Alcademics.com

Smoked Cotton Candy and Other Delights at Tales of the Cocktail

On Thursday, July 26 at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans, I'm giving a talk about sugar. I hope you'll attend. 

Along with information, we'll be serving up sugar in a few forms. The most fantabulous will be as smoked cotton candy. Then while listening to the seminar you can dunk that cotton candy into a sugarless Rum Manhattan (just aged rum and bitters) to sweeten it up. Fun and sticky!

For your intellectual refreshment, we'll be providing you with information on:

• How sugar changed the course of history
• How sugar is was made historically and how it is made today
• What are the least 'processed' sugars and what does that really mean?
• Distilling sugar and molasses into rum and biofuel 
• Sugar in cocktails - simple (and complicated) syrups, heating vs. cold dissolved, viscosity, etc. 
• More fun with sugar- dehydrating liqueurs, garnish, candying, and more!

We were going to attempt to make white sugar from cane during the seminar (we still have a centrifuge on standby) but it appears that the 'sulphitation and liming' steps are getting in the way!

I'm joined in my talk by Bacardi Brand Master David Cid, who has been blowing my mind with the depth of his knowledge about everything to do with sugar and rum. Also, the smoked cotton candy was his idea so PROPS.

For more seminar information, please follow this link.  For tickets, go here.

The seminar is called Sugar: How Sweet It Is!

Thursday, July 26th from 3:00 - 4:30 PM 

 

Come to my Sugar Seminar at Tales of the Cocktail!

On Thursday, July 26th from 3:00 - 4:30 PM I'll be giving a talk at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans. Please come!

Sugar: How Sweet It Is!

In this seminar we’ll study sugar from the stalk to the still and beyond. We’ll take a look at the pre-history of sugar cane, its spread around the world, primitive and modern sugar cane harvesting and sugar processing, and the various forms sugar takes around the world, from treacle to turbinado. Then we’ll study sugar in distillation as sugar cane juice and as molasses and take a peek at the changing global sugar/molasses market that provides the base for rum. Finally we’ll look at sugar and syrup’s use in cocktails, including practical information about viscosity, saturation, inversion, clarification, and more.

I'm leading the talk with David Cid, Bacardi Brand Master. 

We're currently working on our cocktails for the seminar, but it looks like we'll be serving up creations including smoked cotton candy!

More information is here.

 

Tales of the Cocktail: Tickets On Sale Now

As you can tell by that new banner ad to the left side of the screen, tickets are now on sale for the tenth annual Tales of the Cocktail convention in New Orleans this July 2012.

I've been going for the past seven or so years and love it. 

There are a ton of new ticket packages and promotions over at the Tales website worth checking out whether you're planning to attend everything or just a few parties. 

See you in New Orleans!

The Science of Dilution

While at Tales of the Cocktail Vancouver, I attended the seminar on dilution by Audrey Saunders and Harold McGee. Saunders is the owner of the Pegu Club in New York and McGee is the author of the seminal work On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen.

 

Part of the discussion was about why we get more aroma in weaker drinks rather than stronger ones. People add water to whisky and other spirits when nosing them to release aromatics, yet this is counter-intuitive: shouldn't the whisky on its own have a more intense flavor that a whisky with just water in it?

The explanation is:

• In strong spirits, alcohol runs out of water molecules to bond with, and the alcohol molecules begin to form clusters. This is at around 30-40% alcohol.
• Aroma molecules like alcohol more than water. They want to leave the water they're in and release into the air.
• When a liquid has a lot of alcohol, the aroma molecules stick with the alcohol clusters and don't escape the liquid as much.
• Dilution dissolves the clusters and releases aroma molecules.

Saunders has been making a series of "inverted cocktails" in which she uses 2 parts of a weak ingredient like a fortified wine to 1 parts of the strong ingredient like whisky. These inverted cocktails are more aromatic than the stronger (1:2) versions of the same drink.

Other fun facts learned in the seminar:

• Chilling also decreases aroma release, as molecules are moving more slowly.
• Some chemicals help increase the release of aromatics into the air, such as salt, sugars, and carbon dioxide.
• Of course, these will also affect the flavor of our drinks.

Making Hendrick's Gin

At Tales of the Cocktail Vancouver, I stopped in to the Hendrick's Gin tasting room. I've been to about 70 million Hendrick's events, but in this one I first learned how the gin is made. 

