The Cocktail Hour

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You need Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

It's real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

You're left feeling refreshed and revitalized so you can be ready to take on what's next.

The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

Time for a tea break, time for a pure leaf.

Can you get some glasses?

I'm too short.

Can you be short?

This glass has my name on it, and it was given to me by my godmother, and I'm sure she did not envisage that I would be making cocktails in it, especially at 9 a.m.

in the morning.

Gin first,

Saint-Germain,

and then some tonic water.

Tagastropod.

Tagastropod.

Welcome to Gastropod.

I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And I'm Nicola Twilley.

And we are together in my kitchen drinking a toast together.

Because this is an episode all about cocktails.

You are going to learn where the cocktail got its name.

And I can assure you, you will be rushing to tell all your friends about it once you hear.

You will also hear the science of why size really does matter, at least when it comes to ice cubes.

You may be wondering why we were drinking a cocktail at 9 a.m.

It is not that we have a problem, okay?

No interventions necessary.

Actually, we were just communing with the very first cocktail drinkers back at the start of the 1800s.

It was a morning drink.

A cocktail was a generic term, kind of like eye-opener.

They had others at the time, anti-phogmatic, all these things that meant basically something to,

you know, cocktail meant something to cock your tail up in the morning.

That's David Wondrich.

He's the author of a bunch of books on drinking history, including, most recently, Imbibe, the definitive read on the history of the cocktail.

And originally, in America, it got attached after some back and forth to one particular formula, which was booze of any kind, really, but it was mostly Dutch-style gin, brandy, or on the frontier, whiskey, with sugar and water, and a good shot or has several dashes of bitters in there to give you the medicinal excuse for drinking.

So you could say that I'm just taking my bitters.

That was another nickname for it is taking my bitters, which meant basically, you know, taking an old-fashioned is what we call it today, first thing in the morning, and maybe more than one.

He did point out that the original cocktails were only a couple of ounces total.

That's smaller than our drinks today.

And so your cocktail would be just this little iced dewdrop that would just be a few short, sweet, icy sips that would be just delightful.

People would drink a lot of them.

There's a cocktail contest at the New York Hotel in the 1850s that was famous where the winning candidate, depending on which account you follow, drank anywhere between 35 and 45 of these

cocktails.

I know, I know.

I'm a little skeptical, but there are other accounts of similar stuff, and these were big guys but damn we're made of weaker stuff after a few sips at 9 a.m i was already feeling it if we make even less sense than normal now you know why and you know actually cynthia we weren't even drinking a real cocktail as david explained a cocktail originally meant liquor sugar bitters and water that's it that's true but today of course a cocktail just means kind of any mixed drink so i think we're probably safe but of course people have been mixing alcohol with other ingredients since time immemorial immemorial.

So we asked Dave, what were people drinking before the cocktail?

Well, before the cocktail punch, punch was the first

broadly popular mixed drink based on distilled spirits.

Distilled spirits were kind of new.

Punch came in in the early 1600s.

Distilled spirits had been around for a couple hundred years, but only in the last 80 or 100 years before that had they really taken off.

There's actually archaeological evidence that distillation was taking place in India and Pakistan more than 2,000 2,000 years ago.

It certainly was used by the Greeks in Alexandria in the first century, and perhaps by the Chinese then as well.

Modern distillation began in Europe around the 12th century, but nobody had figured out how to really play with spirits until the 1600s.

And that took the English who didn't really...

I mean, this is completely un-English, but they didn't care for distilled spirits.

So we drank them mixed with other things to disguise the flavor.

We made punch, and then we made the very first cocktails.

Yes, you can thank us now.

And we have something else to thank you for, the very bizarre history of the word cocktail.

The name cocktail is highly vexed and there are many different theories and after going through all the evidence the one that to me seems the most convincing is that it cocktail was a word semantically like break water or something like that so it cocks your tail up the clue for this is an English bit of humor in a newspaper talking about cocktail otherwise known as ginger and then you see people in England putting cocktail in their drinks, and that meant some kind of ginger extract.

Now, ginger was known popularly from the horse trading business, where people would put a little bit of ginger up a horse's butt if they were trying to sell it to make it seem younger and friskier.

And everybody knew about this.

It was in all the slang dictionaries at the time.

It was a famous piece of trickery, and it would make the horse cock their tail up.

So it seems to be that was the usage that is the cocktail here.

Call me a prude, but but I would prefer to have my cocktail in liquid form than in a piece of ginger.

Yeah, so ginger in a horse's back.

I don't really recommend it, frankly.

I don't know, though.

You know, young mixologists these days.

Nikki, you had some ginger in your fridge.

We could have just used that to test this whole cocktail thing out.

Oh, you first, Cynthia.

Maybe not.

Listeners, we might have to leave this one to you.

Let us know if you give it a go, but no pictures necessary.

Please.

So anyway, the British gave us the name, and then the cocktail crossed the ocean.

Mixologically, like the idea of mixing spirits and sugar and bitters, that goes back to England.

But they were, as far as we can tell, they weren't put together and they were never really popular.

This is what Americans do: we take stuff that other people have lying around and we say, hey, you know, that's actually really cool if you just do this little thing here.

And, you know, suddenly the minced hamburger steak, we put it on a bun with ketchup and mustard.

