bostonapothecary

2 oz. berkshire mountain distiller's corn whiskey scant spoonful non aromatic white sugar 4 dashes angostura bitters barspoonful of yellow rose water* i'm not the biggest fan of the BMD corn whiskey but here it makes a lovely drink. *i legally distilled the rosewater from roses donated from a friends hedge. she wanted to use her share for making lip balm and hand cream. yellow roses yield a very peachy smelling water which is a perfect foil for the young whiskey. 1.5 oz. los abuelos blanco tequila .75 oz. lime juice spoonful non aromatic white sugar barspoonful of yellow rose water this is a great basic sour. the fruitiness of the rose water gets somewhat lost beneath the lime juice, making it not as salient a feature as we had hoped. eventually we added a tiny dash of tabasco to make the simple drink more compelling. i would really love to try the rosewater with some cognac next...

before any arguments go any further, it should be noted that i'd be really excited to meet anyone that is part of the conversation and host you in boston. we would argue like bon vivants over 5-10 rounds of cocktails, become bored and seek live music, then move on to chasing skirts, pants, or whatever is applicable. cheers to anyone passionate and opinionated!

Now you've done it! We have a class of ingredients that are defined by an archaic use as medicine - no longer used as such and a bitter taste but don't add noticable bitterness to the drink. Prepare for another few pages of semantic arguments... haha, soon enough the reasoning will become "We hold these truths to be self-evident". strangely enough a coworker tonight described a strawberry-rhubarb ice cream he enjoys as having a "pleasant bitterness". early in the evening, i myself ate a strawberry-rhubarb cobbler. all i could think of that could explain this layman's bitter descriptor is the strange nature of rhubarb's acidity. rhubarb has oxalic acid which i think is important to defining its flavor. if oxalic acid contributes to a unique sensation, very different than malic or citric acid, people may label it as bitter. sort of like "halo dumping" but not quite because as stated up thread by one of the language dictators, you cannot/should not use the word that way. if anyone is interested in the olfaction in terms of gustation theory of classifying aromas, one paper i just came across used the language for a very similar phenomenon (olfaction into audition) "sensory convergence".

We could. Overall, I still think you're confused here. And for the benefit of everyone reading, could you dumb down your words? I had to do a Google search of "olfactory construct" and the only website that came up with that phrase was yours. So that didn't help much. i recommend reading Aroma: The cultural history of smelll the authors examine numerous cultures and look at how they divide their olfactory world with language. hence the term "construct". societies create countless constructs like good/bad, masculine/feminine, or earth/water/fire and these are highly subjective and very cultural. because we constantly juxtapose, mix, and pair things we also need a way to organize our olfactory world. to make it less subjective it makes sense to use the closest possible cross sensory analogy. making cocktails is easy. i can arrange endless delicious drinks. attaching language to them is the real challenge and a source of fun. the culinary arts are full of people that can feel things they cannot say. this is due to not having the vocabulary to translate an experience from one frame of mind to another. i would love to hear anyone else's strategies for organizing and reconstructing aromas. mine has proven consistent, flexible, and useful across all realms of the culinary arts.

1.5 oz. tabasco aromatized gin 1 oz. sweet vermouth 1 oz. campari i was really into this drink even though sometimes i find a negroni too sweet for my mood. it reminded me of something in amerine's "wines. their sensory evaluation". his claim was that if you found "varietal character" (olfactory aspects) in the wine that you enjoy, you might overlook gustatory flaws. the varietal character here would be the tabasco aroma and the flaw would be the otherwise too sweet style of drink.

