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
ooh, this black licorice kind of throws some people, but maybe that's what makes it interesting.
Well, I guess kind of taking that jazz note idea. So all the aromatics in an old-fashioned are pretty harmonious. If you're using, say, a darker sugar, those aromatics go nicely with the bourbon or the whiskey notes. A lot of bitters are more baking spice forward. And like all of these different components kind of have a fair amount of overlap with each other.
But then when you make a Sazerac, you're essentially making an old fashioned, but you're putting in a little bit of that black licorice note through the absinthe. And so it's almost like, you know, you had your like, kind of normal, whatever harmonious thing. And then you said, what if I make this one note, do this. I like that. Yeah. And now all of a sudden it's like a lot fewer people like it.
I mean, there's certainly a genetic component, how sensitive you are, literally which olfactory receptors you have. There are a few hundred and not everybody has the same ones. But there have been some studies done, which I can't necessarily cite you the paper on the fly here. But what people have found is that as you train your sense of smell, you are not necessarily getting more sensitive or...
You don't learn to pick things out at a lower threshold, at a lower concentration. What you learn is how to describe them better.
Okay. You make better verbal connections. You have a more rich vocabulary of description. So yeah, you watch a sommelier pick a part of wine and they're doing all these one weird motions, but then they're saying, oh, I get tennis balls and I get warm weather and I get garden hose and this and that. And you're like, You smell the same wine and you're like, this just smells like wine.
It smells like wine, yeah.
Yeah, and I think another part of it too is your expectations get refined.
where now I've read enough about whiskey that I know, okay, these notes come from the barrel. These notes come from the grain. These notes come from this and that. When I'm smelling a whiskey, it's not like my mind is a blank canvas and somebody's just putting something up there and I'm trying to pick it apart. I'm looking for a green apple note. I'm looking for a nutmeg note.
I'm looking for a cinnamon note, which maybe not in a conscious way, but I've been primed through years of drinking whiskey to say like, oh, is this a rye, is this a wheat, is this a whatever?
And it's, yeah, it's a different experience when you're not trained in that world, it can feel overwhelming because yeah, it's just a bunch of random stimuli and you're like, I don't know how to differentiate these or what facets go together and what facets don't. And somebody that's done it for years and years can more quickly categorize, describe, picture these inputs.
Well, maybe I can actually take a step back further and say this. If you're thinking about opening a bar and you're a good home bartender, You're already doing all the fun parts, including drinking the drinks. If you are thinking about opening a bar, yes, there's coolness to it, but you're going to be adding a lot of unfun parts as well. So keep that in mind.
Yeah, in terms of like, hey, I'm at level – And I want to be at level four. Like, how do I, how do I level up my game in terms of a home bartender? The way I approach it is, you know, find a drink that you love, whether it's the daiquirin, the Negroni, the old fashioned, whatever it may be, and work your way out from there.
If you say, oh, there's 10 different cocktail families and there's a thousand different spirits, and I'm just going to work my way through one by one. Good luck.
You know, what, what I would say is, okay, you're an old fashioned drinker. Great. Try it with a little more sweetness, you know, do, do some of these, uh, ingredient ratio studies, find your perfect old fashioned and then say, okay, well, let me try it with a different whiskey. Let me try it with a different sweetener.
Let me try it with a different bitters and kind of build out from comfortable territory. And, um, You know, I know people that get into this world and there's so many spirits to buy. Oh, I want to try one aviation. Now I got to buy a $35 bottle of creme de violet. It's a problem. Yeah. You use it a quarter ounce at a time. You just buy yourself a hundred aviations.
Do you want to drink a hundred aviations? Do your friends, family want to drink, you know? And there's better ways, you know, more economical ways to get into it. And I think either picking, you know, a spirit and saying, okay, I'm a whiskey person. Let me try a sour drink with whiskey. Let me try a bitter drink with whiskey. Let me try a bubbly drink with whiskey.
Or just picking a category and saying, I'm a bittersweet person. Let me try a bittersweet whiskey drink. Let me try a bittersweet gin drink. Let me try a bittersweet cognac drink. You know, that's the way. And in my book, there are some tables where, you know, I would say kind of explore a row or explore a column rather than trying to just explore the entire table. off the bat.
Um, yeah, the cocktail genome project. So, so really as I was writing, uh, my book cocktail theory, that was really like, how do you, how do you create the perfect drink? Whether it's a gin and tonic or a Collins or a whiskey sour or a whatever. But if you don't like gin and tonics, that gin and tonic is not the perfect solution for the situation, no matter how well I make it.
And so like, as I was writing this, I was like, Oh man, I'm gonna have to write a second book about, you know, how do you match a drink to a person? And, And the way that we typically do that is it's on you. You come into my bar, I give you a menu and I say, good luck, read through all these weird ingredients. And maybe I throw you a couple of phrases. Oh, creamy. Oh, bitter. Okay.
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