i apologize for this chart rendering so poorly in the browser.

one of the most significant contributions to the emotional content of a flavor experience is sugar content.  an understanding of sugar content can be useful in creating commonly accepted harmony.  harmony in this case is a function of sugar content relative to numerous contrasting planes like acidity and alcohol.  unfortunately there isn’t much reliable data out there on sugar contents yet, but i constantly see search referrals looking for them (calorie counters or inquisitive artists?).  this table (it will grow) represents an attempt.

(gary regan has an excellent table and maybe i can have him send me alcohol contents for products at the time he made measurements (because brands do change their metrics) and then i can crunch the numbers and we can see how products have evolved (if we are confident in our methods!))

within a liqueur, two significant forces (there are others) effect the density which we can use to get a really close approximation of the sugar content (feel free to challenge my methodology).  alcohol decreases density and luckily its a known variable because its printed on the label (but allowed to have a fairly large margin of error).  sugar increases density and its the unknown variable we are looking to reveal.

if we compensate for alcohol’s effect on the specific gravity using one of many available tables, we can create an adjusted specific gravity that can be used to isolate the sugar content’s effect.  to find various alcohol contents’ influence on the specific gravity, i recommend the chart in the back of Irving Hirsch’s “Manufacture of Whiskey, Brandy & Cordials” (1937 reprint).  Hirsch’s chart (courtesy the Bureau of Standards) is the best i’ve found.  many others do not feature the low alcohol contents with any accuracy that are needed for examining aromatized wines.

the adjusted specific gravity can be converted to a grams per liter of sucrose using “circular C440″ from the same Bureau of Standards.  this circular used to be easy to track down in PDF but all my links are broken and i’m too low tech to host it.  i can email the PDF to anybody that needs it.

of course i should be paying attention to temperature which influences gravity, but most of these measurements were taken on the run in adverse circumstances that didn’t allow a temperature consideration (the free minutes in between restaurant service here and there).

this data has a variety of uses.  for starters we can compare these numbers to many of Joseph Koenig’s from 1879 and make some anthropological hypothesis as to why.  tastes have changed of course, but in the beginning did liqueur sugar contents ever match popular tastes in the first place?  recipes were dynamic as opposed to the modern static attempt, but was that because liqueurs didn’t always bring the desired emotional content to allow harmonic recipes using our modern simple ratios (2:1:1)?

we as artists can use this data as a tool to increase empathy.  selecting bottlings based on sugar content can help control and focus the emotional content of a drink.  aroma aside, a change from brizard’s curacao to senior’s curacao will result in significantly different emotional content in a 2:1:1 margarita.

then of course this data can be used to produce “house made” products for a bar program.  why reinvent the wheel when you can simply emulate success?  most house made products i’ve tasted could benefit from a little more consistency and refinement.

feedback please.

the sources mainly focus on wine and distilled spirits which were studied to death to provide really detailed finger prints of what people were drinking well into the 19th century.

liqueurs (think cointreau, chartreuse, etc.) were not studied in so much detail.  they were economically very significant because they are taxed so high, but most all researchers just throw up their hands in confusion when analyzing them because of the variety.  all of the metrics they put liqueurs through showed massive variance that barely seems useful unless you are just curious about one proprietary product. (and luckily i am!)

herstein and gregory’s “the technology and chemistry of wines and liqueurs” (1935) is brilliant when it comes to wines and spirits analyses but becomes kind of silly in their liqueurs chapter.  according to herstein and gregory liqueurs come in grades like average (sub divided into single strength and double strength), good, very good, excellant.  the biggest difference between average and excellent is an increase in alcohol as well as sugar.  of course there is no empirical data to back up their categorization, but they do also provide recipes for the same liqueur of different grades to show how proportions of ingredients changed.

the text has tons of recipes but is written in the “shovelware” style.  many look like they were plagiarized and never tried.  some don’t seem to work because they are missing information like how big the recipe is supposed to be.  the recipes are prefaced with the warning that they are only examples, but it is still half assed for an otherwise incredibly thorough text.

when you go back this far in time (1935) the bibliographies are dominated by foreign languages.  many of the charts are borrowed from these foreign language sources and are hard to track down.  herstein and gregory borrow a chart from leach (leach, a. e. “food inspection and analysis. new york 1920″ who borrowed it from the famous german chemist konig.  joseph konig’s (i’m missing an umlaut on the “o” of his last name) book “chemie der menschlichen nahrungs- und genussmittel” (i’m not sure if i cited the title correctly) has many editions which goes back to the end of the 19th century.

konig has a chart that analyzes many famous liqueurs for many metrics.  the only numbers of value to us are specific gravity, alcohol content and sugar content.  (if you know what ash content means let me know)

here goes…  (1879 edition)

benedictiner-bitter   specific gravity 1.0709, alcohol 52%, sugar (g/l) 325.7

creme de menthe                                       1.0447,                  48%,                        276.3

annisette de bordeaux                            1.0847,                    42%                        344.4

curacao                                                          1.0300                    55%                         285.0

the 1918 edition doesn’t seem to have a chart but rather summarizes the results in a paragraph. (it took me a while to figure that out because i don’t speak german.  i just found all of the search terms in a paragraph with most of the figures. i think the paragraph also references another text where the data may be borrowed from.)

another edition adds….  (1920)

ginger                                                            1.0481                       47.5%                     259.2

kummel                                                         1.0830                     33.9%                     311.8

pfefferminz-likor (pepper mint)         1.1429                      34.5%                     473.1

chartreuse (green?)                                 1.0799                     43.18%                   343.5

punsch (schwedischer)                          1.1030                     26.3%                      332.0

maraschino                                                 1.1042                     31.76%                    346.8

this famous chart also comes up other texts like “the chemical engineer, volume xxi. 1915″ (a journal)

the significance of this all is that we see a very early sugar and alcohol ethic of the products.  the majority of the emotional content of a drink comes from these relationships plus acidity (we make the assumption that lemons haven’t changed much in acid over 120 years)

since then alcohol contents have gone down. sugar contents have stayed the same for some products and gone down slightly in others.  cointreau is slightly less sweet than 280g/l and i’m pretty sure the chartreuses are down into the 200’s as well which would be the biggest migration.  which chartreuse was not explicitly specified, but if probability favors green the alcohol has also increased significantly.

