Sweetening drinks can be a science
Published 4:00 am, Sunday, January 10, 2010
Gin that bruises, 500-year-old secret recipes and miracle hangover cures. The world of cocktails is rife with myths and misinformation. As we slowly move out of the Dark Ages and into the cocktail Enlightenment, bartenders are starting to use scientific methodology to disprove hearsay and improve drinks.
Some of that science will be explained Jan. 20 at the Exploratorium. A one-night event (sold out, though the Web site promises to share details for home experiments) will include exhibits on the science behind layering a pousse-café, why absinthe turns white when water is added and how cocktails are affected by the shape of ice.
Having experimented with ice in recent years, many bartenders have moved on to studying sugar. Simple syrup is used to balance acid in many cocktails, so several curious bar types have purchased refractometers and pH meters to measure exact levels of each.
Doug Williams, a bartender at Rye in the Tenderloin, is among them. Williams, who will be doing a liquid-nitrogen demonstration at the Exploratorium, theorizes that this equipment could be useful to describe cocktails similar to sake, which is labeled with alcohol content plus sweetness and acidity and other measurable factors. "It's not too difficult to take a cocktail you like that's successful and deconstruct its acid and sweetness levels and things like that, and perhaps replace that cocktail on the menu with something similar."
Experimenting with more practical aspects of mixology is Darcy O'Neil, a laboratory technologist in Ontario, blogger and sometime bartender. He has measured glycerin levels in various brands of vodka and is making an effort to bring acid phosphate back into fashion as a cocktail ingredient.
O'Neil has researched the science of sugar and its effects on taste and aroma in cocktails. One useful find was that aroma alters the perception of sweetness. "Certain things like rose flower or orange flower water or juniper, when you add them to something sweet, it makes them taste less sweet. But when you add banana and caramel, it increases the sense of sweetness, even though there is no change in the sugar level," he says.
With this information he created the Gin-to-the-Fire cocktail. It calls for less than half of the sweetener of a typical sour-style cocktail, yet because of the vanilla flavor in the drink and sweet fruit garnish, O'Neil says the drink tastes balanced.
O'Neil also looked at how so-called supertasters (people who experience taste with more intensity) perceive cocktails. "Supertasters have up to four times the number of taste buds, so if it tastes like a teaspoon of sugar to a nontaster, then it tastes like 4 teaspoons of sugar to a supertaster," O'Neil says.
Don Lee, bartender at Momofuko Ssam Bar in New York and a former software engineer, is also concerned with how sweet tastes are perceived. With his trusty digital refractometer, Lee has been checking the Brix, a measure of sugar, of simple syrups in bars in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco to see how consistent they are at different bars and even at the same bars from day to day. He believes this will allow better standardization of recipes. Right now different bars make their syrups with various sugars, measure ingredients differently and use a hot or cold process to do so. It all affects the flavor and sweetness.
The specific process is particularly important, according to Jennifer Colliau, a bartender at Heaven's Dog and Slanted Door and the owner of Small Hand Foods, a San Francisco company that makes cocktail syrups. Syrups made by dissolving sugar in boiling or hot water will be less viscous and have a "more acidic, lighter, brighter" taste than syrups made at room temperature, she says.
But even Colliau expects some variation behind the bar. "I don't go into the Slanted Door and do a Brix count on all the simple syrup before I start my shift," she says.
Still, Lee wants to measure how important these variations are, even planning double-blind studies. "We're starting with small pieces, things we can quantify," he says. "Once we have numbers for this then we'll try mixing an actual cocktail."
Makes 1 drink
- 2 ounces seltzer water
- 1 ounce London dry gin
- 1/2 ounce Navan vanilla liqueur
- 1/4 ounce lime juice
- 1 ounce grapefruit juice
- 1 dash of Angostura bitters
- -- Strawberry, pear or mango slice for garnish
Instructions: Add the seltzer water into a Champagne flute and set aside. Combine the remaining ingredients in a cocktail shaker and add ice. Shake and strain into the flute. Add the garnish.