And suddenly you've got this totally amazing thing that, you know, in Germany it would be lying on a plate.

Other people invent it, but we perfect it.

Is that what you're saying?

Exactly so.

We steal it first.

We steal it and we polish it up and we, you know, we find its true essence.

The Brits may have invented the cocktail, in other words, but we actually preferred the communal punch bowl.

Meanwhile, over here in the land of the free, Americans wanted their own personal, individual beverage, made to order and quick to drink.

It's very American, exactly.

It's not something to share.

It's a one-off, you know, and it was very strong.

America in a glass.

And not even just America.

It's actually a very New York-ish thing.

The name and the recipe and everything coming together, it seems to be somewhere in a triangle between New York City and Albany and Boston.

Yeah, yeah.

And the place where it went to catch on everywhere else was New York City, hands down.

New York City was the popularizer.

New York City was the nozzle that squirted cocktail all over

the rest of the country.

This is sometime between 1800 and 1810, but it caught on elsewhere in America pretty fast.

Really between, say, 1815 and 1825, when you start seeing more and more notices elsewhere.

And by 1825, it's in New Orleans, and it's in Canada.

So it's known.

It's a known drink.

In your book, you have something called The Original Cocktail, the first published recipe for a cocktail.

So I'm wondering where you found it and what kind kind of drink it is.

Well, that's one with water, not ice.

And it's from a British traveler.

I believe it's Transatlantic Sketches by Captain Alexander, who collected some recipes at the City Hotel in New York.

I'm assuming that was his recipe.

It's a very simple recipe, but you know, it works.

You've made it?

Yeah, it's just bitters, sugar, water, and booze, and gin.

Geneva-type gin, Dutch-type gin.

That's what we drank in America.

And this

scrape of the wooden sugar breaker.

Well, okay, that's a joke at the expense of bad bartenders.

It had a little bit of nutmeg on top as a garnish, which is a great garnish for a cocktail.

The recipe says, if you can't get nutmeg, just grate a little bit of your muddler on top, basically, and nobody will know the difference.

That's the original, but half the fun of cocktails is that there are a bazillion different mixed drinks around today.

We asked all of you about your favorites.

On our Facebook page, we heard about sidecars, negronis, and even booze-soaked peach gummy rings.

And then there are the hot toddies taken medicinally, of course.

As all cocktails originally were.

And also mimicking history is listener Stephanie.

She started out drinking punch at fraternity parties and then she graduated to cocktails.

Her cocktail career got off to a crazy start on her 21st birthday in Italy.

They took me out to this bar near our

near our school where I think I had a screwdriver with vodka and something called a tequila boom boom,

which is where you hold your mouth open and they pour tequila into your mouth and then soda water, close your mouth, shake your head, and tell you to swallow.

Ooh, flashback, my 21st birthday party involved the juicy Lucy, a fairly disastrous combination of vodka, gin, blue curacao, and sprite that just goes down the hatch like nobody's business.

That sounds disgusting.

It is absolutely vomit-inducing.

I have grown up since.

And cocktails have too.

This is Sarah calling from Oakland.

The other night I went to a brand new restaurant and bar in the uptown neighborhood of Oakland called Parlor to try their cocktails.

And I had one that had rye, lemon, mint, and pomegranate molasses.

And it was about the most delicious cocktail I've ever tasted.

That was my friend Sarah Rich, aka the owner of Gold Cutlery.

We last heard from her her on our very first episode.

So nice to have her back on the show and those are basically all of my favorite ingredients combined into one drink.

I need to try that.

So the thing about all of these present-day cocktails, whether they are classy or revolting, they all include ice.

But the original cocktail didn't.

Ice didn't become popular until the 1850s or so.

The frozen water trade got started with ice being shipped all across America from New England ponds, first by boat, and then from the 1830s and 40s on trains.

That changed a lot of things.

Nikki, now is not exactly the time for your large treatise on refrigeration.

Okay, fine.

But the introduction of ice really had a big impact on the cocktail.

It took the place of water in recipes.

It changed the texture and temperature of the drink.

And it also changed the flavor, as we'll hear.

And it led to an explosion in bar tools.

Swizzle sticks, shakers, ice picks, mallets, strainers.

All of a sudden, making cocktails involved a ton of gear.

Suddenly, you needed strainers,

and they started making these little beautiful pieces of silver-plated bar gear that are just, or even pure silver for the fancy people, that are just really lovely.

The first strainers are beautiful.

These little scallop shell things with holes in them and this elegant bend in the handle.

Very nice.

And that would hold the ice back.

Originally, they would give you the drink with the strainer in it, but they gave out a lot of drinks and they only got a few strainers back.

So they learned to strain it into into a glass and hand it to you.

So that changed.

And then you need

ice tools for breaking up the blocks of ice.

You need syrup bottles with pour spouts, dasher bottles for the bidders, shakers.

Suddenly people learn that you can clamp a tin cup on top of a glass and it will make a seal and it will really efficiently shake all your ingredients together and cool them and the bits of ice will bust up any pieces of citrus you throw in there and do the muddling for you.

So that becomes very cool.

And this is where we get to dig into some of the science about cocktails because this really gets to some basic cocktail questions.

What temperature should any particular cocktail be?

Should you stir the drink with an ice cube in it, or should you shake it up?

