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
I can kind of like pick where I think I'm supposed to be. But, you know, I'm the one who's been making drinks, you know, thousands, tens of thousands over the last few years. Even if you drink a lot, it's probably not 10,000 drinks in the last year.
know a couple years so so it's like you've got knowledge of your preferences i've got knowledge of the drinks can we kind of flip the script and say well what if instead of me telling you about the drinks what have you told me about your preferences it's like going to the doctor like they have the medical expertise but you know your body and how you feel right and you better meet somewhere in the middle
Yeah, if you go to the doctor and they say, well, here's the menu. Do you have Rescoe-Fleck syndrome? Do you have leprosy? Do you have gonorrhea? You're like, I think gonorrhea. That's not the way it works, yeah. Yeah, so flipping that script, and the key for me has been, well, what are the questions that I should ask? One way to do it is to say, well, what do you normally drink?
Which I think is like the cheapest, most... You know, it often gets you to the right place, but it's not, it's maybe more a reflection of your habits. And while gin and tonics are easy, I keep a bottle of gin in my cupboard and a bottle of tonic in my fridge and I pour them together. Well, do you like that the best or is it just the easiest to make? And, you know. Right.
Maybe if I asked you the right questions, I would realize, oh, actually, you know, you don't like the bubbles, you like the bitterness from the tonic. We can separate those two and combine them in a different way and, you know, create you a drink that's more ideally suited to you. The other cool part of this is I've been asking people about a lot of their culinary and scent history.
What was your favorite candy as a child? What cuisine did you grow up with? What's a happy scent memory? So, you know, um, I, I had a customer who loved tequila, who loved bittersweet drinks and who grew up in Belgium and ate these violet candies, which was some brand I had never heard of, but I basically made him a tequila violet Negroni and he absolutely loved it.
Not a drink I probably would have ever made, you know, off the top of my head. Um, but it, you know, I was able to kind of piece together these components of flavor to ideally suit him. And, uh, he loved it.
Yeah. So, so it follows a lot of the same thinking of my book where I decompose the flavor, um, you know, into taste, into scent, into some of the more conceptual elements. Now, a lot of people don't necessarily know what umami is or what their preferences are around it. So a lot of my work has been, well, how do I ask these questions in the right way to get the data I need from people?
Rather than asking about umami in a general sense, I can say, do you like barbecue potato chips? Do you like, you know,
meat and mushroom dishes do you like yeah even even with bitterness it's complex because it can be acquired in a very narrow band maybe you dislike bitterness but you've drank enough coffee that you love coffee uh but that doesn't mean you're going to like Campari or Fernet or Malort which are all bitter liqueurs so you know I've
I've been burned a few times where somebody was like, yeah, a little bit. I drink black coffee all the time. I eat green vegetables.
And then you give them some capari. They're like, Oh, this is terrible.
And you know, so, so a lot of that has been kind of this back and forth where a lot of my kind of trusted regulars, I'll send them the survey of 30 or 40 questions. I'll then design them drinks and I'll have them rate them and say, Oh, is this good, is this bad? And what I'm really going for, I let people give a gold star to the drink if it's one of the top 10 best drinks of their life.
Which is a high bar, but people are drinking, so maybe they forget some of those top 10s too. Lowers the standard a tad. And yeah, what I'm shooting for, there could be a couple outcomes. Maybe maybe you make a reservation at my bar and I text you the eight most pertinent questions. And I've got enough lead time that the minute you walk in the door, I just hand you something.
That's your, you know, the equipment you grew up with times the, you know, flavor profile you like times your favorite spirit. Maybe you're part of my secret club that we have your profile on, you know, in our customer relationship database. And I say, okay, well, we were kind of going down a gin rabbit hole last time. Should we keep going that way?
Looks like you also kind of appreciate some cognacs. Maybe we want to dip over that way. And it's tricky because the ideal cocktail, it's both a moment in time, but it's also... It evolves over time. What I drink five years ago is not what I drink today or 10 or 20 years ago.
And being able to sort of push people one step beyond where they're at today is one thing I look for in a cocktail experience and one thing I try to provide to my guests. So even if you maybe don't love the drink in this moment, you look back and say, that was actually a pivotal experience for me. I hated the first Negroni I drank. But it was a very pivotal experience. And I'm glad I had it.
Yeah.
Okay, okay. So kind of the three categories that I find are most important, you know, you kind of made this differentiation between features and flaws. So you don't want to have a flaw. So you got to get the amount of alcohol right, or kind of like the concentration of alcohol, the bitterness and the sourness level.
So do you prefer more spirit forward drinks like old fashions, Negronis, Manhattans, or do you prefer more drinks where other flavors are more forward, like a deck region and tonic, something like that.
Showing 141–160 of 173 · page 8 of 9
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