the last commercially bottled swedish punsch i came across (”carlshamns flag punsch”) had 1.082 specific gravity, 26% alcohol and 267g/l sugar.  switching bottlings would definitely change the emotional content of a drink with swedish punsch…

contrary to popular belief raw honey has good solubility.  crystallized and waxy honeys can easily be dissolved into an alcohol-water solution (vodka, etc.) by merely stirring.  this means that boutique, raw, rare-circumstance, single-varietal honeys can quickly migrate from the tea cup or cheese plate to the cocktail.

to preserve the honey syrup,  an alcohol content of 20% will get you near the minimum of preservation. 20% is a nice number and all you have to add is an equal volume of honey and an equal volume of 40% alcohol spirit to get there.  most importantly, the equal volume measure also puts the sugar content at a point where it can elegantly contrast an equal volume of lemon or lime juice (emotional content!).

most of these raw honeys are crystallized (lack of free water content) but this doesn’t mean you have to heat them to get them to dissolve. heat risks destroying aromas. you simply scoop the honey out and then stir it patiently with the spirit. everything dissolves easier than you’d think.  first put the spirit into the scooped out honey jar to dissolve everything on the sides before mixing it with the bulk in a new container.  (advanced users can put a magnetic stirrer in that jar to speed up the dissolving of everything on the sides) don’t even worry about filtering. he who drinks comb solids should be considered lucky.

there you have it. preserved honey “syrup” that you don’t have to worry about using too quickly. no refrigeration necessary. a 20% alcohol content will give you shelf stability even with low sugar contents (think dry vermouth). increase the sugar content beyond 170g/l (an estimate, think sweet vermouth) and you can be stable at as low as 16%.

the variation of aromas among single varietals is amazing. far more fun than seeking out new gins.

the finished products are just as expensive as commercial options and we (pomodoro, brookline) keep a big library of them so people can try stuff. nothing ferments. nothing spoils. it would otherwise in a water based syrup because the sugar content is cut down to a point where it doesn’t desiccate the yeasts and bacteria. also you can easily make tiny quantities if you don’t want to invest too much.

the bar at work only has one gin (and one aquavit) so keeping many honeys has been a great way to add significant variation to our small program.  we also are patrons of artisans instead of large corporations (drambuie, etc)

honeys that have gone through our program:

ames farm bassw00d (current favorite): green in color, pale, focused aromas slightloy reminiscent of a men’s lime aftershave (in the greatest way possible) if this were a wine it would be a reisling.

ames farm elderberry: labeled elderberry but i think they mean elder flower, smells more like fresh elderflower than st. germain, pale meaning that there are no dense “honeyed” aromas, when it dissolves you don’t know the source is honey.

ames farm dandelion: organicly earthy, sensual, slightly erotic, shares aromas in common with a truffle minus the fusel notes. gives the european versions a run for their money.

floriano chestnut flower: dense and rich like a chestnut, tastes better as the evening gets later or the weather gets colder

pozzolo tarassaco: varies with the vintage but can be quite potent, epicly earthy and sensual, has an affinity for geneva style gins!

pozzolo melata di bosco: made from the sap of alpine spruce trees that get attacked by aphids whose excess secretions the bees collect (i’m not making this up!), dense and molassessy, ironous and blood like (the sorrow of the trees!) from a high mineral content, a shade of spruce pininess that seems to exist almost between juniper and menthe.

floriano rhododendron: poisonous flowers that produce non poisonous honey, very hard to describe, not exactly pale because it has honey notes with an additional round quality that feels like the ghost of an apricot, contrasted by micro angular notes (aromas that decrease the perception of sweetness) that you can’t really attach words to.

gaec de lozari arbutus (”strawberry tree”, former favorite!): the famous bitter honey of corsica and sardinia, definitely not chestnut but quite rich in its roundness, losts of contrasting notes some reminiscent of chili threads, subtle bitterness probably tamed by all the sugar, simply epic, who knew honey could do this.

golden angles sourwood from singers glen, va: the most prized of the appalachian honeys, dominated by the same round aromas found in irish whiskeys, many tropical aromas, it probably loves being mixed with spirits dominated by angular aromas (because it creates aromatic tension!)

lo brusc chataigner (chestnut): another spectacular chestnut, the star of our bobby burns cocktail.

and of course it should be noted, we get most all these at formaggio kitchen.

the greatest unsung ready-made honey liqueur is “brandymel” from the algarve in portugal.  they use a raw seeming honey that is probably local and fortify it with medronho which is a distillate made from the strawberry tree that produces the famous corsican/sardinian honey.  medronho brings that same chili thread like aroma as seen in lozari’s arbutus honey. brandymel uses a different sugar ethic which is slightly less sweet and their alcohol content is slightly higher.  their honey could even have a high percentage of arbutus because its local to the area.  simply spectacular.  one of the greatest unsung culinary treasures.  it still retails for $13.99 a 750 ml. if it were made in corsica it would be more like $70.00.

bees kness

1.5 oz. gin or linie aquavit (we use aquavit under the same name)

.75 oz. honey syrup

.75 oz. lemon juice

robert burns

2 oz. glen fiddich or maybe something like famous grouse

1 oz. vergano americano (lower art than a vermouth, creates spectacular tensions)

barspoon chestnut flower honey syrup

völstead (that is a rock n roll umlaut)

1 oz. rye

1oz. linie aquavit (rye-caraway-anise, classic creative linkage)

1 oz. punt y mess (when you push sugar beyond a 2:1 manhattan’s ethic, a bitter vermouth is nice)

spoonful malata di bosca honey syrup

Interest in culinary art really seems to be growing these days.  It could easily be because the news of late is so depressing that people are opting to only read the dining and sports sections of the newspaper.  This explosion of interest has even led to a few of the chefs I know appearing on tv (looking like idiots).  My oppressively blue collar parents have even started drinking wine.  I never thought I’d see that day.

I feel though, that this growth of interest is all happening with barely any advances in our ability to communicate about our experiences.  We are taking all this culinary art in, and it is touching our souls like art does (awesome), and we want to talk about it (naturally), but we are only able to market these experiences to each other in conversation (“balanced” wines with 97 point RP scores), not describe them or differentiate them.  Our methods of converting sensory evaluation and emotional content to language needs more attention.