With ice, all of these questions are suddenly on the table.

So we went to consult with another David.

Dave Arnold is the cocktail science guy.

He runs a high-tech cocktail bar in New York called Booker and Dax, but he also teaches teaches cocktail science at Harvard.

And he has just come up with a book called Liquid Intelligence, The Art and Science of the Perfect Cocktail.

In it, he lays out what he calls the fundamental law of traditional cocktails.

And here's the simple physics.

Ice in a bar, only way it chills is by melting.

Right?

Because it's at zero degrees and so all it can do is melt.

It can't get warmer than zero.

It just has to melt.

So every bit of chilling that the ice provides is provided through melting and then that melt water mixing with your liquid.

So what that means is that every bit of chilling has dilution that goes with it.

And that those two things are exactly linked to each other.

That means the colder your drink gets, the more diluted it is.

And this leads to some pretty counterintuitive experiments.

Okay, so like if you make a batch of Manhattan's, mix, rye, vermouth, and bitters together, and then you divide that batch in two, and with batch one you add a huge pile of ice, and then with batch two you add a much smaller pile.

And then you stir them both until they reach minus two degrees centigrade.

And that means there is one bit of additional technology you need.

You need two digital thermometers.

So as soon as both of those drinks hit the same temperature, negative two Celsius or about 28 degrees Fahrenheit.

And the one with the large pile of ice will get there first, obviously.

Of course, and then you strain them out into two glasses, and they will taste exactly the same.

Which is not what I thought would happen.

I thought the one with the huge pile of ice would be watery.

And that sounds logical, but the point is, chilling equals dilution.

So as soon as they're the same temperature, they're the exact same drink.

It doesn't matter how long you stir them or how much ice you add at the beginning.

It might not matter how you get there, but it does matter what temperature you end up at.

That affects taste.

The colder something is, unless you're using agave, which fructose doesn't, the sweetness doesn't go away as much with fructose as it does with sucrose.

But yeah, the colder something is, I mean, most of your tastes are blunted, but sugar more than others.

So basically, the colder your drink is, the less sweet it tastes.

And this fructose thing is kind of interesting, too.

So here's why it's different from other sweeteners.

A normal fructose molecule forms a six-sided ring shape.

And when it's in that shape, it is the sweetest of all naturally occurring sugars.

But the warmer your fructose gets, the more of those six-sided ring shapes turn into five-sided rings.

And those are about half as sweet as the six-sided guys.

So thanks to the weird chemistry of fructose, it actually gets less sweet as it gets warmer.

But it's really sweet when it's cold.

That is some strange science.

But most people make their drinks with simple syrup.

That's a mixture of equal parts, sugar and water, and that's sucrose.

And that doesn't taste as sweet when it's cold.

Like Dave says, your entire experience of taste and flavor gets blunted when you're consuming something cold, sweetness most of all.

In other words, it is possible to get your drink too cold.

Once you get anywhere close to the temperature of minus six, seven, eight Celsius, it really starts to become on a Manhattan unpleasant.

And it's because the

oak just starts tasting more like you're sucking on tree bark.

And you lose all of the complexity of the spirit when the temperature kind of gets that low.

Manhattan that you store in the freezer is just wretched.

In fact, Dave recommends that all drinks be served somewhere around negative 5 to negative 1 degrees Celsius, which is 23 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit.

Noted, I will be bringing my thermometer out on the town with me from now on.

Bartenders of Brooklyn, be warned.

The interesting part becomes, and we'll talk about this when we're developing recipes,

is what happens when that drink starts to warm up.

The flavors will change.

That's Jared Sedoyan.

He's managing the bar at the Hawthorne in Boston.

He's actually a computer dork by training.

He did an undergrad in computer science at MIT, but now he's a full-time bartend, and he teaches classes on cocktail science.

People don't sit at a bar, order a cocktail, and then chug the entire thing in two seconds.

That would go down several bad roads real fast.

What they do is they sit with it.

They converse with

their drinking companion or their date or whoever they might be with.

And that cocktail might stay in front of them for five minutes, for 10 minutes, for 20 minutes.

We often consider the shift in temperature too as it relates to flavor.

And I don't know if many, many people consider that.

They want their

martini shaken and ice cold, but they're going to sit with it for 15 minutes and then it's not going to be cold at the end.

So maybe they should have had it on the rocks.

Does that affect what you would recommend to a customer?

Not necessarily.

It's more what...

Because I can't know what their pace is going to be.

It looks like you're going to drink a lot.

Let me shake that for you so it stays cold.

Or, you know,

asking them in advance, oh, are you going to finish this very quickly?

Or do you think that you're going to sit with this for a while?

Would be a little strange.

My partner Tim joined me for a private cocktail class with Jared.

I mean, Tim already ate grasshoppers and made cricket flower pancakes for gastropod.

I figured he deserved a drink.

Yep, I think he's earned it.

But in terms of that dilemma, Dave Arnold actually has some interesting tips for how to make a drink that can work at a whole variety of temperatures.

Avoid acids like lemon and lime juice, he says.

They don't stay in balance as the drink warms up and begins to taste sweeter.

He actually suggests using essential oils instead, like a twist of peel.

And when Jared made an old-fashioned for Tim and me, that's exactly what he did.

