Alcademics.com

The Drunken Botanist Book Review

The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks by Amy Stewart is a truly impressive and important book that I'll be referring to for years to come. 

The book is an entertaining encyclopedia of the plants that are used in fermentation and distillation, in flavoring spirits, and in accenting cocktails. Though botany is the primary focus, Stewart also explains how these ingredients are used in spirits and how fermentation, distillation, and different sorts of infusion work mechanically. 

From the first chapter on agave I knew the book would be revealing. Though I've been to Mexico a bunch of times and know a lot about agave and tequila and mezcal production, I learned so much more by reading this chapter and was surprised to be corrected on a few popular mistruths about the plant and its history (like who named Blue Weber agave and how those supposedly pre-Spanish Filipino stills got there).

Stewart also tackles spirits production, like how yeast (and bacteria) work to ferment things into alcohol, and  sums up how malting works in a few paragraphs while it took me several distillery visits to Scotland to get it down. Other delights in the book include how to grow many of the plants mentioned, sidebars on the bugs you'll find in booze, and covers not just the popular plants but lesser-known ones like sundew, bison grass, and sorghum. There are a few drink recipes in the book, but as always you're best getting recipes out of recipe books. I will, however, try her simple recipe for pickling vegetables and give her olive brining technique a go a I failed so spectacularly at it again this year. 

I honestly don't know how useful or interesting this book would be to the lay reader as it's what I do for a living, but I was both riveted and entertained by nearly all of it. You can preview it on Amazon but you should probably just pick up a copy.

 

 

More Mineral Water Info from a Book on Soda

Another useful resource in my exploration of water in spirits and cocktails is Darcy O'Neil's book Fix the Pumps. 

The book focusses on the history and mechanics of the pre-Prohibition soda fountain. Though largely filled with information on sodas, it includes a chapter and some recipes on mineral waters. 

Before global shipping became easy, soda fountains made their own soda and mineral waters, with the carbonation being the main attraction. 

Here are a few things I learned from the book:

• Club Soda is a trademarked brand. Seltzer water was a brand but is now generic. 
• Carbonation's sensation on the tongue is a chemical sensation rather than a mechanical one. O'Neil likens it to eating peppers, which release endorphins in response to the mild noxious action on the tongue, so the end result is a pleasurable experience. 
• Bubble formation in carbonated water is affected by CO2 pressure (more pressure gives larger bubbles), temperature (colder allows more CO2 to go into solution), and nucleation points (stuff in the water and imperfections in the serving glass). 
• Common minerals found in mineral waters are calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium. But most minerals waters have a relatively low sodium chloride (table salt) level, compared with sodium carbonate/bicarbonate (baking soda).
• One should add mineral salts to plain water then carbonate it, as they don't dissolve well in already-carbonated water. 
• Sometimes it is hard to get all the salts to dissolve. O'Neil provides a chart of the order in which they should be added for best dissolution. 

There are also recipes for 12 soda waters in the book, which are useful as comparisons more than recipes as they're scaled for batches of 19 to 50 liters. 

There's a lot more in the book (and you really should buy it for the soda stuff- it's fascinating) but those were a few take-aways for my experiments.

Now it's back to the lab for me...

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The Water Project on Alcademics is research into water in spirits and in cocktails, from the streams that feed distilleries to the soda water that dilutes your highball. The research for the project is supported by Bowmore Islay Single Malt Scotch Whisky. For all posts in the project, visit the project index page. 

 

Paloma Recipe Round-Up: 20+ Paloma Variations

In my research on the Paloma I have come across many variations on the drink, so I thought I'd link to them here.

Typically the Paloma is made with tequila (always use 100% agave!), grapefruit soda such as Squirt or Jarritos, a squeeze of a lime wedge and a pinch of salt. Esquire's standard recipe is here. A version using fresh grapefruit and soda water is here.

Here are some Paloma variations from around the internet. 