The first question we have to ask is what can culinary art communicate? what can I say with a cocktail and what specific aspects of it say anything?  A drunk bar regular once told me his glass of tequila whispered to him “the desert is large”.  We cannot expect the most useful things to be said, but I have been moved to my greatest joys by things I’ve drank.  What takes us to that joyful state (or any state, even repulsion) are tensions that exist in the work.  These tensions add up to emotional content and are therefore the provoker of your reaction.

My cocktails aim to have particular tensions between elements of structure (acidity, sweetness, alcohol, etc.) as well as tensions between symbolism (particularly the aromatic type), however vague.  The symbols do not have to be too precisely read because there is no plot to the story.  Olfactory symbols are intended to be more like reminders or reference points.  We string them together or bounce off of them creating tension that adds to the emotional content.  Emotional content via symbolism functions relative to the micro or macro context you frame it in, therefore each “reminder” doesn’t exactly point to the same place for each person and we will react in different ways (why we have preferences).

Conversing about our experiences is important.  For starters, when we have a conversation with ourselves we may be more likely to etch an experience into our mental library.  We rely on this library to build the schemas that we use to parse experiences.  New wine drinkers are often frustrated that they have little to say about a wine while experienced wine drinkers have tons to say and probably have more feelings, positive or negative about the experience.  The difference between the drinkers lies in the size of their library, which I bet, discussions of sensory evaluation and emotional content enlarges and maintains.

Our culinary history has a historical record that begs to be written and sensory evaluation should be a key component yet it often gets left out. Somehow our recipes have always been slim on details.  Julia Child (among others) changed recipe writing and culinary history when she detailed the techniques used to physically link ingredients so dishes could actually be recreated by laymen.  Child’s insights ended a long era of purely “shovelware” cook books, but things could be taken further by adding some sort of sensory evaluation to the recipes.  This is easier said than done.  A spaghetti “Carbonara” recipe cannot practically turn into a book in itself (bad marketing material) where every possible relationship is mapped, but if it had to be done, does anyone know how to do it?  We seem to have some sort of deficiency of technical analysis skills and a lack of creative linkage jargon to push the theoretical limits of recipe writing.

The current state of most our recipes is that they are highly dynamic, but what happens if we can write them in a way that makes them static?  The static recipe is a way to walk a day in another man’s shoes, which is usually my goal when I ask someone for their recipe.  A static recipe can convey the regional acid ethic of a classic dish which is something so many chefs get criticized for missing.  Culinary history would be firmer and culinary art objects would become more accessible and enduring.

Many cocktail recipes have made the static shift which is not difficult because of the simplified texture and temperatures.  In 19th century books like the “The Bon Vivant’s Companion”, early mother recipes like the “gin sling” or “whiskey cocktail” were encouraged to be dynamic and stretch up and down to an imbiber’s whim.  By the time the “Savoy Cocktail Book” came around, some recipes were on their way to becoming more staticly locked (many will challenge this assertion).  The result was that new recipes could be more expressionistic and packed with emotional content that we can still experience today just like other art mediums such as Edvard Munch’s expressionist painting “The Scream”.  the “Lucien Gaudin” from the Savoy (look it up!) is not the “Lucien Gaudin” if the proportions, which largely define its emotional content, change.  Of course a new can of worms gets opened up because these statically motivated authors did not have the foresight to see that brands would waver or go under.

The cocktail renaissance has often stumbled because of so many defunct ingredients.  Many ingredients have no sensory evaluation in their historical record so substitutions are impossible.  We will never know if products with a fantasy names like “Hercules” or “Caperitif” were anise or orange aromatized, but we do however have all of their marketing which makes the products seem enticing enough.  It is really a shame that they are gone forever (or their static recipes are just stuck in Internal Revenue Service laboratory records that the Freedom of Information Act can’t seem to penetrate.  Yes, the IRS did pioneer static recipe writing with their importation forms for aromatized wines).

Many imbibers strive to reenact the civil war and make historically accurate cocktails (I love the idea of taking in the same experience as the first Martinez, Manhattan, or Martini), but some suspect the ingredients have wandered aromatically and if they haven’t… how did they do it? Developing and maintaining aromatized products like the Chartreuses or the vermouths takes a team (generations of teams) who obviously have to communicate.  What do these teams say to each other and can we benefit from their communication techniques?  American liquor law might state that “vermouth is a wine which looks and tastes like vermouth” but generations of vermouth producers have hopefully come up with something better.

Culinary communication might be furthered if we could refine or popularize some definitions.  The word at the heart of it all that needs more attention in defining is flavor.  Flavor too often gets confused with it’s component parts, therefore the ambiguity of the language used can make it difficult to communicate.  Flavor is the synesthetic summary experience of tasting, touching, and smelling.  Things get confusing because we use the verb taste to take in flavors but taste as a noun is only a component of a flavor.  This communication setback probably happened because we did not realize flavor was a synesthetic experience.

Synesthesia in this context means that, for example, the aromatic component of a flavor will influence perception of the taste component and separation of the components while perceiving will be challenging if not possible.  This happens because certain aromas make things taste sweeter than they really are while other aromas make things taste less sweet.  The components of flavor can be identified, named, and relationships between them can be mapped.  This knowledge, like the formal aspects of painting, can be used to charge culinary art with extra potent emotional content (my obsession).

The painting analogy can teach us a lot about breaking down the flavor phenomenon.  Early in the 20th century, painters started to be intensely concerned with exploring spatial effect in the picture plane (sensation of three dimensions using the two-dimensional picture plane).  These “plane conscious” artists mapped all the illusions that led one to believe they were experiencing three dimensions on the two dimensional picture plane.  These artists even liberated us from mere illusions which often have negative connotations.  What was once illusory became a “plastic reality”.  What this means to flavor is that if you think a wine is sweet, but there is no measurable sugar in the wine, you aren’t really wrong.  Not being wrong isn’t the end of it.  You still have to work harder in communicating if you want the waiter to bring you a wine whose perception of sweetness via aroma you actually enjoy.