The old-fashioned as a sipping drink that you linger over for a while, so he used lemon oil.

I've just peeled a really beautiful lemon, and you can see if you look really close at them, there are all these little pores, and they're actually full of lemon oil.

And if I hold your hand out

like this, and if I express that

on my hand,

and my hand is all shiny.

Yeah, if we look at the peel again, I'm sorry to dirty your hands, but you'll appreciate it in a second.

You can see that the peel's all wet now.

The oils have come out of those pores a little bit.

And what we're going to do, and you can smell that, it's just.

It's amazing.

Yeah, it smells great.

We're going to express some of that oil on top of the old-fashioned.

Okay, so now should we just just smell it?

Now smell it again.

Oh, wow.

The lemon is really present, even though there's no juice or anything in it.

Complete transformation, right?

And it tasted completely different, too.

It's just like we talked about in our flavor episode, Nikki.

So much of what we taste comes from the smell.

And that amazing smell of lemon oil that's on the surface of the drink and around the rim of the glass, it just imbues the drink with this wonderful lemon-y flavor.

Wow.

I'm one of those lazy people who always leaves out the twist.

Me too.

Okay, so use a twist instead of juice for those slow sipping drinks.

Or David actually suggests using bitters.

He says they are designed to work well at a variety of temperatures and dilutions.

And then his final drink is actually the most obvious of all.

At a rock.

I think that there are certain drinks that should not be served on a rock because I don't want them to dilute anymore.

Whereas a negroni can be served on a rock because also there's two things that go into play.

Negronis, when they get very warm, tend to, the sweetness comes out more.

Remember we're saying as it gets warmer, the Negroni tends to get too sweet when it gets warm.

The flavors, I don't think, are balanced out as well when they're on the warm side as they are when they're on the cold side.

Whereas a Negroni can withstand a good bit of dilution.

You know, I don't like a Manhattan on a rock because I think you've already taken a Manhattan to the point where I want it with dilution.

Manhattan can get a little bit warmer and have it still be good.

And so don't serve that one on a rock.

Unless, of of course, someone serves you a Manhattan that's not diluted enough to your taste.

Drop a rock in it.

You know what I mean?

And enjoy your drink.

I do love that he says, you know, just drink your drink the way you like it.

No judgment.

You say no judgment, but this is where size comes in.

And it really does matter.

In ice cubes, I mean.

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Size of the ice didn't really matter much when you were shaking, but it really does when you're stirring, because stirring is a much less effective, when I say effective, I mean efficient, chilling thing, right?

You have less stuff in contact.

So size of your ice cube matters very much when you're stirring.

Larger ice cubes have a smaller surface area in contact with your drink, so they melt and chill more slowly.

And that means you can sip your drink longer without it getting watery.

FYI, Dave's personal favorite, is a two-inch square, and he hates the spherical ones because they nudge up against his nose funny when he's drinking.

Which, I mean, I know how he feels.

But this talk of shaking, it brings us to the James Bond question.

Shaken or stirred, what's the science?

Really, stirring is just dilution and chilling.

Shaking is dilution, chilling, and texture.

You know, when you're shaking, you're diluting it a lot more, right?

Because it's much more violent than stirring.

So as a more diluted drink, typically there'll be it's colder, right?

Because of the fundamental law.

And because of that connection between temperature and sweetness, that means that a shaken drink should start out as a sweeter recipe than a stirred one, so that it still tastes sweet at a colder temperature.

And then there's the texture factor with the shaking.

All those bubbles.

And they also tend to have like a little frothy layer at the top.

And that's why you can run this test very easily.

So clarified lime juice and regular lime juice don't taste that different when you, you know, taste them on their own.

But if you shake a daiquiri with clarified lime juice, and clarified meaning I've taken all the everything out of it that you know stops you from being able to read a newspaper through it, and you shake one with regular lime juice, you'll find, even if they're the same age and everything else, the lime juice is, you'll find that the one with the clarified lime juice is terrible.

That completely lacks a texture.

And it's because even the little bit of crud that's in lime juice really helps kind of hold air bubbles and texture, and so you'll just get a better, better drink.

Tim and I got to test this out.

First, Jared made us a delicious daiquiri with local rum, fresh lime juice, and simple syrup.

You can see it's really foamy.

Yeah, really foamy.

There's a lot of air in that drink now.

Now, I'm going to put a Hawthorne strainer over our shaker tin here.

There's a big spring on the inside that's nice because it can fit on several different sized vessels.

And then I'm also going to use a tea strainer.

This is going to remove those little tiny ice shards, things that will melt very fast, and increase the amount of water in the drink shortly after we serve it.

That's amazing.

And it has a bit of texture to it.

It's almost like this slight effervescence, right?

It just kind of dances on your palate.

Then he moved on to an old-fashioned.

It's usually stirred, and so he did it both ways for us, shaken and stirred.

Then we're going to add a couple ounces of our Rittenhouse rye whiskey.

Doing this in a circle.

The smell is amazing, even from over here.

The difference in color is amazing.

Look at them next to each other.

The old fashioned that I stirred, you can see right through.

The old fashioned that I've shaken, there's a thin head of foam.

It's opaque.

It's full of oxygen.

But try these side by side.

Yeah, the stirred one is really velvety and really smooth.

I think the shaken one...

