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
Yeah, texture, I'm mostly meaning the amount of air bubbles that are included. And what I found was that it's kind of an all or nothing thing. When you're putting air bubbles in there, you kind of just want a bunch of 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.
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 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.
Yeah, there's a surface area consideration there. Sphere is kind of the lowest surface area to volume ratio. There you go, math. And the visual component can't be denied. Most of my book centers on getting the molecules in the glass right and the temperature and 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.
Yeah, yeah. 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. That's not how most people think of it.
But, you know, 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 notes, bass 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, um, an iterative analytical approach to building a fragrance. You get the drink balanced, you taste it, it smells pretty good. You say, okay, you know, um, and, and I, I like to, you know, basically do another round of, um,
Yeah, that, I mean, that's really the tricky part is that scent is so complex. 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 smell 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, okay. Yeah.
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 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 scent composition.
Absolutely, absolutely. There's a Chinese spirit called Baijiu. that has some molecules that appear both in foot fungus and in Parmesan cheese.
You have to be very careful which thing you're going to say it smells like, you know?
Correct, correct. I mean, 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 meant to be consumed more directly. Right. But yeah, applying that perfumery mindset to composing the aromatic side of the drink.
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 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.
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 some of these metaphors I think are quite intuitive where 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 base note. And maybe it's not language you've used, but I think I've done classes with people and 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. 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? 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?
Showing 101–120 of 173 · page 6 of 9
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