Plane consciousness is the future of culinary art.  The painter Hans Hoffman stated “a plane is a fragment of the architecture of space”.  A culinary art experience is easily analogous to taking in space because space isn’t so much real as just an abstract concept.  Each culinary art object is an entire world created out of relationships between these planes.  Isolating planes and defining their relationships is going to motivate artists to develop the science by behind manipulating them (we have already seen great growth in this recently).

The great frontier of culinary communication is in aroma.  Each of us has an “olfactory construct” that we use to divide and categorize our aromatic world.  Research shows that “olfactory symbolism” or the meanings we attach to aromas which guide the divisions of our constructs are culturally relative and therefore we are not exactly hard wired to believe anything smells good or bad.  Many constructs are possible and aromas can be divided into all sorts of categories, some more useful to culinary art than others.

There may even be a hardwired type of olfactory construct that is intensely useful to building and describing flavors in culinary (someone please study this i’m dieing to know if its hardwired).  We can divide aromas based on how they change the perception of sweetness in a flavor.  I call this construct the “round/angular olfactory construct”.  Round aromas are the fruits like orange, apple, apricot, etc, but also aromas like anise, and almond.  If only slightly, these aromas will all increase the perception of sweetness in a flavor.  Angular aromas create the opposite effect (do not confuse with sourness) and some bartenders call spirits like rye whiskey that are dominated by hard to name angular aromas “drying agents”.  Other angular aromas are spices like juniper, clove, and cinnamon.

Multiple round aromas in a flavor experience can be described with the analogy of overtones and intervals.  some round aromas together like apricot and orange are intensely hard to parse and create an overtone.  Distinct “intervals” happen between more disparate round aromatic linkages like coconut-pineapple or anything-anise.  The aromas are perceived in a succession that can add serious “depth” to a flavor experience.  The round aromatic interval is analogous to how depth is created in the picture plane by intervals of warm and cool colors (“warm & cool” is an arbitrary analogy that we’ve grown to accept!).

Angular aromas exist in what could also be called “intervals”, but they seem to have a slightly different nature where they do not produce overtones (or maybe they do? My theory is not firm).  An analogy to describe the groupings of angular aromas could be “terraced” with few intervals that seem to climb in larger steps (fernet) to “crescendo” where there are many intervals which seem to climb gradually and are hard to differentiate (vermouth, Chartreuse).

We seem to love the linkage of round and angular aromas.  They often lead to a very pleasurable sense of spatial effect (Arnold Palmer) and are great considerations when improvising drinks.  Strangely, both Chartreuses seem to be elaborate sets of only angular aromas absent of all roundness.  The skewed nature of it all may have had strange symbolism to the early monks such as celibacy or the denial of pleasure (though it could also be a cover up for their deviate behavior).  No matter what the chartreuses symbolize, it must have taken some sort of communication of sensory analysis to exclude any botanicals with round aromas (anise lurks everywhere.  The anise aroma can actually be found in green Chartreuse but the aroma is locked up by the high alcohol.  When the proof gets cut the anise aroma is more free to be volatile).

Another great olfactory construct which relies heavily on searching for universal symbolism in western culture is the “temporal olfactory construct” which separates aromas based on a time association with them; does an aroma remind you of the past or the future?  Just like we enjoy the clash of the round and angular, we also enjoy the violent juxtaposition of the past and future (and often both constructs overlap).  Examples of backward looking aromas in western culture would be the garden of eden fruits and antiseptic preservative aromas like juniper, sage, and wormwood.  Forward looking aromas are often exotic like coconut, pineapple, demerera rum, or cognac.  Some aromas like cherry have a tonal range and can point in both directions.  Cherry liqueurs like Heering point towards the past with their stodgy density while forward looking Kirschwasser glows aromatically in a neon sort of way after being liberated from involatile aromas via distillation.  Famous temporal juxtapositions would be gin (epic olfactory tension!) with purifying juniper contrasted with exotic saffron and orange peel or absinthe with glowing futuristic anise contrasted with ancient preservative wormwood, but of course it is all culturally relative.  These days we have lost touch with the symbols and our reference points are too personal.  The olfactory literacy rate being so low really stifles the art.

The emotional content that olfactory symbolism creates makes aromatic tonality very significant though overlooked.  Ferran Adria might have  made playing with texture the hot topic, and texture has its own emotional content (as well as makes for good fluffy journalism), but aromatic tonality is where its at (not to diminish Adria, I bet his team is really into aroma and I’d really love to hear what they have to say about it).  Shifting the shade or tone of an aroma charges it emotionally, but we talk about it strangely.  When you see tasting notes for wines that address aromatic roundness they are always written as “fruit comma fruit comma fruit comma etcetera”.  The commas lead one to believe the wine will have all those aromas, (maybe in intervals or via a true time element provided by rapid oxidation in the glass) but somehow the shade of round aroma really exists between the fruits (beautiful mermaid-grotesque!).  When we abstract and build wines, we aspire to push and pull aroma into this unknown space between the knowns.  We need to trade the commas for another logical operator that indicates between-ness.

Admitting a love for the space between two knowns does not solve much.  We still can’t comfortably articulate in conversation shades of strange aromas like “organic earthiness” in a wine (in my eyes the most emotionally charged of all wine aromas!).  My favorite shades are emotionally very sensual and romantic because of their similarity to animal aromas and can even be divided symbolically into the masculine and feminine.  Other organic earth aromas at the far reaches of the spectrum are analogous to a white truffle that is past its prime (so sad!) and are in the negative end of my olfactory construct.  Using these analogies, in a hundred years will anyone understand my descriptors of the red wines of Bolgheri, and if Bolgheri never produces a bottle again, will anyone feel they found a similar shade of earth aroma in another part of the world?

Tonality and juxtaposition bring up another communication issue.  What exactly is “complexity” in a flavor experience and is it a useful descriptor?  The desire to call something “complex” seems like an instance where we settle for one word to market an experience, but we really need to divide it into multiple words to describe an experience.  Experiences of rare expressions of roundness often get called “complex” even when they don’t have any distinct intervals.  The same thing happens with angular aromas.  Is “complex” appropriate or should we say something like “distinct”, “rare”, or “enigmatic” to denote the out of the ordinary experience?  To me “complex” seems reserved for flavor experiences that have many intervals of aromas, employ many planes of taste, and maybe even a have a time sensitive evolution via rapid oxidation.