It's so cold that you don't taste the flavors anywhere near as much.

Okay, so Mr.

Bond, here's the deal.

The drinks you should stare and pour out on a rock are the boozier ones that you're going to sit with for a while.

And those frothy, shaken ones, like the daiquiri, you need to chug them.

And this is why I hate it when people don't drink their shaken drinks right away.

It's like the drink is dying.

The minute that someone hands you a shaken drink, it's dying, you know, and not because of temperature, right?

But because of its texture.

Yeah, just drink those things.

This is why, you know, smaller shaken drinks are better than larger shaken drinks.

And shaken drinks consumed quickly but in moderation are of much higher quality than, you know, big boats of drink that sit around on the table for a long time.

So we have the speed of drinking down.

But what about the speed of shaking?

Does technique matter here?

Or is it just about a tricep workout?

And so I have one bartender now who's like,

well, in the middle of his shaking routine, we'll do a little double gank, gank, and you know, he'll like shake him and then go clink, clink, clink, clink, and like, while he's shaking, it makes nice rhythms.

It's awesome, and it makes the customer like the drink more because it's more fun.

Does it make the drink better?

No, you know what I mean?

I mean, except for, yes, it does because you're enjoying it more, you know?

But does it affect the drink?

No, no, it doesn't.

Different bartenders around town, you'll see of different shakes.

Some look a lot more violent than others.

And for the most part, you're going to end up with a very similar, a very similar drink.

And then the other sort of side thing, too, is you have to have rhythm.

All of us are musicians at heart.

I'm picturing Tom Cruise in my head right now, just so you know, Cynthia.

Obviously from the movie Cocktail.

I'm not sure I ever even saw it, but I can picture that movie poster.

You know, he's leaning sexily on the bar and there is some amazing hair there.

Bartending has always been a little bit about this showmanship.

I mean, like Dave says, does it make the drink taste better?

Not scientifically.

But it's fun to watch, and that kind of does make the drink taste better.

In fact, the celebrity bartender was born pretty much at the same moment that the cocktail grew up.

That moment where ice took over from water, and suddenly there were shakers and stirrers, and all sorts of crazy tricks and tools.

The first celebrity bartender is a guy Dave Wondrich wrote all about in his book, Imbibe.

His name is Jerry Thomas.

He grew up in New Haven and learned to make drinks, and then he was a sailor, and like most people at the time, he jumped ship in San Francisco to make a buck off gold, but he found bartending to be a lot easier and more lucrative.

He attended bars some out there.

He became a minstrel show entrepreneur.

That was kind of the rock and roll of his day.

He knew how to draw and paint.

He did some of that.

He got back to New York with $16,000 in gold after adventures in Mexico and some really crazy stuff.

And that was a lot of money back then.

It's like at least $250,000.

You know, he was 21 years old and he blew it all in six months.

Wow, I bet he was really regretting that.

Rock and roll.

I don't know.

I think he pretty much had a good time whenever.

He didn't mind it.

He seemed to have a way of always finding something fun to do.

He opened a bar in New York, then he went to walk about all over the country, mixing drinks, came back, was drink mixer in one of the top hotels in New York, put out this bartending guide, The World's First.

This was the very first guide to making cocktails.

So the cocktail books really start with Jerry Thomas, who wrote How to Mix Drinks or The Bon Vivant's Companion, and that was published in 1862.

We wandered into Cocktail Kingdom.

It is this mecca of everything cocktail in New York City.

And as it happens, the owner Greg Bohm built up the world's largest collection of vintage cocktail books.

Manager Ethan Kahn let us take a peek.

This is absurdly rare and pretty expensive, but it's in remarkable shape as well.

So this is very, very cool.

I mean, really, he's one of the grandfathers or the grandfather of mixology, as we talk about.

He's the first guy that ended up writing it all down.

So you go back here you want to see what an old-fashioned was like in 1862.

You want to see what a Sherry Cobbler was like.

You want to see what a Brandy Crusta was, a mint julep.

And then there are a few peculiar ones.

One of his more famous drinks was the Blue Blazer, which you make in silver tins and light on fire and toss back.

Sorry, silver.

Basically silver goblets with hand handled goblets.

It's pretty fantastic to see.

It goes back and forth with a nice thin blue flame and it's a wonderful presentation.

They had these high overhead pours that they would do, where it would look like they were tossing the cocktail back and forth.

And people are kind of bringing that back, but we haven't quite figured out exactly what they were doing.

This was a very closely guarded trade secret, you know, because if you could do that, you could star behind the bar and make a lot of money, and you wanted to keep that to yourself.

So you'd have stuff like that.

You'd have all these bits of flair.

Eventually, you get Jerry Thomas, the great bartender, setting hot whiskey on fire and doing the long pour and

having arcs of blue flame cutting through the gloom of the barroom.

That's pretty spectacular.

Dave Wondrich has worked with Cocktail Kingdom to recreate Jerry Thomas's special pouring mugs.

But he's right.

A lot of the science behind these hot cocktails, especially, has been forgotten.

We talked to Dave Arnold about this.

Apparently, in colonial America, the hot drinks were made by literally sticking a red hot poker in them.

I was kind of shocked to hear that.

When you taste a drink that's made with like hot water, let's say, which is kind of how people do it now, versus this kind of direct, like high heat heating, the flavors of the two are completely different.

