slkinsey

"Intellectual property" is a catch-all phrase used to describe the ownership rights associated with an idea rather than a physical thing. The three most widely known intellectual property protections are copyright (for the expression of an idea, such as prose writing, musical writing or recording, paintings and other works), patent (for inventions), trademark (for a distinctive indicator used to identify a product, business or service) and trade secrets (not-generally-known knowledge that confers an economic advantage over competitors). Not all of these things have similar kinds of protections. In particular, trade secrets are not protected intellectual property in all jurisdictions, which is why they are usually protected by Nondisclosure Agreements. How these might apply to cocktails depends on a number of factors. Although, really, considering that the internet is so busy eroding so many of the firmly established intellectual property protections that it seems a bit like wasted effort to try to move them into the world of cocktails. Rather, it's likely that the best solutions will be to try to figure out other ways to generate profit from this kind of work. Copyright is an interesting if unlikely possibility. The nice thing about copyright is that you don't have to register it or pay for it. If you created a copyrightable work, you are the copyright owner. There is certainly copyright protection for musical compositions, and I suppose one could argue that a cocktail recipe is like a "score" for "performing the cocktail composition." Unfortunately there seems to be plenty of precedent to the effect that lists of ingredients together with instructions such as "shake," "stir," "muddle" and "strain" is not copyrightable. Again, given the speed at which enforcement of copyright is being eaten away in the digital age, it seems unlikely that this will be availing. Trademark is definitely one that can and has been used. The "Dark 'n' Stormy" is a well-known example. Goslings owns that trademark and can control what can and cannot be called a Dark 'n' Stormy. It certainly might be possible for, say, Audrey Saunders to trademark "Earl Gray MarTEAni." And this would mean that she could control the use of that mark. This could stop some minority of people from profiting from or claiming credit for her creation. However, there are a number of problems with this. First is that it costs to register a trademark, it costs to maintain the trademark registration, and it costs money when you have to litigate to enforce the trademark, which you have to do if you want to keep it in force. So it could be very expensive indeed for a bartender to trademark every cocktail they create, or even just a small repertoire of their best ones. Second, an individual trademark only covers a very, very specific mark. There is nothing stopping a bar from making and selling a "Dark and Stormy" or a "Dark & Stormy" any way they want. This makes trademark also not likely to be availing. Then there is patent. This is normally used for physical inventions, but in certain cases can be used for inventive ways of doing things. This is sometimes used in chemistry and, for excample, my mother is an inventor of patents No. 6,375,980 and 6,106,859 for "Stabilization of lipid:DNA formulations during nebulization." This might have some application for the sorts of things that Eben Freeman does, but it's unlikely that one could get a patent for "System and method for making an Earl Gray MarTEAni." And even if it were possible, the application process is long, burdensome and expensive, and it has continuing costs throughout the term of the patent (20 years from the filing date in the U.S.) if you want to keep it in force. Again, probably not availing in most cases. The trade secret model is perhaps one that could work in certain limited contexts. You could have all the staff at the bar sign an NDA, and/or you could go the old-school tiki route, and strip all the labels off your bottles, concoct mysterious ingredients offsite, and give your bartenders recipes referring to "once ounce of bottle no. 5" and so on. This actually worked remarkably well in the tiki world for a long time, to such an extent that the recipes for some iconic drinks are only now being uncovered. That doesn't mean someone else didn't try to reverse engineer the Zombie and call that drink a Zombie, of course. It only made it difficult to reproduce the original Zombie. The people I've seen who seem to have got this right in the cocktail world are those who share their most famous recipes rather freely with the public. While any bar can make and serve an Earl Gray MarTEAni, because the recipe is widely known, it is also widely known that Audrey Saunders invented this drink and so what acclaim and benefit there is to gain from the popularity of this drink accrues to her. This is something with which the ubiquity of the internet is uniquely positioned to help. The Painkiller Tiki Bar guys are very smart to put their recipes out there because, if their "Cradle of Life" becomes a popular and imitated drink, at least it will enhance their reputations and hopefully drive business to their establishments -- and that's better than some other schmo taking credit for the drink, or the originator of the drink being lost in the sands of time like the creator of the Cosmopolitan (the flip side of all this is that if people know you are the inventor, you might just find a bunch of cocktailians outside your castle gate with torches and pitchforks -- so maybe it's best that the Cosmo's inventor is unknown). Of course, even publicizing your original recipes widely on the internet won't prevent every problem, as evidenced by the incorrectly formulated and incorrectly named "Earl Gray Mar-tea-ni" as found in Difford's Guide and the Big Bartender's Book.

