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
Oops, I accidentally put too much gin in.
It's fine. No such thing as too much gin, right. The Negroni held up to both colder and warmer temperatures than most cocktails. It held up to both more and less dilution than most cocktails. So... Yeah, I wasn't actually trying to write a book in praise of the Negroni, but that's essentially what I wound up writing.
Yeah, I think balance is kind of what gets you in the door. Like if it's not balanced, send that drink back. Like there's no saving it. So, you know, the way I often describe it when I'm teaching cocktail classes is most people get the ingredients right. You find some recipe in a book, you find it online. Okay, you bought the right gin, you bought the right...
Citrus, you know, I buy the same limes as you, you know, there's not like special bartender limes or something. But what a lot of people don't get right are kind of the engineering variables. So the temperature, the texture and the dilution primarily. And a lot of what that comes down to is did you shake it right or did you stir it right?
And one of the ideas there is when you're shaking or stirring, yes, you're mixing the ingredients, but that's not primarily what you're doing. Shaking for two seconds. will pretty thoroughly mix most ingredients or stirring for a couple seconds.
The way I like to think about that is what you're doing is you're setting the temperature, you're setting the dilution, you're setting the level of aeration. And when you think about it that way, so kind of the ideal shake is about 12 seconds, which is way longer than most home users shake and frankly longer than most bartenders shake.
I've been doing this long enough that now a timer just starts in my head. The minute I start shaking it, I can't stop it. One, two, three. And my body refuses to stop until I hit 12. I'm not saying that's a good thing. I'm just saying it's a thing. And that's how long it takes for enough ice to melt, enough dilution to happen, enough chilling to happen.
And you have to shake it quite hard to integrate air bubbles into the drink. So that's a red flag if you're out on the town and you get a shaken drink and the bartender just kind of lazily, I'll shake this. Okay. The ice is kind of slopping back and forth for a few seconds. Like, let me stop you right there. I'll get a Negroni instead. Yeah.
So yeah, the technique is how you set those engineering variables and with a couple of rules of thumb, which I lay out in the book. But yeah, the biggest one is shake for 12 seconds and shake it hard.
So about an 18-inch shake is ideal.
Indeed. And I would say you could probably get away with shorter. Really what you want is the impact of the ice into the end of the tins. So it's got to travel far enough that you can really kind of slam it, slam the ice into the end. So you get a good.
There's almost like an auditory cue more than a say.
Also true. Yep.
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.
There's a lot to say about martinis. And the thing is, it's a minefield because everybody thinks their version of a martini is the correct version. And there's so many variations out there. And this is a little bit of an age thing. I'm kind of right at the cusp where I drink martinis. I find a lot of guests that are older than me drink martinis.
A lot of guests that are younger than me don't drink martinis. And so normally when somebody comes in and says, make me a martini, I'm like... Tell me what you like in very specific terms. And I can totally do that. Well, I always make it with a quarter ounce of vermouth. I always make it with this, you know, and it's like, I always make it with this gin or that vodka or whatever.
And it's like, yep, I can do that for you. Absolutely. That is not what I would have guessed. So yeah, So that was, yeah, it was, it was actually a little bit of an intentional choice to avoid the martini because there's so many strong opinions there and there's so many opinions that don't line up with each other that I was like,
Maybe I'll just have to write a different book about martinis at some point.
Agreed. Agreed. Yeah. And certainly that's. That's a part of the cocktail world. What glass do you serve the drink in? What color is the drink? I've you know, we don't list the color of the drinks on the menu. I've totally had guests.
you know, husband and wife where the husband had to switch drinks with his wife because his drink was too pink, which sounds silly, but I've, I've witnessed it, you know? And yeah, now I've, you know, I'll say when I got into this world, yeah, I had a bit of that. And at this point I've drank every dainty and pink and whatever drink along the gender spectrum you want to think about.
Showing 61–80 of 173 · page 4 of 9
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