And I think that one of the reasons that hot drinks typically aren't as popular is just because they're just not very good.

When you taste one that's made with a very high heat source, like a red hot poker or any one of these kind of old school high heat sources, it's just a more complex, interesting flavor.

That's so funny.

Maybe the reason hot drinks aren't popular is that we aren't making them right.

Exactly.

And Dave conducted all sorts of crazy experiments to see how drinks tasted with different ways of heating them.

He used a soldering iron with a copper tip, a hot poker, and even broken up rocks from a Korean bibim bop bowl.

Safety note.

Well, there's going to be a bunch of safety notes, but one is don't just buy or go take a rock out of your yard and put it on your stove.

Why?

Because I did it, and they blow up.

You know what I mean?

A good thing for our listeners not to do.

I scared the bejesus out of

someone in the pastry department at the SCI because I forgot to put a pot over these rocks that I was heating, and they blew up and sprayed rock shards all over the kitchen.

No students there, you know, but sprayed rock shards all over the kitchen.

And I was like, no, nope.

Another safety note.

Those Korean stones get up to 800 degrees Fahrenheit, which is not pleasant against your face.

To put it mildly.

What if they drank it too quickly and then the stone hit their face be even worse than that spherical ice cube?

David Wondrich has actually managed to recreate Jerry Thomas's famous blue blazer pour without crisping his knuckles, but it's kind of a lost art.

At the end of the 19th century, America is the greatest cocktail nation in the world.

No exaggeration.

And then prohibition came along.

It pretty much wrecked everything, you know.

All that sophistication was thrown out the window.

I mean, people were drinking artificial gin with orange juice.

What is artificial gin?

Well, it's grain alcohol, water, and juniper essence, and maybe a little glycerin to give it a smooth edge.

Yeah, not so very tasty.

I've made it.

It's not good.

You know, it was bad.

You could get good spirits, again, if you had a good bootlegger and,

were willing to pay through the nose, but that was pretty rare.

All the best bartenders, they had really worked very hard for at least half a century to build themselves up as this kind of craft artisanal profession where they were respectable business people and craftsmen and treated well and earned some respect.

That was out the window.

Now bartender was illegal.

Who did you get?

You got crooks and other people like that behind the bar, people who could afford to take a fall.

The knowledge and the drinkers move overseas to Cuba, to Japan.

I can't help picturing Hemingway sitting at one of those famous Cuban bars.

At Cocktail Kingdom, they actually have trading card-sized drink menus from those Cuban bars.

They also have a crate of pre-Castro Bacardi.

That actually brings up an interesting point.

When people try to recreate historic drinks, they don't realize that the spirits are actually different.

The craziest thing is that even the limes are different.

Jerry Thomas and other bartenders at the time would have been using key limes, not the bigger kind that we get at the store today.

But luckily, people have started to recreate historic spirit, so at least we can get a little closer.

But wait, we have not gotten up to the graft cocktail revival yet.

We are still in the cocktail dark ages.

But let's take a brief break from history and find out our cocktail personalities.

Hmm.

My friend Sam Bompus is half of the London-based Bompus and Parr.

They are culinary magicians who cook steaks with lava, turn row houses into punch bowls, and create portraits and jelly.

For Americans, that's jello, just to translate.

So Bompass and Parr recently created something called a cocktail monolith.

It is this glistening black machine that they designed for a festival at the Ministry of Sound in London last month.

And it creates the perfect cocktail just for you, based on Junging analytics.

We called Sam in his office/slash workshop in South London.

I'm always interested in the sort of bartender interaction.

A really good bartender can eye you up, see you coming through the door, and like Sherlock Holmes, by just the sort of twitch of your eye, tell what sort of cocktail would be best for you.

We wanted to make that a little bit more scientific, so spent some time looking at different ways that people's personalities are profiled in psychology.

And we found that sort of a Jungen scale would be most efficient to sort of program

and would give us something that everyone can walk away with happy.

So with this,

the sorts of profiles that come out of it, people like the architect, the defender, the mediator, the campaigner, the console, the adventurer, everyone sounds pretty cool.

After you get your personality profile, the machine picks a drink for you.

Effectively, the machine has a number of different repositories of sort of pre-mixed, pre-batched cocktails, which are then combined in various ratios depending on the personality type.

So there's a lot of sort of pineapple, we had like a whiskey in there, we had a gin in there, but then various of the mixes are flavoured with things like blue lotus, garana, elderflower, you know, things like sage and lavender as well to give them the sort of herbal kick and botanical fix that we thought would not only appeal to different personalities, but help them be better people too.

So should we take a personality test?

I think so.

I mean we're not there in person so we're not getting the full effect of this machine but can you do a reading on us from afar?

I absolutely can.

The way this is going to work is I'm going to ask you eight questions.

Each one of the questions can be answered on a scale of one to five, one being not true at all, and five being very true.

Can Nikki and I answer them for each other?

Can we say, oh, yeah,

I don't want you choosing my cocktail.

Okay, sorry, go on.

And three in the middle is somewhat true.

And if you can imagine, what you have is this black obsidian, chilled glassed monolith glistening with condensation on the outside and it's got it's got a screen in the center of it which is asking you these questions rather than me.