One change you might consider is switching to a smaller shaker. bostonapothecary mentioned somewhere a while back that he liked the combo of 8 and 16 oz tins from barproducts to deal with bad ice. Having given them a try, I agree. The small size is nice because you can fill up the shaker, restricting ice movement and slushification, without going through tons of ice for a few shaken drinks. This is, I believe, a big part of the Japanese shaking technique. They're not just shoveling a scoop of Kold-Draft cubes into one of those small cobbler shakers and going to town. The ice they're using, generally speaking, is ice that has been cut from large block ice. As a result there is a variety of shapes and sizes, and it's not purely cubic in shape. This offers the ability to really pack the shaker with a lot of ice, and in the afterparty to the Uyeda seminar (where he made cocktails for everyone) this is something Don Lee and I both noticed -- that the shaker was really packed. They also typically place the ice into the shaker one cube at a time, which allows them to select certain sized cubes and place them into the shaker so as to have the maximum amount of ice in there. When I am using my 520ml Japanese cobbler shaker, I usually use an ice pick to split and shape my Kold-Draft-sized home ice cubes so that I can fit as much ice in there as possible. And it's astounding how much ice you can fit in what looks like a small shaker if you use different shapes and sizes and place each piece individually -- usually around 10 cubes! Having more ice in the shaker, of course, has certain thermal benefits. It also encourages less breakage in the ice and the production of fine ice crystals rather than larger ones since the ice can only make small movements and rub together rather than crashing around. It is also possible in a cobbler shaker, by changing the angle at which the drink is decanted from the shaker, to control the amount of ice chips that come through into the glass. I have not found that this level of control is as easily achieved with a Boston shaker and Hawthorne strainer. The more headspace there is in the shape of the shaker, of course, the less you can pack the shaker. Even though the bottom piece my WMF Parisian shaker has the same volume as the bottom piece of my Japanese cobbler shaker, the Parisian has much more head space and therefore much more movement of the ice when shaking. Boston shakers (especially the glass-and-metal types, but it is also an issue with the all-metal sets) also have this issue. And, of course, there are various ways of dealing with this. At Pegu Club, for example, when there are certain drinks that they feel are particularly dilution-sensitive, they put the booze into the small tin of the all-metal Boston set and fill that to the top with ice, but then put several extra cubes into the large tin and clamp it down over the small tin. This allows them to pack the all-metal Boston set more fully than usual. Other methods, of course, are to embrace the headspace and movement of ice, and simply use much larger pieces of ice. It's interesting to see the variety of paths that can lead to one result (which is a way of considering the difference between the Eastern and Western philosophies of bartending, but that's for another topic). Absolutely. The "Ih" form of ice has a hexagonal crystalline structure. That means that there are going to be certain directions where it is easy to make a clean break and other directions where it will not be so easy. The clear sculpture-grade ice, because of the way it is frozen and the fact that it contains far fewer impurities, air, etc. is of course going to have a much more well defined and consistent internal crystalline structure, which will lead to cleaner cleavage. Another issue is temperature. I play around with sculpture-grade ice every so often. One piece of advice I was given was that I needed to let the ice sit out at room temperature until it stopped forming white frost on the outside before I started to chip away at it, or it would not make clean breaks. This proved to be 100% correct, in my experience. Ice straight out of the freezer, regardless of quality or type of ice, is very likely to shatter or break in unexpected/unwanted ways.

I agree that what you say makes sense. The issue, as I perceive it, is the desire to minimize the time period during which the water can reabsorb gas before it freezes. If one were able to pour boiling water into a reasonably gas-impermeable container and then seal the contain with minimal "headspace" then it might make plenty of sense to freeze the water quite slowly. I wonder if using a freezing container with sides that sloped outwards just slightly might minimize internal stress-cracking.

Interesting. I thought it expanded when it froze. But now I see that the expansion actually starts to happen around 4C.

I've thought that "bottom up freezing" ought to be a pretty good way to get clear ice. My thinking is that you could construct a freezing container with a thick aluminum base and thick-but-flexible latex creating the four vertical walls around it. Then, you put the empty container into the freezer until it gets good and cold. And when you fill the container with water, the aluminum starts freezing the water from the bottom up due to conduction. If you were able to jiggle the walls every so often, that would prevent ice from forming over the surface.