My favorite spirit at the moment is Medronho from the Algarve region of Portugal.  Medronho is a brandy made from the “strawberry tree” or Arbutus.  Nothing is more esoteric or made under rarer circumstances.  I could easily call the brandy “spectacular” or “balanced” (hells no!) and market Medronho to all, but I can’t really call it complex.  The aroma of the brandy basically consists of a strange, distinct, pungent aroma very much like Tobasco minus the vinegar and another mousey-autolytic aroma similar to what you find in some Champagnes (who knows if it is from yeast autolysis).  There is the typical taste structure of a distillate plus the two distinct aromatic intervals.  The juxtaposition is as strange as it gets and the aromas are rare for a fruit brandy, but complex does not fit the bill.  I’ll settle for distinct or even avante-garde relative to the normal western culinary experience. Medronho has no counterpart.

The dissonant nature of some experiences challenges another word that we commonly use in our culinary marketing.  Everything in culinary seems to be “balanced”, but the word has a lot of problems.  Balance does not seem to have any provisions for cultural relativity and cannot account for the acquired tastes that drive modern culinary art.  We can build in cultural relativity or we can switch to another word.  The musical world has championed the word “harmony” and sorted out every nuance of its use.  Harmony is relative because of consonance and dissonance which have been acknowledged to be flexible and always in motion.  Arnold Schoenberg famously stated that there is no dissonance and rather “a dissonance is a further removed consonance that we have yet to absorb.”  Schoenberg’s learned harmony idea opens up a world of acquired tastes that balance, with its fixed connotations, closes off.  There is a new crop of foodies out there whose hobby is essentially acquiring acquired tastes.

Tossing the art of dissonance metabolizing fetishists into the market is dangerous because of our mastery of marketing.  We so easily sell acquired tastes to people that are not ready for them, creating dissatisfaction and potentially hindering the progress of expanding harmony.  Embracing plane consciousness in communication might be a solution.  If we describe the direction of planes to summarize spatial effect (identifying the dissonant space in few articulate words), we can keep people that shouldn’t be from swimming in the avante-garde of culinary art.

Culinary communication is an art in itself.  The task of communicating what artists consciously abstract into the synesthetic unknown is a crazy proposition.  Hopefully plane consciousness, olfactory constructs, culturally relative harmony, and acknowledgment of grotesque tonality will give us an edge.  Ahead of us, we have static recipes to build so we can preserve the complicated “ethics” of our culinary heritage.  There are monumental works that still need to be maintained and modern symbolism that still needs to be explored.   It would be nice if through more discourse, the art of culinary communication will catch up to culinary art itself.

x oz. rum

y oz. lime juice

z g. sugar

the daiquiri is an iconic drink with no specific recipe.  what one believes a daiquiri should be, is all subject to the principles of cultural relativity.  this relative concept is significant because of how polarized western food ways are.  one might find another’s daiquiri to be undrinkably sweet, too tart, or too alcoholic.  hemingway often enjoyed a sugarless daiquiri that most imbibers would find very extreme and probably inharmonious.

with just three ingredients (plus some water!) there is a multitude of options.  rum, which fortifies the drink, is the most diverse spirits category there is.  the range of rum’s aromas is staggering and hard to fully outline.  rum aromas can range from simplistic (and very common in culinary) like caramel or vanilla to rare like iodine, or the enigmatic and un-nameable.  the appeal of rum aromas are also subject to a lot of culturally relative symbolism.  each of us has an “olfactory construct” which we use to categorize aromatic experiences and attach meaning.  in western culture there are some aromas with close to universal symbolism but classification is also often very personal.  to me, the aroma of caramel in rum is a negative.  i find caramel boring and try to avoid rums dominated by the aroma.  i don’t want my rum to go through some elaborate process and end up smelling like something i could just make in my kitchen.  yet the market speaks and those rums sell well.  within rum, many people probably hold the caramel aroma favorably in their olfactory construct.  symbols can congeal.  maybe i used to like caramel as well, but experiences can make your olfactory construct shift.

for many, a daiquiri takes shape with an intense plane of acid.  limes have a very consistent amount of acidity, but their aromas can vary significantly.  the lime aroma is very piney and angular in nature, but the degree of its intensity varies significantly with the lime.  sometimes when limes have a yellowed skin, the aroma of their juice can be obnoxious, overly piney and very hard to enjoy.  if the lime has dimpled skin, the rind is usually very thick and there is little juice inside.  limes with the best juice economy and most elegant aroma are not so intensely green as dimpled limes, don’t feel solid, and have very smooth skin.  these are what growers strive to put on the market.

the character of the sugar source for a daiquiri can vary drastically.  bleached and highly refined white sugars are not aromatic.  bleached sugar sweetness to the daiquiri’s structure but no aromatic contrast to the rum and lime. on the other hand, raw sugars can be distinct and highly aromatic.  at the far extreme, molasses is a concentrate of the aromatic part of sugar, separated during the refining process.  aromatic sugars have a density of aroma that can overshadow many nuances of a rum and should be used with that in mind.  using a sugar source with aroma also has the potential to make boring rums much more exciting.

the relationship of sugar to acid is where the majority of the daiquiri’s emotional content comes from.  aroma, its level of extract, and alcohol pull on these planes of structure, but they are not so significant or predictably manipulated.  the PH of the acid is hard to obsess over so it becomes easiest to describe the acid/sugar ratio as relative to a 400g/l sugar source in a 2:1:1 sour.