It turns out that Hendrick's is the product of two different stills. Botanicals are infused into the spirit during distillation in different ways depending on the still.

 

 

The botanicals go into the column in the still on the left, whereas they are infused into the spirit directly in the pot in the still on the right.

The two distillates are mixed and rose and cucumber essences are added. This makes a gin concentrate. Like many other brands of gin, this concentrate is then diluted both with water and neutral spirit to bring it to the proper bottling strength.

We were able to try each of the distillates, smell the essences, and taste the concentrate.

 

 

And then it was time for drinks.   

 

 

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Born to Mix: Dushan Zaric's Seminar at Tales Vancouver

Dushan Zaric, and owner of New York's Employees Only and Macao Trading Co., gave a talk at Tales of the Cocktail Vancouver about spirits that were made for mixing in cocktails.

Zaric compared bartending to being a musician, using spirits as instruments and doing a ‘repetitive creative practice’ while making drinks behind the bar each night. He used the analogy in many ways, also noting that recipes are like reading music and can be performed differently by bartenders without deviating from what's written. 

He noted that as brand materials are written by marketing departments, it's not okay to just go by what it says about a product on the bottle label. “You are not only a bartender, you are in charge of knowing everything there is to know about a spirit,” he said.

 He noted a few thing to avoid in making cocktails:
1. One-dimensional taste
2. Two-dimensional taste- off balance, usually soft finish, low complexity
3. Overly complex taste – confuses the palate, too much going on. (I had a couple of these drinks while here in Vancouver.)

And he noted that the goal is to build a three diimsensoinal cocktail. The drink should have beginning middle and end in the mouth.

The he spoke about mixibility and quality in spirits. He noted for example that younger ryes are great for cocktails, while older ones are usually too woody for use- but they were made for sipping, not mixing. (And he said that producers make many spirits taste very woody as consumers associate that with quality, but that can be detrimental as far as the spirits' utility in cocktails.) 

He next went through a few examples of how he might adjust cocktail recipes based on the base spirits used in them. For example, he'd use less Tanqueray gin in a Negroni than he would Plymouth gin, as Tanqueray is higher proof, and slightly more Herradura blanco tequila than El Tesoro in a Margarita.

You can see the slides from the talk (that include the above mentioned recipes starting at slide 52, but probably not too much else useful information) on his Slideshare site here.

Audience questions at the end concerned how to help transition customers from basic vodka drinks to more complicated ones. One interesting suggestion was to do it with food- convince the Jack & Coke drinker to try a Manhattan by sending out a free appetizer of steak tartare to pair with it. 

Other questions ranged from flavoring and smoothing agents in spirits, to some specific questions about operating Employees Only. People had good questions. 

Now I'm off to my next seminar...

The seminar was sponsored by Campari, who also co-sponsored by trip to Tales. Thanks Campari!

 

What's the Difference Between Wild Turkey 80 and Wild Turkey 81?

Hello from Vancouver! I'm up here for the two-day Tales of the Cocktail festival.

In one of the tasting rooms yesterday, Eddie Russell, Associate Distiller and son of Master Distiller Jimmy Russel, was on hand to pass out samples and information.

In Canada and in some parts of the US there is a Wild Turkey 80, while recently they launched Wild Tukey 81. One proof degree difference? I asked Eddie Russell about it. 

The Wild Tukey 80 is actually discontinued. The product was a four year old bourbon.

Wild Turkey 81 is made with 6-8 year old whiskies. I believe Russell said that it is the same recipe as used in the Wild Turkey 101, but don't quote me on that. It's meant to be a in the same category as the other top-selling mixing bourbons. 

So there you have it!

Every Drink I Had at Tales of the Cocktail 2011

Below are the tweets sent out as I was recording every drink I had at Tales of the Cocktail for the second year in a row. 

The totals are: 

Wednesday: 18

Thursday: 41

Friday: 28

Saturnday: 19

 Compared to last year, this looks like a ton more drinks. But really I kept it to small sips and tastes for the most part. I came home feeling less poluted than usual, so don't let the numbers terrify you. Tales is for amateurs too!

Thursday was the big day again, due to the Diageo happy hour event. I had the same number as last year, 25, but it looks like more drinks before and afterward. 

Below are the individual drinks from my Twitter feed, many with pictures. Note they're in reverse order.