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
But then where more of the storytelling, more of the intrigue comes in is on the aroma side where to the tongue, honey is just a sweetness, but to the nose, there could be floral elements. There could be some caramelized elements. There could be you know, whatever the bees were eating. Now you're telling the story of those bees through the cocktail.
Yeah. Yeah. There, there's an idea in, 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 horseradish.
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.
And then it had a blueberry, amaro, and we made a tincture out of horseradish. So we just took the horseradish root, chopped up, soaked that in alcohol for about two weeks, straightened out the chunks, and we just had a little dropper bottle where you could dose in some horseradish to taste.
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, like you were saying with the sidecar. Maybe the difference between a great sidecar and a good sidecar is an eighth of an ounce of lemon. Right. And some drinks are quite robust. You can just kind of pour, whatever.
A Negroni is going to be good almost no matter what you do. An old-fashioned really is balanced on a knife edge in terms of the ratio of bitters to sweet to spirit, which is part of the reason I almost never order Old Fashions when I go out anymore. I'll get a Negroni unless I really trust the person behind the bar.
It's not a theory I've seen in the literature. The literature being a few hundred cocktail books that I own. But it's something that I explored in my book. And in terms of temperature, in terms of dilution, some drinks really have to be cold to be good. Some drinks really die quickly once that ice starts to melt.
You know, gin and tonics, Collins style drinks, like once that ice starts to go, it really falls off a cliff. Some drinks can melt a little bit more and they kind of stay reasonable further into that sort of melty zone.
Well, yeah, sometimes you got to show people how it's wrong to let them appreciate how it's right. 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.
I have read about how taste buds work. You know, I've, I've done a little bit of testing. It didn't make it into the book, but you know, say what is the optimal sugar concentration at 30 F at 60 F at 90 F. But, but I think just anecdotally, you probably know the answers to a lot of these, like the amount of sugar and ice cream is great when the ice cream is frozen.
If you take, you know, once that ice cream melts and it's at, whatever, even 50, 60 F, it's like, oh my gosh, this is unbearably sweet. Or a can of Coke, you know, all the ratios are skewed once it's room temperature. The amount of sugar in the can hasn't changed, but the, you know, the way your brain or taste bud interprets that has changed a lot.
A few hundred might be low thousands.
Sure. 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. 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 they're all within a certain range, but... 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.
So I'm looking at a ratio now and not necessarily an absolute number. But I said, okay, we'll do a quarter ounce lime, quarter ounce sugar, and then we'll vary everything in quarter ounce amounts until the drink is terrible in some direction. And I wound up with a range where I said, okay, you know, kind of the ideal is two ounces of rum, three quarter lime, three quarter simple syrup.
But there's a little bit of wiggle room on either side, a little bit more in this direction, a little bit less in that direction. I then did again with temperature and said, okay, where is it ideal? I did it again with dilution. So as you're shaking the drink, that ice is melting, right? 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% is water? Yeah. Can you charge me 30% less, please? But yeah, so within all those variables, 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 wanna be. There were some other points where I was like, oh boy, we're right on the edge here. So when you normally shake a cocktail, turns out about 35% dilution is where you kind of fall off that cliff.
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