It's extremely doubtful that there would be any meaningfully noticeable difference based only on this variable. What, exactly, is this "double-freezing method"? I have heard tell of double freezing described two ways. One way is to freeze the ice, allow that ice to melt, and then re-freeze the melt-water. I can't see how this would possibly have a positive benefit versus other methods that seem easier to me, except perhaps that precipitated solids might sink to the bottom of the freezing containers. The second way I have heard this described is to make the ice (e.g., in a machine) and then temper that ice to a colder temperature in a freezer. The latter technique could confer some benefits, namely that the ice will be colder and therefore harder. The idea that re-freezing melt water "compacts the ice" sounds like nonsense to me. The best you can hope for is to have less air trapped in the ice, although it is not clear to me that freezing, melting and re-freezing works any better at getting rid of trapped air than double-boiling water and freezing it directly from hot. In either case, what you need to figure out how to prevent is the reabsorption of gas into the cold liquid (solubility of gas in water increasing with lower temperatures right up to the point where the water freezes and the gas precipitates out). So, for example, filling a container all the way up to the top with double-boiled boiling water, then sealing the container and freezing the contents without allowing any air to enter would be one way of doing that (you'd want a flexible container to prevent stress fractures from clouding the ice). A different way of doing something similar would be to precipitate out all the gas by freezing the water, then allowing the ice to melt while taking measures to minimize reabsorption of gas, then re-freezing the water. Compared to freezing water directly out of the tap, if you're careful to avoid agitating the freezing container, double-freezing ice should produce some improvements. But it's by no means a magical solution to this problem. As for density... frozen water, in the forms which can be found outside of a laboratory, is 0.92 g/mL. Period. Re-freezing melt water isn't somehow going to make it come out to 0.93 g/mL.

Could you explain what you mean by this? Are you saying that it's just too easy to get a gold medal in the SF Spirits Competition? Or that somehow they are giving preferential treatment to certain products? Or that he wields some kind of influence over the result? Or do you just think it's bad as a matter of principle for companies to have to pay an fee to be entered into the competition? I note, by the way, that the Bluecoat gin Mr. Pacult excoriated in his personal review was among six brands that won double gold in the competition, which hardly seems likely if his beliefs and preferences influenced the outcome. And, not to defend the competition or Mr. Pacult (some of the results seem odd to me), but it seems to be overstating things a bit to suggest that paying the entrance fee confers "a way better than even chance of getting a gold medal." I see that there were around 35 medals awarded in the gin category, but only 6 double gold (17%) and 3 gold (8.5%). I don't know if any entrants received no rating at all. Personally, I'm agnostic on Pacult and any of the other writers. There isn't much substitute for trying the stuff yourself or at least getting a personal recommendation from someone whose palate you trust.

I don't follow. The half-moons that come out of my ice maker are fully frozen. Right. That's because your freezer is chilled to well below freezing. The half-moon shape makes it possible to mechanically remove the fully-frozen, dry ice from the freezing tray by pushing it out of the tray. This is a simple money proposition. It is not necessarily inefficient, and in fact cheaper to keep the ice at right around 0 degrees C. At 0C, by the way, the surface of the ice will be wet. Thus, wet ice. The way most ice makers work is that all the chilling is directed towards the part where the freezing takes place, and the bottom is simply an insulated bin that holds the ice. This insulated bin is partially chilled with whatever coldness is "left over" from making new ice up above. For this reason, the ice bin is typically not much above 0C, and for the reasons previously stated, the de-traying process works much easier if the ice is a bit wet and therefore around 0C as well. Really, there is little need to actually freeze the ice at much below 0C, and in fact ice frozen at warmer temperatures may benefit from increased clarity, etc. This is one reason why wet "bad ice machine ice" is often quite clear whereas the half-moon "in-freezer ice machine ice" is often almost entirely opaque. What you would like for a machine to do is freeze the ice at around 0C, and then unmold it to a refrigerated ice storage bin where it is tempered to a lower temperature. I assume this is what The U-Line ice makers andiesenji recommends make crescent-shaped ice and are essentially stand-alone versions of in-freezer ice makers (in fact, they even look like little freezers with ice makers inside).

