How I Think About Cocktails

Synesthesia?

This is my first post about cocktails. I decided that I wanted to write about them after reading a very detailed techniques post. There are really complex cocktails out there served by establishments such as The Aviary in Chicago and Dandelyan (now Lyaness) in London. I call these drinks culinary cocktails, and to recreate them, you need a professional kitchen backing your bar. On the other hand, the drinks that most people are familiar with are relatively simple affairs. That’s great. They’re approachable and pretty easy to make compared to other culinary pursuits like baking. If you are just getting started making cocktails at home, your first concern is not going to be clear ice, repeatable dilution or the right glassware. You will face the challenge of using your home bar to make drinks that sound appealing on drinks sites like Kindred Cocktails. Slightly more challenging is reverse engineering a drink you had at a bar that you want to recreate at home. In either case, your first concern will be making a flavorful, pleasant cocktail that you and your friends enjoy.

I have been doing just this for about 15 years now, and I have thought a lot about what makes a good cocktail. I like to believe that thinking helps me make better cocktails, especially when I am missing one or more specific ingredients. My not-very-rigorous system of thinking about drinks uses an idea that I call “mouth shape”. When you take a sip of your cocktail, you have a sensory sequence that lasts from when the fluid enters your mouth until you swallow and often for longer. I conceive of this sensory sequence as having a shape.

When mixing a cocktail, I think you want to recreate something like this spherical “ideal mouth shape”. In the sensory sequence, certain sensations always happen in the same order. For example, consider the Lemon Drop cocktail, an approachable, simple cocktail, quite nice when done well and syrupy, sour, or insipid when done badly. It is a vodka-based drink with lemon juice, simple syrup and a lemon zest garnish. Because lemon flavor is the star of this show, fresh lemons are critical. I don’t think you can do this drink well without them. The great thing about this drink is that you can use one medium to large lemon for each drink, just remember to peel your zest before you extract the juice.

When a sip of cocktail hits your tongue, you immediately pick up the degree of sweetness, sourness and salinity. This is the “Fore” taste. In the Lemon Drop, the sweet from the simple syrup and the sour from the lemon juice show up in the fore. In the right balance, they complement each other and you notice both equally. If the ratio of sour to sweet is off, as often happens when bartenders keep the original proportions and decide to dust the drink’s surface with confectioner’s sugar, the sweetness overwhelms the sour, which is a problem for a drink with lemon in the name.

As the cocktail fills your mouth, other sensations join the initial ones which you continue to feel. You now get an experience of the alcohol in the drink as well as aromas. I call this the “Mid”. Alcohol by itself is lively. It makes your mouth tingle, especially in the first few sips of your first drink. Alcohol also transports more aromatic compounds to your olfactory nerves. The Lemon Drop mid is lively and full of lemon aroma. To see how the vodka amplifies the lemon aromatics, consider the intensity of the lemon aroma in the Lemon Drop compared to the intensity of the lemon aroma in fresh lemonade. The neutral alcohol from the vodka helps heighten your sensation of the lemon.

You can control this mid mouth shape experience by augmenting the natural lemon aroma with a lemon vodka, or expanding the aroma to be more generally citrusy by adding some Triple Sec (Triple Sec is sweet so consider reducing the amount of simple syrup you add should you try this variation). For me, the key insight when making a Lemon Drop is that the lemon aroma is most concentrated in the lemon zest. Many Lemon Drop recipes call for a lemon wedge or lemon wheel as garnish, but instead I would a lemon zest garnish. Fruit hanging on the glass rim or floating in the center of the drink is visually appealing, but the simplicity of the Lemon Drop means that you can achieve more, both visual and flavorful, with zest. A generous peel of lemon zest will accentuate the lemon flavor. Squeeze the zest over the finished drink to express small droplets of lemon oil onto the surface of the drink before placing the zest in the drink as a garnish. I use a vegetable peeler for this because a channel peeler may produce an attactive ribon of zest, but more surface area will provide more oils. You also want to remove only the skin (yellow) of the lemon with your peeler and as little of the white pith as possible. The white pith is more bitter and changes the nature of the drink’s flavors.

As you swallow, you complete the sensory sequence of the cocktail. You now notice any bitter flavors in the cocktail. Strong herbaceous flavors are also likely to linger from earlier in the sip. This is the “After”. For delicate cocktails like the Lemon Drop, there is not a lot of new sensation during the swallow. Your experience is now probably mostly from the alcohol and cold liquid on your throat with some lingering lemon aroma. For drinks that incorporate bitter flavors, this after part of the mouth shape becomes more pronounced because many of these bitter flavors tend to linger on the tongue and palate well after you’ve swallowed. Bitter flavors elongate and distort the “ideal mouth shape” from something like a sphere to more like a teardrop.

This is extension of the sensory experience of a cocktail is the chief reason why bitters use in cocktails is so common.

With this in mind, we can make the Lemon Drop bigger by adding a dash of lemon bitters. Since lemon bitters are not commonly used, a home cocktail bar is more likely to have orange bitters, and introduction of orange citrus notes will not be discordant with the lemon flavor of the drink. Why would you do this? For most people bitters are a learned appreciation, so adding bitters to a lemon drop is a good modification to enable friends with more experienced cocktail palates to enjoy a Lemon Drop with friends that will appreciate the fresh, clean simplicity of the original Lemon Drop. I would try to mix separate drinks for a group of friends containing people who I thought would appreciate bitters and people who I thought would not, but if you are conscious of the time it takes to mix a drink, you could add the dash of bitters after pouring.

A quick aside on mixing drinks in the presence of others: you do not want to rush. Embrace the role; your work will be appreciated. Follow the process that you always use. Measure your ingredients. Bartenders who measure by count either have a lot of practice or don’t care about quality. The most certain way of messing up that “mouth shape” is failing to get the ingredient ratios correct. Most cocktail shakers permit you to make two full cocktails at a time. I always batch if I can. There are also ranges of cocktail glasses that are half sized. Small glasses will enable you to serve more people faster. Since the first three sips of a cocktail are usually the best, small glasses offer a hidden perk of more first sips without consuming more alcohol.

If you are making cocktails at home for friends, this familiarty with mouth shape and how different ingredients affect flavor enables you to customize your drinks to their tastes. Before you invite people over, take some time to perpare and enjoy the cocktails you plan to serve. Learning to make good cocktails is experiential. Focusing on flavors and balance will get you further than the right glassware, ice, deftness peeling citrus, or a bar with a hundred bottles. As far as learning technique goes, I think that the best thing to do is to visit a local bar that takes cocktails seriously, go early, sit at the bar and ask the bartender what she’s doing. If she is not too busy, she will help accelerate your technique acquistion. While there, you might as well broaden your cocktail palate, too. I always look for drinks that I have not had before or flavor combinations that intuition says will not be complementary. I can use the idea of a cocktail’s “mouth shape” to figure out why the apparently incoherent drink works.