There is no such thing as "olfactory bitterness." Bitterness is purely a taste, and a hereditary one at that. So unless you've evolved to smell poisons, you can't "smell" something bitter. it is an analogy hence it gets a prefix. i've heard a thousand people say a wine fermented to dryness was sweet. i've heard a thousand people ask for a less sweet dry wine only to favor a wine with a different sort of aroma. what can we infer about the language they select? based on my library of experiences i could probably smell something raw and un-abstracted and tell you if it was going to be bitter or not. it would be based on a similar experience. if you believe in synesthesia you could indeed potentially feel the sensation of gustatory bitterness from an aroma. my olfactory construct does not claim anything is a one for one trade of sensations but it is basically the closest sensory analogy we have. You can't really use the term halo-dumping in this situation. Halo-dumping primarily refers to scientific analysis. In the paper, it goes on to say that "‘Halo-dumping’ can occur whenever the appropriate response alternative for a salient attribute is unavailable to participants. This can lead participants to ‘dump’ the values for a salient attribute that is not available in the range of alternative response scales provided (e.g., the strength of a fruity odor) onto one of the other rating attributes that have been provided (e.g., the sweetness of the fruity odor)." You're not applying any "rating attributes". It's a cocktail, not a double blind test. what technical name would we give the common phenomenon of cocktail/wine tasters labeling acidic experiences as bitter because they do not have the vocabulary to call it acidic? discussion of a cocktail experience seems like it can be similar to a blind test because the inputs are often just vague symbols to the imbibers. my olfactory construct makes no claim that gustation is being stimulated by aromas. the brain does not receive straight forward gustatory sweetness from these aromas, rather it could be said it receives something like it based on our past experiences. gustatory sweetness only becomes the closest analogy we have and therefore influences our language decisions. it seems like we could create some sort of gustatory analogy to describe how angelica can suppress sweetness and when we identify other aromas that also suppress sweetness we could do the same.

i hope the paper was at least an interesting read. verbal culinary communication does not have a lot of mutually agreed upon terms. we rely on very vague terms like "dry" and "savory". these words describe multisensory perception. every extra sense that a word tries to take responsibility for expands the range of the meaning making it less articulate. i see the term "bitters" as having morphed into one of these multisensory words. the name which eludes to gustation has often become a cross sensory analogy for the frequent nature of the aromas. maybe for the sake of consumer protection a case could be made to reign the term in, but i see plenty of opportunity to curate products informing consumers what they are in for. i also feel the name ended up where it is by laymen and not solely exploitative opportunist industry people. the idea of a word wandering around among the generations seems kind of cool to me.

humor me and read that paper, i'd love to know what you think about it.

I have to be honest the majority of the time I have no clue what you're going on about and I don't think you do either, the only thing I have really deciphered is that you seem to suggest you can smell bitterness which as far as I'm aware - and I'd be glad to be shown otherwise - you can't. There's a lot of science in your postings that simply isn't true... saying something has "intervals" of aroma is just like saying it has "layers". the analogy comes from painting. in the early 20th century some painters wanted to explore depth in the picture plane by creating color intervals. "overtones" refers to the result of mixing two things. sometimes when two things go together you cannot parse them. two things become one new thing. why do certain products blend multiple types of orange peels together? to create an attractive overtone. it is more or less another painting analogy. if you tried to describe the spectrum of that overtone you would probably end up using a cross sensory analogy. the ordinary and extraordinary are not that complicated a concept. many people believe we have motivational drives to create & seek the extraordinary. the aromatic tonality of a sunkist supermarket orange is ordinary, but we prize other more obscure types for their every so slightly different character. why does everyone these days where funky colored sunglasses or chuck taylors in colors that are not so common? me wanting my oranges, my reisling, or my cocktails to smell unique is not that crazy an idea. the idea of describing one sense in terms of another is not a crazy idea. we do have commonly accepted analogies like "warm & cool" colors after all. we also have synesthesia & synesthetes and growing amounts of research on the topic... there is tons of research that examines "sweetness enhancement" in food where aromas increase or decrease the perception of sweetness. we also have multi sensory amplification where things like salt change the threshold of perception of aromas. lots of people are studying it. sorry if it is new to you. up thread i posted a great paper on the subject. here it is again... multisensory perception of flavor