Blood Orange and Thyme Paloma by Airda Molenkamp [recipe]

Nuestra Paloma by Thad Vogler of Beretta, SF. It contains St. Germain, bitters, Cointreau, and grapefruit juice. [recipe]

The Charred Grapefruit Paloma by Warren Bobrow [recipe]

Paloma, Mi Amante by Paul Clarke - A Paloma using strawberry-infused tequila. [recipe]

Paloma Variation - A Paloma using IPA beer, plus tequila, grapefruit cordial, and lime. [mentioned here; no recipe]

Palomita - A Paloma without tequila; just using Coinreau, lime, and grapefruit. [recipe]

Green Palomarita - Mezcal, lime, grapefruit, Chartreuse [recipe]

Dove & Daisy - Tequila, lime, Aperol, orange liqueur, salt, soda water. [recipe]

La Paloma - Grapefruit liqueur, tequila, grapefruit juice, lime, soda. [recipe]

Cantarito - A Paloma variation using lemon, lime, and orange juices in place of the lime squeeze. [recipe]

Paloma Brava by Dushan Zaric - Contains tequila, lime, orange, grapefruit, grapefruit soda, agave nectar, and salt. [recipe]

La Canterita by Ashley Miller - Tequila, triple sec, agave nectar, grapefruit, lemon, lime, orange. [recipe]

Strawberry Paloma with strawberry-infused tequila, honey, lime, and grapefruit. [recipe]

Reunion Cooler by Jennifer Colliau- Tequila, peppercorns, pineapple, grapefruit peel, lime. [recipe]

The 212 by Aisha Sharpe and Willy Shine - Tequila, Aperol, grapefruit [recipe]

Siesta by Katie Stipe - Tequila, Campari, lime, grapefruit, simple syrup [recipe]

Acapulco by Salvatore Calabrese - Tequila, rum, grapefruit, pineapple. [recipe]

Cardarita by Ago Perrone - Tequila, almond-cardamom sugar, grapefruit, Galliano, ginger ale [recipe]

Salty Chihuahua - Tequila, grapefruit juice, salt [recipe]

Ginger Paloma - Ginger-grapefruit syrup, tequila, lime, club soda [recipe]

Tequila Fresa Punch - Starwberry-infused tequila, triple sec, orange, lime, grapefruit soda, orange bitters [recipe]

 

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Perfectly Clear Ice Balls - A Clever Trick

One of Alcademics' readers figured out a simple way to make perfectly clear ice balls by using a silicon ice ball mold, a piece of wire, and a pot of water. 

His name is Craig Belon and so he calls it the Belon Method. No actual parrots are required.

Artwork by Craig Belon, as are all photos in this post except the next one.

The method is this:

1. Get yourself a silicone ice ball tray like this one that comes in a pack of six. 

2. Over a pot of water (or better yet, a cooler as that will produce lots of clear ice) make a wire loop that the ice ball mold will sit on. 

3. Fill the pot with water just up to the wire. Also fill ice ball with water. Feel free to fill the ice ball with distilled or filtered water for better taste.

Dunk the filled ice ball mold into the pot of water  with the hole FACING DOWN. As you pull the mold up out of the water to set it on the wire. The water should stay inside the ice mold rather than running down into the pot. That's the whole trick.  

4. Freeze it.

As I figured out during all the ice experiments, the water freezes directionally from the coldest place to the warmest; and the first parts to freeze are perfectly clear whereas the last area to freeze is cloudy from trapped air, impurities, and pressure cracks.

In a typical ice cube, that's outside-in, with the cloudy part in the center.  In the Cooler Method I force that to be top-down. Using this pot the water will freeze from the outside-in, but the big pot creates a big heat sink so the top will be clear until after the ice ball is fully frozen.

So with the hole in the ice ball mold facing the bottom of the pot, as the water in the mold turns to ice and expands, it pushes out the extra air-filled water out the hole into the pot below. 

5. Let it freeze, then remove it. 

Now that's a sexy ice ball! Thanks for sharing Craig! 

For those of you who want to freeze more than one ball at a time, I'm guessing you could simply make multiple loops in the wire to hold multiple ice balls, but suspend it over a cooler (as in the Cooler Method) instead, as that is all freezing from the top-down. And at the end, you'd have a bunch of ice balls plus a slab of clear ice with which to make cubes. 

 

Belon also included a way he likes to drink absinthe using an ice ball. 

 

"Flawless Absinthe" by Craig Belon

Recipe:

1 Ice ball using the Belon Method
1 Absinthe glass (essential due to its shape)
1 Sugar cube
Chilled water

Directions: 

-place just enough absinthe into an absinthe glass to fill the bottom bulb part

-Insert Belon Method ice ball, corking off the absinthe in the bottom

-SLOWLY add water to the top over a sugar cube in the standard absinthe preparation fashion.