I think there is some confusion here (or maybe I am the one who is confused)... Some people are talking about the automatic ice makers that are incorporated into kitchen freezers. As I understand it, Dave is talking about stand-alone home ice makers that don't do anything but make ice. These are two meaningfully different situations. This doesn't make much sense to me. I believe that the reason why many ice makers make ice at barely 0 degrees C is because if the ice were any colder it would be difficult to get it out of the molds. If, on the other hand, the ice is just a bit wet, it slides out easily. These stand-along ice makers don't want to go to the trouble of maintaining two temperature zones for making (warmer) and storing (colder) ice, so the default is the warmer temperature. More expensive units, such as the commercial Kold-Draft machines (and perhaps their home "Ice Butler" machine) actually heat the freezing rack when it is time to release a batch of ice. This slightly melts the surface of the ice, which helps it to slide out of the mold into the ice bin below. This also explains the industry-standard half-moon shape produced by the in-freezer models. They are frozen to a colder (and thus "stickier") temperature that wouldn't slide out of a square mold very easily. But since it is in a half-moon shape, the below-freezing ice cubes can be effectively "pushed" sideways out of the mold into the storage container. This is the first I've heard of this: so pouring a soda over colder ice makes it fizz more? Is it something like less CO2 can stay dissolved at colder temps? I don't see how this could possibly be true. The main things that lead to rapid degassing of carbonated beverages dispensed into a glass are temperature, turbulence and the presence of nucleation sites. If your fizz water is cold, you pour it in carefully, and you don't have a lot of nucleation sites (e.g., little particles suspended in citrus juice, minor imperfections in the glass, microscopic dust particles, etc.) in there, I don't see how pouring over warm, wet ice would be helpful. The only possible difference I could see is that extremely cold ice might have a rough surface that provided extra nucleation sites. But these will all melt away in a matter of less than a second following contact with liquid, leaving a surface that is no less smooth than that of the warm, wet ice.

Why? Nothing is going to bring it up to temperature any faster than chucking it in the bath.

Ice is the crystalline phase of water.

I wonder how this might be affected by the "wet mop" technique of barbecuing, where the surface of the meat is periodically wetted throughout the smoking process. Might this be a way of maintaining an overall lower internal temperature? It seems like you might be able to keep the wet bulb effect going for a long time this way... although I imagine that there are limits to its effectiveness (thin liquids won't adhere to the surface very well and what does adhere will evaporate off quickly, whereas thicker liquids may not evaporate at a high enough rate to provide sufficient local cooling).

Very interesting. So let me see if I get this right... For a given piece of meat in a barbecue-style smoker the temperature of the meat will slowly rise until it reaches a kind of "temporary equilibrium temperature" where evaporating moisture maintains the surface of the meat at a more or less constant temperature via the "wet bulb effect" (the inside of the meat also plateaus since peak internal temperature is dependent on surface temperature). The temperature of this temporary plateau should be somewhat different depending upon the ambient temperature and humidity in the smoker, but I imagine these variables are similar enough in barbecue-style cooking to account for the broad similarity observed in this temperature plateau. So the meat sits at the plateau temperature until the surface of the meat dries out sufficiently so that evaporation is no longer able to cool the surface of the meat effectively in the ambient environment (this is now "dry bulb"), at which point the surface temperature and consequently the internal temperature can rise. The time that the meat spends at the "temporary equilibrium temperature" until the surface dries out is the observed "temperature stall." That is not only incredibly interesting, but also a fun debunking of what everyone thought was a revelatory explanation of the science behind this observed effect! I wonder the extent to which the "temporary equilibrium temperature" could be altered by introducing moisture into the smoking chamber. Oh, and don't worry. I am most certainly buying the book!

Pretty cool. You're not worried about sunlight on all those bottles? It's always something I've wondered about in my dream designs for a home bar.

Very interesting! I'm not quite sure I get it, though. As I understand it, the temperature of the pork shoulder or brisket or whatever is measured with a needle probe stuck deep into the center of the meat. How would this ever not be "wet bulb" until the meat was completely desicated? Right. I guess that was more or less my point: that melting fat out of a piece of meat is really more about breaking down the collagen than it is about melting the fat.

But pork fat is only around 43% saturated. Pork fat is around 1% myristic acid, 27% palmitic acid, 15% stearic acid, 48% oleic acid, 6% linoleic acid, and 2% other unsaturated fatty acids. It is generally held to have a melting point in the neighborhood of 40C, depending on composition. Some pork fat melts as low as 30C.