And let's not forget people accepting products sold under a banner that they aren't. this is not a big deal because these products can be curated. if we add a layer curation we can celebrate one of those beautiful historical quirks. the wine industry has been making vague labels for more than a century now. strangely enough, of all the things on a wine label, the color choices end up expressing the most responsibility to the wine because of their cross-sensory tonal sympathies. when i use "bitters" i primarily think of aroma, in terms of intervals & overtones, the ordinary & and the extraordinary. i also think of the amount of dissolved aroma in the drink, and then i also think of price. made well, bitters can be a cheaper source of extraordinary aromas than buying more expensive spirits.

maynard amerine wrote about a technique for measuring the quinine in an aperitif via its alkaloid content. i think the technique was designed for regulatory reasons because there were/are quinine maximums that products can have. he provides example measurements for dubonnet & byrrh. in beer the IBU doesn't even sum up the perceived bitterness of a beer completely because it is relative to the contrasting power of the malt aromas. fenaroli's "handbook of flavor ingredients" (1975) opines that the term bitters is too broad and essentially meaningless. he makes some attempt to subdivide things. i think the earliest definitions of the terms in question refer to stuff consumed with a medicinal motive, but now that we have different, primarily artistic motives, the terms don't apply. i have a feeling that at some point in time in the 20th century as consumption motives changed and production sizes had to scale up, all famous bitter commercial products were retooled and refined by superstar consultant flavor chemists. and then to top it all off there is a known culture of misinformation to protect production techniques. i personally like the lack of rules, it is probably why there is so much awesome avante-garde stuff to drink.

"since 1886" (we've been adding tabasco to everything...) 1.5 oz. tabasco aromatized gin* .75 oz. orange liqueur (senior curacao) .75 oz. lime juice dash angostura *neutralize 100ml of tabasco with 7 grams of baking soda to neutralize the vinegar. marry the result with 500ml of london dry gin and redistill. distilling straight through may result in slight cloudiness so start making tales separations and discard the cloudy segments. dilute the result to the gin's original proof. if gin is not on hand use blue plum slivovitz. if tabasco is not on hand use balsamic vinegar then substitute rye whiskey or slivovitz or tequila or mezcal for the gin. the tabasco's aroma really comes through and is an awesome juxtaposition to everything else. the distillate has no scoville piquancy so a strange expectation/anticipation differential exists. cheap and fun. inspired by a chapter of amerine's book on handling winery biproducts where they salvage the alcohol from vinegar tainted wine by adding baking soda before distilling.

one of the tricky aspects of talking about flavor and its numerous divisions is that we cannot just say "bitter" or "sweet", we have to specify gustatory bitterness or olfactory bitterness. we cannot assume that all language defaults to gustation. this is particularly important to understanding the language attached to things like dry wines. halo dumping is not irrelevant, it is an attempt to explain the name and the language we hear laymen use. if you want, you could just argue that it is not that plausible, but i think it is. one thing that i want from my dasher bottle whatevers is a way to augment aromatic intervals & tonality by the dash without augmenting my gustatory proportions. i need those aromas that decreases the perception of sweetness to create the tension that renders my drink compelling... this is usually the way that "bitter make it better" gustatory bitterness isn't a negative in dasher bottle bitters, but because of the order of operations of multisensory perception, gustatory bitterness can be a sensory distraction from aroma. so it comes down to what your favorite tension is; gustatory bitterness or various forms of olfactory dryness? not that it is relevant, but i really enjoy both yours and avery's bitters. i don't even make my own anymore, i trust that you guys have more opportunity to make evolving generations of your recipes in pursuit of the extraordinary. but never limit yourself, pursue the extraordinary by any means necessary.