Physics: the water is denser than the liquor anyway, but with sugar dissolved especially more so. This water will flow around the miniscule gap between the ice ball and the edge of the glass, further cooling it. It will slip past the ball to the bottom of the glass, forming an absinthe-sugarwater interface in the bulb that slowly rises, producing the characteristic white precipitate.... but only at the interface! The fluids of differing densities will remain mostly unmixed over the course of 5-10 minutes, with a rising line of precipitate, until most of the absinthe is on the TOP of the glass, freezing, (it started at the bottom) and still crystal clear, and the sugar water at the bottom. This process produces a beautiful cascading effect (properly: Schlering lines)

What this means is that the drink actually starts as a pretty stout swig of pure absinthe that is frigid-cold, and as you drink it changes to become sweeter and sweeter. 

A cocktail that changes as you drink it, each sip different than the last. Thanks to physics. 

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Well then, thanks to physics, and thanks again to Craig Belon for his brilliant little trick. 

 

Building Better Mineral Water: Deconstructing Mineral Waters

In the Water Project here on Alcademics, I'm looking at what is in commercial brands of sparkling mineral waters and reconstructing them. 

To do so, first I looked at how to get all the dissolved solids out of tap water. Then I measured properties of commercial mineral waters - pH and dissolved solids- and compared them with publicly available information. 

The next step was to examine what each mineral in mineral water tasted like on its own. 

Again referring to the information on Khymos.org, I could see that the primary minerals in mineral water are Calcium, Sodium, Magnesium, and Potassium. The website also allows you to look at bicarbonate, sulfate, chloride, and nitrate. 

To taste each of these minerals/salts on its own, I looked up the mineral water with the greatest concentration of a particular mineral, then added the ingredient in the proper amount to mineral-free water to give me that water's amount of it. In other words, if Apolinaris water had the most Magnesium (it did), then I started with water with no minerals in it and added the magnesium-containing ingredients in its recipe (epsom salts and magnesium carbonate) without worrying about the other minerals in the recipe.

I measured the pH and total dissolved solids (TDS) of the new mineral water before carbonation, and the pH again afterward. This was mostly to make sure I wasn't adding anything that would put the mineral water outside of a safe range of pH for drinking. 

Single-Mineral Mineral Water Chart

Mineral	Brand	Added	pH	TDS	pH after carbonation	Notes
Calcium	Contrex	Plaster of Paris	9.9	244	4.8	Cleared up after carbonation. Nice fizz. Taste: powdery/dry but not flavorful
Magnesium	Apolinaris	Epsom salts and Magnesium Carbonate	10	132	5.1	Cloudy until carbonate, creamy, mineraly, soft carbonation though
Sodium	Saint-Yorre	Baking soda and Table salt	8.2	2170	5.9	Clear before carbonation, great fizz, tastes very salty
Potassium	Saint-Yorre	Potassium Bicarbonate	8.4	158	4.8	Clear before carbonating, fizzes over with carbonation when charging, flavor is dryness; not much else
Sufate	Contrex	Epsom salt and Plaster of Paris	7.4	459	5.1	A little sweet. Really good carbonation. Nice texture.
Chloride	San Narciso	table salt	6.9	876	6.9	Good carbonation but just salty, blech

It was interesting to see how these salts affected carbonation; not just flavor of the water.

The next step was to taste these one-mineral-rich waters with alcohol to see what happened. I thought they might bring out different aspects of flavor in booze and I was right. 

I made an equal-parts Vodka Soda with each of the soda waters above. My tasting notes were:

Mineral	Notes
Calcium	Bright and flavorful
Magnesium	Not a lot of character; a little salty
Sodium	Salty, way too salty
Potassium	Chalky but kinda good
Sulfate	Brighter and sweeter, but perhaps too much so
Chloride	Salty

After this, I made a mineral blend of what I thought might work, using a combination of baking soda, epsom salt, and plaster of paris. This blend did make the flavor in vodka (and whisky) pop, but was too salty tasting. 

My next experiments will be to build other mineral blends to find one(s) that I like. There is much more work to be done!

 

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The Water Project on Alcademics is research into water in spirits and in cocktails, from the streams that feed distilleries to the soda water that dilutes your highball. The research for the project is supported by Bowmore Islay Single Malt Scotch Whisky. For all posts in the project, visit the project index page. 

 

 

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Good Bars Need Lead Bartenders

I am now writing for FSR Magazine, an industry magazine for full service restaurants. In my first feature I tackle the topic of why a head bartender is essential to a successful cocktail program. 