As far as I know, the conversion of collagen to gelatin is endothermic. So, if the amount of thermal energy you are putting into the meat is small enough and there is sufficient collagen present, there would be a plateau in the temperature of the meat while the reaction happens. Pork fats melt at around 40C +/-5, and of course this would take fusion energy, but if that were to cause a "stall" we would then expect to see it at around 40C. But of course, melting pork fat and rendering pork fat out of adipose tissue are not the same thing. Adipose tissue, meanwhile, is made up of fat and collagen and so rendering fat out of the adipose tissue will be dependent in part upon breaking down the collagen. The observed temperature of the "stall" at 74C, which is much higher than the melting temperature of pork fat,makes me believe that the "stall" does not meaningfully result from melting fat.

I wonder how many products there out playing in the "dry gin" playground that are not on a base of grain spirit. Cold River is on a potato spirit. G'Vine is on a grape spirit. Both should be able to be consumed by those with Celiac disease.

Of course, there was a time when people said similar things about using gas-fired stoves over wood-fired stoves, and before that perhaps it was using a new-fangled pan and a new-fangled stove over roasting it on a spit over a fire, and so on and so on until you come to the guy who argues that there is no need to use a sharp stick to hold the duck over the fire when cooking a duck to perfection whilst rendering the skin properly by slapping in a hot rock is no problem if you know what you're doing.

It seems to me that the best way of doing this would be to have some kind of apparatus that would vibrate the ice tray.

You think? My thinking is that high proof neutral ethyl alcohol is high proof neutral ethyl alcohol. Most likely, the reason grain neutral spirits is the usual choice for gin is simply because that is the cheapest and easiest sugar source in the major gin-producing areas of the world (UK and USA). Meanwhile, $25 bucks a bottle seems reasonable enough.

Pecorino is simply the generic Italian word signifying "sheep's milk cheese" (pecora = "sheep"). So, Pecorino Toscano, for example, means not much more than "sheep's milk cheese made in Tuscany" (it is a D.O. cheese, not a D.O.C. like Pecorino Romano). Stagionato means "seasoned" (as in "matured or aged" not as in "salted and peppered"). It can also mean "seasoned/aged" with something else, as in: Pecorino Stagionato al Peperoncino ("sheep's cheese aged with dried red pepper"). Maturo means "mature." Neither of these has a particularly specific meaning. Similarly, there are plenty of young, soft, fresh pecorino cheeses called Pecorino Fresco or some variation thereof, which may have a variety of ages. "ReNero" should actually be Re Nero, meaning "Black King." It is a brand name of a cheese made by the Cooperativa Agricola "Il Forteto" in Tuscany. It is a cheese made in a small form, so it actually gets less age.

To me it tastes like "floral celery." Something like 3/4 celery leaves with 1/4 marjoram might suffice.

Fairway sells gigantic turkey breasts tied up as "roasts" and we do this all the time. My general practice is simple: (1) put various seasonings, salt and some liquid into the bag (even though my machine makes a strong vacuum, I find that adding the liquid to the bag produces better results -- don't know why) (2) seal and cook to pasteurize at 62C (3) chill the bag in an ice bath, chuck it in the refrigerator overnight (4) take it out and rinse off the accumulated "bag goo" (5) slice as needed for sandwiches, etc. We do similar "lunchmeat" preparations (albeit at different temperatures depending on the protein) with thick seared "London broil" steaks, pork loins, chicken breasts, leg of lamb, etc.

Pecorino cheese runs the gamut from soft young cheeses to mild semisoft table cheeses to salty, aged grating cheeses. It is not at all common to get soft, young pecorino cheeses in the States, but I eat it on a regular basis when in central Italy. We get excellent quality Pecorino Romano here in NYC, so I can't comment as to whether examples elsewhere around the country are in poor condition. What I can say is that, unlike aged Parmigiano-Romano, even the best quality aged Pecorino Romano is likely to be too salty to be eaten by itself in chunks. It's not meant to be used that way. What I see as a fundamental difference between the two is that Pecorino Romano adds sharpness and salt, which can either point up the sharpness of the dish or cut through the richness of a dish, whereas Parmigiano-Reggiano adds umami and richness. Whether and to what extent one would like to add one or both of these characteristics depends on personal preference and the needs of the dish. For example, if I were making a sharp, spicy sauce with garlic, olive oil, chilies and tomatoes to be served with bucatini, I would be likely to use Pecorino Romano to accentuate those characteristics. If, on the other hand, I were making a mellow, sweet sauce with onion, butter and tomatoes to be served with gnocchi, I'd be more likely to reach for Parmigiano-Reggiano. Also, for me, certain ingredients call for one cheese or the other. For example, olives say "Pecorino" to me, as does spicy as a general rule of thumb. Meats tend to get Parmigiano, except for lamb which I like with some Pecorino as well.