I didn't suggest they were however bitterness plays a major part in what an amaro is, hence the name. The reason I asked is that there is a distinction between amaros and other products consisting of botanicals and alcohol. In the same way that non-potable bitters have a distinction differing from the products you suggest qualify as bitters. i don't think that quote can be truncated. another thing about "bitters" is that the term "bitter" is a "halo dumping" catch all for gustatory and olfactory divisions that decrease the perception of sweetness. it is very common to hear people say something is too "bitter" when it is actually too "acidic". this phenomenon of mislabeling things as "bitter" is discussed in Auvray & Spence's paper "the multisensory perception of flavor" the olfactory division part assumes that you can categorize all aromas in terms of gustation (and i don't think i'm the only person that uses the olfaction into gustation "olfactory construct"). it is easy to identify olfactory sweetness and umami, but it is very difficult to break down the other olfactory divisions so they often get lumped with "bitter". embrace the multisensory madness.

an amaro is not necessarily about being bitter (gustatory), it is about the manipulation of bitter things. you can use "special effects" to create an expectation/anticipation differential between olfaction and gustation. this is done by distilling bitter botanicals then re infusing that distillate with more of the bitter botanical so you have something like 2x aroma 1x bitter. it is also done with partial extractions of various sorts. another special effect is the use of thickeners to increase viscosity without relying on dissolving sugar. amaros then focus on aromatic tonality using olfactory overtones to abstract an expression into a negative space between two known spaces. amaros are the flavor equivalent of a wassily kandinsky painting.

Wow - swing and a miss there. There's no tax or licensing loop-hole that is attached to the term "Bitters". In fact, "bitters" doesn't even exist as a category with the TTB on the nonbeverage alcohol side. Bitters fall under the designation of "Flavorings and Flavoring Extracts" from a tax perspective. If the formulation is either evaluated by the Nonbeverage Lab of the TTB to be not suitable for drinking, or if your formulation passes the self-assessment criteria, then it's considered a food product and taxed as such. to be "not suitable for drinking" bitters rely mainly on their amount of dissolved aroma which is quite high, not strictly gustatory bitterness. to much dissolved aroma can be just as dissonant as too much gustatory bitterness. so "bitters" might often essentially be "flavoring extracts", but when you have such great pedigree and symbolism to appropriate, why not do it? most of the time these days its with the good intentions of helping people acquire acquired tastes and relax. the term "cocktail" has been widely appropriated for its symbolism, "bitters" are basically the same thing with a little more bureaucracy. bartending explores symbolism just like it explores raw aesthetic sensations. beauty is a composite of both.

"standard"? i think you guys are getting hung up on the name bitters. the name bears no responsibility to providing gustatory bitterness. it mainly exists to exploit a tax & licensing loop hole. bitters also function to allow shiesty (or thoughtful) bartenders to abstract affordable & ordinary spirits into the extra ordinary by laying down new aromas with merely a dash. this dash also tries to have minimal impact on gustation. bitters most typically are an array of aromas that decrease the perception of sweetness and therefore could possibly elicit bitter sensations via olfaction, but they don't have to. olfactory tension and extraordinary tonality is all that is important (as well as potentcy) so rhubarb bitters could work in theory, but in practice is a different story all together.

in my spatial quest, i've explored just about every flavor apex there is. one set that i've ignored for some reason is scoville piquancy aka spicy drinks. besides a long standing love affair with ginger beer this is my first try at probing these spaces. 1 oz. trimbach prunelle sauvage (sloe berry eau de vie) 1 oz. clear creak douglas fir eau de vie 1 oz. cinzano bianco vermouth 2 dashes tobasco (small dashes from a small bottle) stir not bad for a piquant clear spirit drink. the hot sensation of the tobasco lingers the longest. the gaze of the minds eye seems to have trouble dividing its attention between the olfactory dryness of the douglas fir brandy and the piquancy of the tobasco. an interesting apex, but i'd like to revisit the idea with mezcal, chartreuse & acidity.

i've been reading up on my enzymes... (trying to makes those MC-FCI inspired pectinase steeped fries) in research manual called "in a jam and out of juice" i came across this: "Limonoid Bitterness Unlike naringen, limonin is not found in intact fruits. However, freshly squeezed citrus fruits can turn bitter after only a few hours as limonin is formed by natural chemical reactions (so-called 'delayed bitterness'). This reaction is enhanced when the fresh juice in pasteurized." i knew of the delayed bitterness phenomenon, but not that it was caused by enzymes. oxidation might be the least of citrus juices' worries with these enzymes slowly at work...

in general, the tastes you acquire or evolve to find harmonious show a pattern of escalating tension from a central point (gustatory or olfactory sweetness). it is probably beneficial to acquire tastes for things local and sustainable or conventionally nutritious and mentally nutritious (the therapy of sensory distractions). the paths from point A to point B is the big question and bar tending really explores those paths.