1.5 oz. rum (80 proof)

.75 oz. lime juice

.75 oz. sugar syrup (400g/l or very close to a common 1:1 simple syrup)

the above recipe really captures the average of most western tastes and is what is typically served in a restaurant scenario.  as the relative amount of sugar decreases, the drink can be described as “drier” and appealing to less imbibers on average while sometimes gaining in its ability to thrill a minority.  when producing daiquiris for others, the challenge becomes abstracting the drink to an idealized emotional state by changing the ratios of rum, lime, and sugar as well as other planes like temperature, dissolved gas and inhomogeneous elements like ice chips produced during shaking.

switching to stirred in granular sugar while trying to maintain a similar acid/sugar ethic decreases the overall volume of the drink and therefore you need to extrapolate.  using granular sugar without a scale takes intuition, but can increase the intensity of the spirit without having to use a higher proof bottling because the drink is not diluted with water from the syrup.

language to describe the emotional content of a drink is very underdeveloped and because food ways are so diverse, all we really have is trial and error when matching drinks to drinkers which can be costly.  unlike a painting which only needs to be painted once, every time a culinary work is consumed it needs to be produced which is not without expense.  we have developed language effective enough to sell drinks and make them seem enticing, but not effective enough for people to actually understand what they are getting with any precision.  most imbibers just shoot in the dark with a simplistic mentality of “i like ‘x’ trendy liqueur so i bet i’ll like any drink that features it”.  everybody gets by, but with such an asynchronous system (one side knows everything, the other side knows little) for new experiences, the art can’t go very far.  no one is likely to become the arnold schoenberg of mixology, expressing the tricky aspects of the zeitgeist which require new notions of flavor harmony.

anyhow, make my daiquiri like a Markovich Lissitzky or Wassily Kandisnky painting; abstracted and expressionist.  stretch it with the emotionally charged raring to go structure of a 250 gram sour pulled taught by low extract aroma (via non aromatic sugar!).  throw out those common “culinary” aromas.  i want my mind to wander through enigmatic, mermaid-grotesque, aged, cape verdean rum aromas terraced against the gentle piny-ness of a perfect lime.  forget those over oaked, lacquered up whiskey cocktails, this will be like a licking a green marble sculpture, shaped by structure and veined by aroma.  if you come from a snapple-sweet tea life style, be prepared to find out we don’t idealize the world the same way.

ginger beer has definitely come back into vogue lately, but i don’t think its full creative potential has been realized.  the uniqueness and pungency of ginger yields an intense emotional response that begs to be explored.  when you really investigate the mechanics of ginger beer, the simple seeming component of the “dark and stormy” or “gin gin mule” isn’t so simple.

for starters carbonating is hard but that is the least of the problems.  the ginger aroma is quick to degrade in certain environments and without knowing what they are, developing a recipe can be a lot of frustration.  in darcy o’neil’s incredible book “fix the pumps”, he explains that ginger cannot tolerate sucrose solutions or a PH that is too low.  this means a recipe needs invert sugars (not that hard to do) and can’t be comfortably acidified for stability. so i guess it needs to be sold before it spoils in a week.

the flavor of ginger beer is also a little more complicated that just ginger.  spiciness is often bolstered by capsicum to add depth which i’m sure will take a few iterations to get right.  i also have a feeling horseradish might also be able to add a similar amount of spicy depth.  spatial effect can also be enhanced by adding malt or honey to create aromatic backgrounds or even… sweet potato water! (water sweet potatoes were boiled in. similar to the guyana beverage “sweet potato fly”)

to make this all actually happen in a bar with any quality or economic viability, a recipe is going to have to be kegged and put on draft as well as nearly non cooked because you can’t tie up a stove in the kitchen for too long.

you also need an accurate sense of your turnover. a three gallon recipe will give you 75 or so 5 oz. portions.  if you fill it every few days you can probably keep everything fresh and sanitary which is important because components won’t be sterilized by cooking.

the foundation of a recipe is ginger and sugar in carbonated water.

my recipe needed nearly a quart of ginger juice per three gallons. with the right tool for the right job juicing ginger can be pretty easy.  grate the root in a cheese greater then put it through a centrifugal juicer like an Acme.  if your trying to make a gallon of juice you could probably even basket press the grated ginger.  the juice can easily be frozen and parceled out later so you only juice the ginger once a month.

if you choose to terrace the spiciness with capsicum, you can make a very potent high alcohol chili tincture and dole it out by the drop. horseradish could be treated just like the ginger.

the sugar content is fairly easy to figure out by looking on the nutritional facts on the backs of commercial bottlings and emulating their success.  ginger beer sugar is in the range of 100 to 150 grams per liter.  this could be weighed out and inverted in large highly concentrated batches then frozen just like the ginger juice.  you would have to be in the kitchen only once of month granted you have enough freezer space.

the contrasting back drop could be opportunistic.  maybe you have staff meal sweet potatoes, maybe you don’t. maybe you had enough space to freeze that as well.  using nothing isn’t a bad idea either.  a.j. stephens brand “boston” ginger beer is my favorite and seems to be really minimal.

toss it in the keg and gas it up like a lager.  14 psi at fridge temp is a good start but this could be adjusted based on foaming.

not everyone has a spare draft line but if you serve enough, even factoring in labor, making your own ginger beer could give you artistic freedom and save money.

after a couple more production iterations i’ll post a more formal recipe.

my vision for aromatic adjuncts so far are hopping the brew and using malta goya as my malt flavor source (similar to my fake genever recipe which relies on distilled malta goya)

martini

(3 to 1)

2.25 oz. citadelle gin

.75 oz. noilly prat dry vermouth

dash orange bitters

homogenized lemon peel (expressed in the stirring pitcher)

this is fantastic and refreshing.  citadel is a gin with a ratio of juniper and coriander that is not as extreme as other more juniper dominant bottlings.  the acidity of the vermouth does not stand out significantly and the lack of sweetness mutes the effect of the orange bitters to elegance.