If a drink menu is out-of-date or overly-simplistic and the bartenders can’t speak intelligently about the cocktails, I know two things about a restaurant: That there is no lead bartender in place, and that I’ll be ordering a beer.

In ths story I write about promoting-and retaining- lead bartenders. I interviewed Leo Robitschek from Eleven Madison Park and Benjamin Schiller of Chicago's Boka Restaurant Group. 

Read the story here. 

And if you're working in the full service restaurant business, you can get a free subscription here. 

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Top Bourbon Historical Myths on Details Daily Blog

My latest story is up on Details.com. I took a look at Michael Veach's amazing book Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey: An American Heritage and wrote about a few of the many bourbon myths he busted. 

These include who invented bourbon, why it's called that, what they used to put into it to make it taste older, and more. 

Go read the story on Details.com. 

Cocktail Science with Don Lee and Mike Ryan at Tales Buenos Aires

Here at Tales of the Cocktail in Buenos Aires, taking place at the Intercontinental Hotel, I have attended three seminars on one day. The last one was about the science of cocktails. Below are my notes- these are hard to translate from science slides to text, but here goes:

 

The Science of Cocktails: Ice, Infusions, and Insight by Don Lee and Mike Ryan

In cocktails being precise is more important than being accurate - it's better to have all drinks be exactly the same than have the occasional one be perfect. That's an argument for measurement in cocktails.

Don Lee measured the amount of dashes when you dash bitters - to see how accurate a dasher was and how that changes over the course of a bottle. He found that it changed over time, but on average:

Angostura 41 dashes = 1oz = 30 ml

Regan's or Peychaud's 30 dashes = 1 oz = 30 ml

Japanese Dasher Bottle 150 dashes = 1 ounce = 30 ml

Salad dressing oil and vinegar doesn't mix because one is polar and one is non-polar.

No matter what the temperature the ice starts at (freezer vs. well ice) when shaking, the drink cools to the same level. So colder ice doesn't result in a colder drink at the end.

It also doesn't matter if you're using big ice or small cheater ice when shaking-it all reaches the same final temperature in that same time- in about 15 seconds. This is because small ice has more surface area, and on that surface, water that sticks to it and makes the drinks more dilute without great cooling (because it releases a lot of energy to convert ice to water). But if you shake with dry (non-wet) vs. regular wet ice, you get less dilution from dry ice. So shaking with dry ice doesn't make drink colder but there is less drink dilution.

Stirring- things are different. You will get to the same dilution with different ice at the same rate- but you have to stir for a ridiculously long time for that to happen and most people don't. However stirred drinks have less dilution at a normal stirring time, and softer silky texture.

"Cooking ice" - letting it sit on ice and then stirring it later to get a drink colder - this is a myth. It will get just as cold as a stirred drink in the same amount of time. Only when you are actively stirring does it get really colder.

In stirring a drink, it takes a lot longer to do this, so using the smallest ice cube (without surface water - so right from freezer) makes drinks coldest fastest. But of course this is not practical in a bar.

Infusions- consider it with the following variables: base liquid, ingredient you're infusing, the surface area of that ingredient reacting with the base, time, temperature of infusion, and filtration method to get that infusion solids out.

In whisky, you could consider the barrel as being the thing infused. With gin, the filtration method is the type of still - Carterhead vs. other stills. Small batch bourbon - small barrels are larger surface area. But these same factors affect regular infusions we would make at home.

Fat Washing - Surface area in fat washing is the width of the container- where the two liquids are touching. So wide pot = faster fat wash.

Including Pressure in the Formula

Don Lee came up with a formula for infusions, and then a second one including pressure in the equation. Pressure comes in when you use an iSi Soda Canister or a vacuum sealer.

Negative pressure infusions = vacuum = good for putting liquid flavors into solids. (So the solid thing is being infused.)

Positive pressure infusions = iSi soda siphon = good for getting solids flavors into liquids. Don says 5 minutes under pressure and 5 minutes after venting can be the equivalent of weeks of regular infusing. Flash infusions won't extract as many tannins (soluble in alcohol) as flash infusion so you get different results than just letting things steep in alcohol.

Can use a superbag to get most of color out of quinine powder for homemade tonics.

For clarificaiton using agar agar, a refinement is: Agar + Superbag + Salad Spinner = ghetto-fuge that will get liquids out of agar gel the best and most efficient way. A superbag alone if you squeeze it will get agar into final drink. ghetto-fuge is a solution to that.