I kinda agree, kinda don't, but ultimately think it doesn't matter much either way. Or maybe I just don't care much for "serious" art. (OK, that was a lie, I really love serious art, but I don't like some aspects of the culture surrounding art which sometimes take it too seriously.) i haven't read the article, but the quote is sort of silly. food is not trapped in the physical world. a drink or a dish exists within the mind's eye just as much as anything else. i do not think the author of the quote understands that there are multiple motives for consumption. coffee is not consumed just for the caffeine, or a sandwich for its nutritional content. "serious" art differs from other forms that some might call "decorative" in that they are more likely to be a "text about a text" and therefore require education to interpret and "appreciate". for example, the impressionist movement was a reaction to some other movement. for some reason people think art cannot generate a lot of change unless it is this 20th generation parody of something else. maybe the decorative arts should be called something like "aesthetically detached" (from symolism) arts. they haven't accumulated much symbolism and instead are reliant on raw-sensory-aesthetic appeal. the fact that chartreuse is made by monks pales in comparison to the aesthetic olfactory tension it generates with maraschino liqueur in the Last Word and yet i'm still drawn to it... i also don't have to understand that a shirt is a fifth generation removed parody of something a 19th dutch cheese monger would wear to enjoy it. constantly encountering awesome "aesthetically detached" art can probably have more cumulative impact on our lives than a piece of "serious" symbolically driven art so it probably shouldn't be scoffed at. i would argue that culinary art is an easy candidate for the most "significant" form of art (whatever that means). culinary is easily aesthetically detached (or not if you are a "modernist" text about a text chef) which is awesome. culinary is also far more multi-sensory than other arts which gives it amazing potential. if according to painter Hans Hoffman "a plane is a fragment of the architecture of space", being so multi sensory, culinary art can have more planes than a painting and therefore a richer sense of space. (believe it or not, jug wine makers know more about these planes and manipulating them than anyone else in culinary) culinary art also has an easier time putting beauty to work than other forms of art. if beauty is a composite of extraordinary sensoriality and positive symbolic value, more so than in any other art, can you manipulate and enfranchise people with either side giving them a motivation drive to accept the other and therefore enact change. its a mouthful of concepts but i'm sure its true and its astounding to watch in action. so beauty in culinary is a busy two lane street of harmony in flux while in other arts it is one way with a few people going against the grain. one of my long term goals is to serve cocktails at the MOMA. i think a lot of the aesthetic explorations that we see in cocktails closely paralleled other major art movement in painting and the tale should be told right along side the paintings. for example, Mondrian tried to explore the sense of motion created by intervals of colors in his painting "boogie-woogie" just like the sense of motion created by distinct intervals of aroma in the Aviation when you consider it within the mind's eye. the one thing that the "modernist cuisine" movement really lacks to me is any aesthetic exploration (and articulate explanation) of what renders food compelling and attractive within the mind's eye. culinary can't be taken seriously until we explain these things which also cannot be done until we take it seriously.