Great.

I'm picturing it in my head.

Okay, so question one.

I'm very close to my childhood feelings.

To my childhood feelings.

Very close to my childhood feelings.

Like I remem what?

I remember them or I feel them.

Cynthia, if you overthink every question, it's going to be half an hour before you get a cocktail.

I'd say four.

Fast forward while Cynthia takes a hundred years to make up her mind on six more questions, and then we get to the final one.

A good parent has to be a bit of a child, too.

Huh.

Um,

these are hard, these are really hard.

Uh,

and I think a good parent has to be a grown-up, but um, three.

Okay, so this is interesting.

You are coming out as the logistician.

The loally?

Their defining characteristic of integrity, practical logic, and tireless dedication to duty make them a vital core to many families as well as organizations that uphold traditions, rules, and standards, such as law officers, regulatory bodies, and the military.

Oh, that's so not true.

What does she get to drink?

Wait, there's more.

Oh, really?

Logisticians hold back none of their time and energy, completing every task with accuracy and patience.

Yay!

It's good for gastropod.

Any better?

I think that's reasonable.

You're a getting shit done kind of person.

You might actually like the cocktail that you get there.

Okay, good.

Okay, so the logistician gets the hallucinotini.

It's the classic martini, similar to the logistician, is abundant, proud, and logical.

Tonight, logisticians and architects are offered the opportunity to break free from reason and responsibility by consuming the hallucino 3 blue lotus tea infused vermouth.

Out with ruthless efficiency, in with the psychedelic.

Luckily, the effect wears off in two hours, but hopefully, logisticians will walk away with a new perspective on life and an appreciation of colour and blurred lines.

I cannot wait.

It's only 8.40 in the morning here, but I think you should have it, Cynthia.

I'm waiting.

If only I could reach through the phone lines.

We'll come back to the personality test so we can hear what drink you got, Nikki.

But first, let's return to some cocktail history.

Okay, so we're currently stuck in prohibition, which really, really messed things up for cocktails in the U.S.

And then it got worse before it got better.

I know.

Remember those hard drinks of the 1980s?

Remember how sickly, sweet, and fake everything was?

Yeah, that was pretty bad.

There's no sugarcoating it.

I started drinking in bars in the late 70s and oof.

But

it was a rational response to the conditions that you had.

The spirits industry was, like all the food industries in America, was heavily consolidated at the time.

Anything eccentric, weird, old was getting shut down.

All the energy was going into like shiny new market, marketing.

The shiny and new spirits were definitely in retreat.

And those stupid-ass drinks that were being foisted on us, like the melon ball and stuff like that, which are pretty revolting.

But those were a response to the quality of spirits that was being pushed around.

That was, you know, was what you had.

And they were a rational response, I suppose, also to the fact that everybody was way more interested in quales than they were in quality cocktails.

The 80s, man.

Hair, clothes, and drinks all bad.

Though I have a weak spot for the music still.

Sorry.

I am with you.

And for some of our listeners, that decade has maybe never ended.

Ari Miller, who is a chef and a gastropod fan, called in to tell us us about his questionable decision to make homemade jell-o shots for a friend's birthday.

And I had been working at this restaurant where we make clear bloody merry.

We basically infused vodka with, you know, like horseradish and celery and that type of stuff.

So that's what I did.

Then I made some tomato water and mixed those together, mixed it with gelatin and let it set.

But I had never worked with gelatin before and this was early enough in my career that

I guess I hadn't fully appreciated that when you do something new for the first time, it probably makes sense to research it a little bit or at least

ask fellow kitchen workers for some advice if they've had any experience.

I did neither of those things.

I also made a horrible drink based on tomato water.

I was trying to be creative.

I adore tomato water and, in fact, all of the other ingredients I put in the drink, but it was truly disgusting.

But anyway, Ari made one other mistake.

He had no idea how to use gelatin, and he didn't taste the shots before before he left the restaurant.

So I show up, you know, the party's already in full swing, and everyone's so excited.

Oh, you know, Bloody Mary Jell-O shots are here.

And I went in the kitchen, I take a quick taste, and it was just so nasty that I went immediately to throw the whole thing away.

And a couple friends caught me, and they're like, no, we want to try this.

And I was like, well, you know, you can trust me.

It's pretty bad.

And they're like, no, no, no.

Like, we're sure that's just you being hard on yourself.

You know, we definitely want to try this.

You know, you always tell us, like, oh, it should have been better.

It should have been better.

But they're like, well, we'll, you know, we'll be the judge.

I was like, all right.

They all taste it.

It's like, you know, in a complete movie moment, they just all spit it out at the same time.

And they're like, yeah, throw it away.

I think the lesson here is that jello shots are just bad no matter what.

Agreed.

So, Nikki, I think we've waited long enough.

We have to let our listeners hear how you made out with the cocktail machine.

As long as it doesn't give me something made with tomatoes, I'm happy.

Okay, let's do it.

All right.

Okay.

I'm ready.

So, have you got the scoop?

You know the scale.

I know the scale.

I am picturing the glistening black monolith.

Okay, wonderful.

So, question one: I'm very close to my childhood feelings.

One, I don't even remember being a child, so.

Okay, six, I'm easily hurt.

Uh,

am I?

Maybe, yes.