(2 to 1)

2 oz. tanqueray gin

1 oz. dolin dry vermouth

dash orange bitters

top notes of lemon peel

this version has a different sense of harmony.  tanqueray has a very large amount of juniper relative to coriander, yet in the drink, because of the inhomogeneous lemon peel, the gin’s aggressive angular aromatic nature is intensely overshadowed.  for some, the acidity from the large quantity of dry vermouth is too challenging.  dolin is also a brand known for its gorgeous bright muscat meets elder flower fruit, but even in such a large quantity and paired with orange bitters, the fruit is not readily obvious.

the martini is a drink in love with exclusivity and has a very skewed sense of harmony.  elitists are quick to defend the iconic beverage as high art and their misty prose leaves others with little understanding of what is really going on.

within, the the martini is composed of two well entrenched high art ingredients.  dry gin defends itself by adding extra exotic-seeming botanicals in trace amounts that have no real bearing on the overall aroma.  the extra ingredients are strictly symbolic (gin is all about aromatic symbolism), yet new producers constantly fall into the trap of actually using the extra botanicals to influence flavor with the consequence of their gins often smelling like someone added cracked black pepper.  gin drinkers are often very brand sensitive but the most important, least analyzed difference between producers is their juniper to coriander ethic.  some producers are in love with juniper and their gins can come across as bottled pine trees while others show restraint and can come across as either elegant or sometimes bland if too much overshadowing happens.  no one way is better, each is just a different sense of harmony related to symbolic value placed on the juniper aroma within an imbiber’s osmology.

vermouth is one of the trickiest beverages to understand, eluding language and being defined only as a “beverage that resembles the characteristics of and tastes like vermouth”.  dry vermouth may have been paired with gin because of its alliterative botanical concept as well as its delicacy and inability to overshadow.   gin’s exclusivity techniques look like white lies relative to the many claims of deliberate misinformation in vermouth production techniques.  the main item of misinformation in question is that botanicals are extracted using high proof solvents when the truth is really the opposite.  the solvents are adjusted to the minimum of microbiological stability so they don’t over extract bitter principles.  if aspiring producers fall for the high proof trap they will never figure out how to replicate existing produers’ success.  exclusivity is furthered with claims that formulas are composed of a massive array of botanicals which conflicts with some open producers claiming the use of only a few.

as the sum of its parts, the martini has a strange sense of spatial effect.  if made as gin and dry vermouth in a varying ratio, sweetness, which is important to so many other styles of drink, is nearly eliminated.  as opposed to a “sour” style drink with voluptuous pornographic proportions, the martini is tall, gaunt and uniquely very attractive.  the function of dry vermouth in the martini is complex.  for starters dry vermouth simply dilutes gin’s alcohol and aroma.  this all happens with a swap for vermouth’s acidity and its largely self contrasted round aroma.  the change in ratio between gin and vermouth is really the push and pull of numerous planes of spatial effect.  angular aromas and real acidity are not exactly an even trade and many people find vermouth’s acidity to be inharmonious with the absence of sweetness in such a high alcohol environment.

besides imbibers enjoying an easy connoisseurial point to distinguish themselves with, aroma may be the reason the gin martini has evolved to the dry, no vermouth style.  if the nature of aromas can significantly effect our perception of structure, modern gin styles employ aroma to effectively create experiences that can go unameliorated.  no acid necessary, modern gin producers took care of that literally (dissolved acid post distillation) or figuratively (aroma).  no contrasting round aroma necessary, modern producers built that in.  not that anything malicious is going on but eliminate a middle man and you can sell more product.

modern gins have enough angular aroma to be refreshing but not too much that they need to be diluted with vermouth to find common harmony.  there is more citrus peel in modern formulas and coupled with orange bitters, as well as effective use of a twist, martini-esque spatial effect can be maintained without the vermouth.

now that the largest points of contention are squared away, what are thought of as mere garnishes, the olive and lemon twist, often become the most exciting and defining parts of the martini.  the olive adds salt from its brine which is still a rare plane to manipulate in the cocktail realm.  the twist can either be applied into the liquid and stirred or directly to the top of the drink with the difference being the creation of a homogenous or inhomogeneous element.  frontal olfaction is very powerful and strong inhomogenous “top notes” have a large tendency to overshadow aromas within the drink therefore they can make an experience very distinct.  a lemon twist should be wielded with a lot of empathy because it really determines the fate of dollar an ounce gin.

with such a skewed sense of space, temperature becomes a plane that is critically important to the martini.  the gaunt, thin drink becomes very cranky as it warms and is best thought of as a three part shot.  stirring the drink to minimize dissolve gas with an adequate amount of ice is important as well the realization that an unchilled glass will suck the cold energy right out of the liquid.

like the architect ludwig mies van der rohe stated, “god is in the details”.  if you understand the landmarks you can move around and shape an entire world with its own spiritual life.  the martini has a surprising amount of relationships that can benefit from more attention than most.  small changes have a very significant influence on spatial effect and therefore emotional response.  with every decision within the martini having such intense impact,  the drink might actually be worthy of all the obsession and fetishism lavished upon it.

for quite a while i have dreamt of the idea of bottling high pressure sodas in champagne bottles within a restaurant scenario. ginger beers, sparkling lemonade, sparkling versions of still wines, or maybe hibiscus soda that resembles the structure of prosecco.

so far carbonated with yeast, but only ended up with sulfurous yeasty brut sodas (but the carbonation was flawless!).  i’ve tried to come up with manifolds like the tap cap or perlage system to force carbonate single bottles, yet have had little success. this all led me to attempt more traditional keg to bottle force carbonation.

the first problem was to develop a proof of concept experiment using only water.

to bottle something resembling champagne the beverage would have to be 60 psi at room temp (though i’ve heard some champagnes can top out at 80).  in the fridge, with the same amount of dissolved gas, the pressure will be lower but how low exactly is tricky to figure out (i can’t find any tables that explain the relationship…).  my fridge is cold, maybe just above freezing in the high 30’s.  what do i have to set the pressure at if i want it to expand to 60 at room temp?  to figure this out i thought i’d simply carbonate the keg to 60 psi at room temp.  easier said than done.  it takes multiple days for the water to absorb the gas.  i actually don’t think i ever got to 60 on multiple tries.  one time i actually had a leak and found the entire just filled gas cylinder empty.  gauges will say you are at 60 but those are just measuring the pressure in the head space and not accounting for what is going on in the liquid.  after wasting a full tank i thought i’d just estimate a number in the fridge so i went with 40 psi at fridge temp.  i didn’t let it warm up to room temp to see what it hit, but i’m pretty sure i got to 40 and it would make a nice drink.

now we had to get the water out of the keg and into a champagne bottle.  many factors can thwart this being done.  my discharging tool was the highly regarded “blichmann beer gun”.  i was hoping that it would scale up the the pressure and do the job.  the beer gun applies no “counter pressure” and claims it doesn’t need to because it’s design reduces so much turbulence relative to other designs.  (youtube videos show it working really well for beer)

i thought i would lower the pressure and push the highly carbonated liquid at a much lower pressure out of the keg. unsuccessful.  you could see at the very beginning of the hose that the gas was coming out of solution (we started at 5 psi maybe).  gas came out of solution until we turned the pressure up to the 30’s.  apparently counter pressure is critical.  we probably need everything colder as well.  the rig is large and probably needs a colder fridge and a large ice bath.  probably two stock pots of salted ice which is more than i keep in the house.