Actually, I think it was the other way around. I used to be a musician and always liked stuff that broke boundaries--e.g., Funkadelic, where funk met acid rock. Then I studied literature and specialized in things that were difficult to categorize and took some getting to know. It just took me a while to apply the strategies and aesthetics I had learned in those fields to this one. 'Cause you know, 'I drink that and not this' is pretty ingrained. (And no, I still don't regularly drink Irish Car Bombs, Chocotinis or any of 'those' drinks; but I don't have a rule against it.) All art is universal; all crafts are specific. I don't know if that's true, but it's worth thinking about. universal across all art mediums is that something is made special, extraordinary, or supernatural. we have an appetite for the extraordinary. in a culinary context i'd say probably even more so than our appetite for alcohol, sugar, acid, and dissolved aroma. what is proprietary to a craft is the abstraction techniques that create the extraordinary. i'm not just talking about aesthetic-sensory aspects either, symbolic aspects can also be extraordinary like exemplary service. if you get deeper into abstracting symbolism and have a good sense of what is going on you can get away from that Emily Post sort of cookie-cutter service and tap the power of ironic, gruff, desirable-surliness (maybe we could just call it S&M style service). for those who appreciate it, S&M style service is very conducive to acquiring acquired tastes... funkadelic is some good stuff, but which boundaries do they push more? the raw auditory harmonic boundaries or the symbolism and meaning of the whole thing. i'd say they enfranchise you with an extraordinary, but easy to accept auditory harmony which gives you a motivational drive to accept their silly yet profound message. David, next time you are in boston on a tuesday, skip the cocktail bars and come out to wally's jazz club for tuesday night funk. it is one of the greatest art experiences the whole city has to offer and it boggles my mind that so few culinary arts industry people ever go.

Totally agree, both about problem solving and in particular about acquired tastes. But you have to start with yourself. Case in point. A number of years ago, when I was quite new to the professional booze-taster gig, I got sent a bottle of this new rum called Sea Wynde. I tasted it and almost spat it out. It was harsh, burnt tasting, sulfurous. If that was rum, everything else I knew as rum wasn't. Clearly defective. But it did intrigue me. It had Jim Murray's name attached to it, and it claimed to be a Navy rum, two things not to be ignored. So I did a little research and also started keeping an eye out for other things in that class, just to see if I was missing something. I tried Pusser's. A little of that stank in there. I got my hands on some Lemon Hart. More. El Dorado. Also more. Woods's Navy Rum, even more. I went to Jamaica and drank a lot of Wray & Nephew, which had a lot of it in a different way. Then we got Inner Circle, also different but a lot. By now, of course, I had learned to appreciate this stuff and was actively seeking it out. Then Eric Seed asked me what spirits I'd like to see available, and I told him a real, old-school Jamaica rum. I'd never had one, but I was sure it was big in that stank, which by this point I had learned to call "hogo." Next time I saw him, he had samples, and by this point I was able to tell what I was looking for in such a rum. With that input and input from some other people who had come to appreciate this style (Audrey Saunders, for one), Eric put together Smith & Cross. Things like that don't happen if you compartmentalize your input. do you think you've taken any of the possible lessons of these acquired tastes to the other realms of your life? perhaps less afraid of change? maybe more able to find beauty in the world? do you understand any other art mediums better that also lie in the realm of acquired tastes? what do people take out of all this drinking?

i don't know how serious people are about this topic, but if anyone wants to learn about judging art i'd recommend reading Leo Steinberg's essay "Other Criteria" or even his entire anthology of criticism which bears the same name. i'm pretty sure it might lead people out of the "art for art sake" and into art doing something like solving a problem. i guarantee everything steinberg says about painting can be reapplied to the culinary arts. it will change the way you rank and put importance on the work of chefs, bartenders, bars, and restaurants. another good place to learn about what art does is dave hickey's "the invisible dragon: four essays on beauty" (hickey won a macarthur genius award for art criticism) i'd like to think the cocktails i make do a variety of things and solve a variety of problems. a lot of subversive things can happen when you teach people to value and acquire acquired tastes.

these bartenders do not understand the problems that need to be solved. their ingredient obsession is also misdirected. though it should be noted that the symbolism of the antique spoons, the zweisel coupes, the crystal bottles, and the exemplary service are important to helping people expand their aesthetic harmonic range. i outlined the mechanism in a blog post called "A Tale of Two Harmonies". Unfortunately most people do not always have the ability to articulate why they do what they do. You can still be successful if you don't, but you might be less likely. the cocktail is a powerful art and i think few people have scratched the surface of what you can do with it. (edited to make more sense)