Uh, four,

Question eight.

A good parent has to be a bit of a child, too.

Probably to put up with it.

Five.

Five.

Okay, let me compute.

I should have given myself a five on Easily Hurt, to be honest.

Yeah, I feel as though that was a bit, that was the one where I was like, I don't really want to own it.

I know, I gave myself a three.

I don't think that was true.

True.

I was wondering as well, because this is difficult because you're the only people that are doing this with all the answers out there.

I know.

Everyone else

gets some disguise by the mysteries of the machine.

Well, if our listeners stop listening because they've decided we're horrible people,

we'll blame you.

We'll ask you for a cocktail to soothe our feelings.

Okay, we've got a different result here.

So,

Nicola, you are a mediator.

Do you want to know about being a mediator?

And I unexpected talent.

It sounds exciting.

Tell me.

Okay, so the mediator personalities are true idealists, while they might be perceived as calm, reserved, or even shy.

Mediators have an inner flame and passion that can truly shine.

The risk of feeling misunderstood is unfortunately high for the mediated personality type.

But when they find like-minded people to spend their time with, the harmony they feel it will be a fountain of joy and inspiration to keep you in.

I like the sound of this person.

I don't know if it's me, but they sound really nice.

Your tasty libation is a wise sour.

It contains both guarana and elderflam.

Sounds delicious.

It's based on a whiskey sour, which, as a cocktail, is often seen as reserved, but misunderstood because it is a classic that has so many reiterations.

Here, the drink is infused with garana and elderflower in order to compensate for their misgivings.

The gharana propels the mediator forward with caffeine to put aside their reserved nature.

Additionally, the elderflower will cure their slight self-involvement by making them realize that everyone has something to offer.

Now we have truly bared our souls.

I hope you guys still like us.

Don't go away.

It's too late now, Cynthia.

But it's time to bring things up to date with the last chapter in our tour through cocktail history.

In the past decade, the American cocktail has come back into its full glory, and bartenders are hot stuff again.

I think it came out of the culinary revival.

People wanted fewer drinks, better drinks.

I think it got a huge boost in the last

15 years by the last 15 years, which have been a pretty depressing time in America.

You You know, there really hasn't been,

it has not been a fun time.

It's been a time of stress and division and economic problems and war, a lot of war and, you know, just all this stuff that makes people want to drink.

But we don't only love cocktails because we're depressed about the rest of our lives.

David Wendrich pointed out that cocktails are also this wonderful, intimate luxury.

Instant gratification, you know, and now you're in this lovely purpose-built cocktail lounge where

it's got a nice amber glow and the music is soft and the drinks are cold.

And somebody made something exactly for you, which is hard to get in the modern world.

Everything is, you know, you buy it online, you never see it made, everything just arrives.

And this is something that's made for you now here by somebody who knows what they're doing.

And that's a beautiful thing.

Yes, they're social, they're personal, and at least that first one, that makes everything better.

We've come full circle in a really good way.

I feel like we've like taken this like meandering journey through

cocktails, which is like how it how it should be, right?

Cocktails are a way to lubricate conversation.

It's this little quote from our menu book here at the Hawthorne and sort of encourage these sorts of social discourse that's just really fun.

Well it's really fun for us.

And I have to say I'm so relieved I thought you were gonna make me do subnatural cocktails or cricket cocktails or I was waiting.

He's gonna see what happens when you mix gin and innards or something.

The kind of stuff she usually puts me through on the show.

This is way better.

So thank you for

happy to help, you know?

But next round

we'll do some cricket cocktails, I guess.

No, we will not.

Instead, we're gonna leave with one of Dave Arnold's top tricks to make all of your regular cocktails better.

It surprised me, but it makes total sense.

If you forget everything else about how to make a drink from this episode, this is one tip to remember.

So what is the one thing you should add to your drinks that you're probably not?

Well, like salt, and remember, we're talking about very small quantities of salt here.

We're not talking about salting the rim of your glass.

It's very, very small quantities of salt really just cause all the flavors to kind of pop.

It's the same kind of function that it

does in a pie crust, let's say, or in like a creme anglaise mix for sweets.

And a lot of times people, when they're cooking that kind of a food, when they're doing pastry, they'll omit the salt and wonder why their stuff tastes so bad.

And it's because you didn't put the salt in, you know, and it's not enough salt for you to necessarily taste it.

And so, it's a super simple experiment for people to do when they're making cocktails.

Just make a cocktail and then just add a couple of grains of salt to it.

It doesn't take a lot, like you don't want to add like a lot lot, but just add a little bit of salt, pinch of salt to it, and stir it and tell me that you don't like it better.

Most of the time, you know, you do.

Thank you to David Wundrich, author of Imbibe, and Dave Arnold, author of Liquid Intelligence.

And Jack Inslee at Heritage Radio, who recorded our interview with Dave over in their shipping container studio in Bushwick.

And we should also thank the folks at Cocktail Kingdom who did not bat an eyelash when we barged in with our mics and started asking to see old books.

And thank you to Jared Sedoyan at the Hawthorne in Boston for the Cocktail Science lesson.

And also to Sam Bompass, the man behind the cocktail monolith.

He has seen our souls and he still returns my emails.

Thanks to all our listeners for your cocktail stories.

We didn't include them all, but they were great fun.