at 30 psi we were able to keep the gas in solution, but we had not even pulled the trigger yet.  the liquid immediately starts to lose gas as it rockets out the valve.  30 psi is a lot of pushing power.  i surmise that if there was anything dissolved at this pressure it would foam to death.  a solution would be to concentrate the flavoring,  dole it out to the bottles, and freeze it to the bottoms.  after getting the water in the bottles the frozen flavoring will warm up and dissolve.

the soda water we were left with wasn’t bad, but my bottling plant isn’t ready for prime time.

what i think i really need is a bottling apparatus that does counter pressure really well. i think i’m going to have to try a traditional design.

i’m also going to retreat to ginger beer which is bottled at a pressure slightly above beer.

you live and you learn…

i was intending to use it to make cider but thought i could also put it to other uses around the bar.

the main bar problem i’ve been wanting to find a solution to is creating large volumes of clear pineapple juices to offer at brunch instead of orange juice.  the fresh, tart juice can be incredibly refreshing.

so i bought eight pineapples for a dollar a piece at hay market.  i peeled the skins  in about a minute and tossed them into the press after a simple dicing.

the press has a ratcheting mechanism so you don’t need to be able to move around it 360 degrees for use .  you can easily put it on a bench top but i do recommend bolting it down.  i was lucking that i could drill bolt holes into my bench top otherwise you could mount it on some plywood then clamp that to the bench top.

pineapples are loaded with juice so eight yielded an entire gallon of really clear juice in just of a few productive minutes with the ratchet.

reloading the press is pretty easy.  ratchet backward, take off the ratchet lever, then unscrew to the top with a 360 degree motion using your hands.  you can then simply release the slats and pull off the press cake.  you could make 5 gallons of juice in about a half hour.  cleaning to be honest is a bitch.  you need to loosen the bolts on every slat to get all the fibrous junk in between but with the right socket it really just take five minutes.

pressing is a really good option for pineapples because any griding whips huge amounts of air into the juice and they get really frothy.  also no affordable centrifuging juicers can put out the same volumes as the press.

now that brunch is over and you didn’t quite sell all the juice you can give the rest the “ice wine” treatment to make a decadent (but not obnoxiously decadent) syrup. freeze concentrate only 50% of your juice to increase its extract and marry it back to the rest then use your refractometer to hit 40 brix.

the resulting syrup is a killer foil for lime juice

1.5 oz. gin

.5 oz. kirshwasser

1 oz. lime juice

1 oz. “ice wine” pineapple syrup

2 dashes angostura bitters

my next project is to press apples and concentrate the juice into a syrup i can fortifying with laird’s apple brandy to make “feux pommeau”

the maraschino cherry is an interesting art object.  to many its just a preserved cherry.  but it also can be a trick of expectation and anticipation.  you expect this simple looking preserved cherry to taste like a cherry and it does… but also with the intense almond-y note of the pit.  this was done by an alcoholic solvent bringing the character of the pit to equilibrium with the rest of the cherry.  but you can’t just use any alcoholic solvent.  because we are dealing with equilibriums and certain expectations that must be met, the solvent has to have the same aroma as the juice of the cherry… therefore it must be a cherry eau-de-vie.  that is usually the first mistake people make in making “brandied” cherries.  if you use something with different aroma than the fruit, equilibrium will strip the flavor out of the fruit with often horrific consequences.

well maybe we could do this with another fruit than cherry.  but none really have a pit or inhomogeneous element that a solvent could homogenize.  so what we would have to do is aromatize a fruit brandy with a spice and push it into a fruit instead of pulling it somewhat out. hence we have the “maraschino” blackberry. blackberries soaked in blackberry eau-de-vie that was distilled with mace and grains of paradise (then mixed with vitamin C powder as an anti-oxidant).

well i more or less executed the “maraschino” blackberry idea but came to a stumbling block.  i made a nice blackberry eau-de-vie that i distilled with an “inuitive” amount of spice (i didn’t measure).  the resultant elixir was definitely palatable on its own and not over intense in spice by itself.  things got messy after i added the black berries and let thing sit for a couple weeks.  you can drink the liquid on its own, but the spice aroma in the black berry upon eating seem wretchedly over extracted.  you have to spit it out.  there is obviously some trick of perception that amplifies certain sensations, but how the hell does is it work?

i think i will just dilute the spice extract with more plain eau-de-vie and see what happens.  the “maraschino” blackberry may still be salvaged, but i need a better understanding of this flavor illusion.  i’m reminded of two experiences.  years ago i made a simple clove infused whiskey with seagram’s vo and probably ten cloves per liter.  the infusion tasted really flat and un-clove-like until you added some triple-sec.  wow did the flavor wake up.  sugar is a known flavor enhancer and likely its full potential was unleashed on the cloves.  the same could be happening to the spices from the sugar in the blackberries.  but there isn’t much sugar in the blackberries (maybe just a few %) and much of that sugar was brought to equilibrium with the rest of the liquid.

another experience was drawn from making a simple pineapple rum infusion.  when it comes to equilibrium and you eat a peice of pineapple you get a sensation that you’ve just taken in over proof rum.  even to someone quite desensitized, the sensation is a jolt.  it doesn’t seem probable that the pineapple has more alcohol than the liquid.  so what gives?  is it a result of the texture?  maybe.  blackberries and raspberries taste great whole but when you juice them and rob their texture they taste flat and muted.  to get any life back into them you need to abstract and ameliorate them with more sugar and more acid.

maybe we are experiencing an abstraction through texture.  all those tiny blackberry cells keep popping in your mouth hitting you with barrage after barrage of sensation.  it echoes and amplifies…  i know ferran adria experimented with “limes with texture” where he overshadowed the character of cucumber with lime to borrow their texture.  i wonder if anything was amplified and maybe he was inspired by other fruit abstractions that we more commonly encounter.

potential amusement abounds…