Yeah. And I think, you know, when you're working in this world and you're trying to create new drinks or you're trying to memorize a bunch of drinks, when you're doing it onesie twosie, it's a very daunting undertaking. Once you start to see those trends, now you can say, oh, well, I know that, um, 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.
Not my original phrasing that came from a bar called Death & 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? We don't need it to look for any other names.
It's so intuitive. It's so catchy. But yeah, the idea being you've got a Mr. Potato Head doll. You can put in the googly eyes. You can put in the sunglasses eyes. You can put in the angry eyes, the happy eyes. As long as there's eyes where the eyes are supposed to be, and a nose and a mouth where they're supposed to be, it looks like... I mean, weirdly, a humanoid potato.
And the idea is if you have a sweet and sour cocktail, as long as you've got a sweet component where the sweet should be, sour where the sour should be, spirit where the spirit should be, that could be lemon, lime, orange, grapefruit. That could be honey, maple syrup, sugar, agave syrup. And it unlocks this... creativity because now you can be more creative in how you combine things.
Oh, I, you know, even if you're at home and you're like, well, I want to make this drink that calls for lime, but I only have orange. That's fine. You know, Mr. Potato Head out the lime, Mr. Potato Head in the orange. You got a delicious drink right there.
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.
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