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
And I, I don't, you know, it barely crosses my mind anymore, but yeah. Then with guests, I'm like, Oh, okay. People care. Yeah. I don't love the fact that there are the gender connotations with drinks and glasses, but it's reality.
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.
So, I guess my first answer would be, well, how do you take your martini? Shaken or stirred? Okay, great. That's exactly what I'm going to do. You know, my opinion is to stir it. And I would 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? 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, you know, my martini is basically a Manhattan build.
Two part spirit, one part vermouth, 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.
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 Yeah. So you're just picking a point along kind of a dialed in line, colder and more diluted or less cold, less diluted.
Yeah. So 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. And then they pop when you drink and go up into your nose. And And this is a really noticeable effect. You might think it'd be pretty minor. I've done it both ways. And it's like, oh, wow.
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 the other thing that it does is it inhibits some of your tasting of the drink, meaning some of those air bubbles cling to your tongue and basically it sort of blocks some of the liquid from interacting with taste buds. So the shaking boosts aroma and drops the level of taste. So as a weird thought experiment, I said, well, could you make a shaken old fashioned that's balanced?
which again, most people would say terrible abomination.
So the way that I build an old fashioned is two ounces of whiskey, usually something in the 25 to $30 range, a quarter ounce of simple syrup and three dashes of Angostura bitters. And, and then I would stir that for 10 seconds over a big ice cube. And there's your old fashioned.
And if you wanted to create that same balance in a shaken drink, so because shaking inhibits some of that taste signal, you have to boost the amount of taste ingredients, meaning you have to add a little more sugar, you have to add a little more bitters, but it also enhances the aromatic elements of the drink. And in an old 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 part of the point of an old-fashioned is you've got this kind of mid-level or entry-level whiskey, and you can make it really delicious with a quick tweak. It's maybe not something I would sip neat, but I would totally sip it as an old-fashioned.
Once you shake it, all those off-notes really come out in a more dramatic way, and you've now got to bump up to, say, a $40, $50 bottle of because the aromatic profile of a nicer whiskey is just more pleasant, and that's what you're playing up.
Yeah, yeah, that's a great way of saying it. That's not my quote, but maybe... You're welcome to do it. So it's almost like the dose makes the poison. A little bit of this molecule enhances aroma, but once it goes too far, now it takes over the drink and now it's made the drink terrible.
So for instance, one of the big compounds in whiskey is called ethyl acetate, which has a little bit of a green apple note. And when it's present in low amounts, it sort of helps you appreciate everything else. It's almost good up to the point where you consciously notice it.
And then once it crosses that threshold, you start to say, oh, there's kind of a solventy nail polish remover, like off note in this whiskey. Some clear spirits have it in abundance. So something like a Pisco or an unaged brandy, it really overwhelms. which is, you know, not a lot of people drink Pisco neat, or at least I don't. But you shake it up in a cocktail.
Now the lower temperature, more dilution, the other ingredients can bring that molecule into an appropriate range where it becomes a feature instead of a flaw.
Right. So if you have a stirred martini recipe that you find to be balanced and you wanted to shake it instead, you would have to boost the level of the taste ingredients, meaning more bitters, more vermouth, and you would have to use nicer aromatic elements, which would also include the vermouth, but predominantly the spirit. So if you're getting away with a $20, $25 bottle of gin...
All right, open up the wallet, you know, buy something a little higher on the shelf.
Showing 81–100 of 173 · page 5 of 9
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