Cocktails At Home E-Book

Tristan Stephenson

• Herausgeber: Ryland Peters & Small
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

An expert guide to setting up a home bar, plus over 75 cocktail recipes to try from one of the world's leading bartenders, drinks industry innovator and best-selling author. Preparing a first-class cocktail relies upon an understanding of its ingredients and the delicate alchemy of how they work together. Here, Tristan Stephenson – drinks industry consultant, bar owner, restaurateur and author of best-selling drinks books – offers his expert advice on the fundamentals of home mixology and shares his perfected recipes for classic cocktails. Enjoy a Manhattan, Negroni and Martini, discover lesser known vintage gems including the Martinez and Aviation as well as modern favourites the Espresso Martini and Mojito.

Leseprobe

THE CURIOUS

BARTENDER

COCKTAILS

AT HOME

COCKTAILS

AT HOME

More than 75 recipes for classic and iconic drinks

TRISTAN STEPHENSON

Photography by Addie Chinn

ART DIRECTOR Leslie Harrington

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Julia Charles

HEAD OF PRODUCTION Patricia Harrington

PUBLISHER Cindy Richards

PROP STYLIST Sarianne Pleasant

ILLUSTRATOR Selina Snow

INDEXER Hilary Bird

First published in 2021 by

Ryland Peters & Small

20–21 Jockey’s Fields

London WC1R 4BW

and

341 E 116th St

New York NY 10029

www.rylandpeters.com

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Text copyright © Tristan Stephenson 2021

Design and commissioned photography copyright © Ryland Peters & Small 2021

Please note that all recipes in this book have been previously published by Ryland Peters & Small in the Curious Bartender series by Tristan Stephenson and adapted for this new volume.

The author’s moral rights have been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-78879-352-0

E-ISBN:978-1-78879-375-9

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

US Library of Congress CIP data has been applied for.

Printed in China

contents

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INTRODUCTION

equipment & GLASSWARE

Kitchen ingredients

Science of Flavour

thirteen Bottles

Making a drink

GIN

VODKA

WHISKY/WHISKEY & BOURBON

RUM

TEQUILA

BRANDY, SHERRY, WINE & AMARI

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Credits & acKNOWLEDGEMENTS

introduction

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I enjoy having friends over for dinner, but must confess that I rarely make cocktails for my guests. I think this comes as a surprise to some of them, who (quite rightly) expect someone who has made a living from mixing drinks to be mixing martinis on a nightly basis. There are two reasons why I don’t make drinks at home very often: the first is that I drink enough cocktails in my bars as it is, and sometimes it’s nice to just crack open a bottle of wine and sit back; the second reason has more worrying implications, as it’s for the simple fact that I find mixing drinks at home a bit of a chore. With that little revelation, you might be wondering how this book is going to teach you to become a kitchen cocktail hero, when the person writing the book – the person who has made hundreds of thousands of cocktails over the past two decades – finds it too strenuous a task to shake a cocktail for his own wife.

The problem is that I, like pretty much everyone else on the planet, have never been taught how to make good drinks at home. I was taught to bartend. In a bar. But a professional bar station and a domestic kitchen have very little in common with one another. Asking a top bartender to make world-class drinks at home is no easier than expecting a Michelin star chef to produce a tasting menu from scratch in a domestic kitchen. It’s not impossible but it requires a transfer of skill to a different environment, using and sometimes substituting equipment, and doing all of it in what is generally a far more confined space. A change of tack is required, but for a professional bartender it can be a difficult transition to make. To shake off years of training and gained experience and to start all over again with low work tops, no ice-well, and an inefficient arrangement of bins, sinks, and fridges. But for someone who has never worked in a bar, and who has never experienced what it’s like to be ‘five deep in the weeds’ at 11pm on a Saturday night, learning to bartend in a kitchen is not a great challenge at all. And in some respects your kitchen is already fairly well set up for mixing drinks: you have running water, a freezer, plenty of ingredients, and a wealth of utensils. The secret, then, lies in practice and preparation; understanding what you’re going to need, when you will need it, and how best to make ready for it. As with cooking, it’s entirely possible to produce something delicious and to make an incredible mess at the same time. But unlike cooking, your guests will not be content with seeing a tray laden with beautiful cocktails floating into the room as you kick the door shut and hide a scene of complete devastation in the kitchen. One of the great and curious things about mixing drinks is finding that your friends and family want to witness and comment on the making process. Cocktails are about seeing the motion of the bartender, and witnessing the picking, pouring and stirring of ingredients to a perfect state.

In summary, there are three things that I hope you, dear reader, will take from this book: the first is to understand what equipment and ingredients you need to use or source. Second is to understand the basic techniques you need to master to get the best out of the ingredients, and to look like a pro at the same time. And lastly, I hope you will enjoy learning more about the history of each drink as much as I have, and use this newfound knowledge to expertly choose the ideal cocktail for any occasion.

equipment & glassware

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These days there are virtually no limits to the range and variety of bar equipment available to the bartender and home enthusiast. The world’s great cocktail bars regularly call for expensive equipment to make their drinks and this builds upon the theatre of the experience, adding value to your evening and validating the cash it costs you. At home, however, a vintage gold-plated cocktail shaker is a luxury that most of us cannot afford and that absolutely none of us need.

So let’s set the record straight from the start: you don’t need lots of fancy equipment to make great drinks at home. All of the drinks featured in this book can be produced with nothing more a jigger, a cocktail shaker, a barspoon and a good supply of ice. And even a cocktail shaker can be substituted for a plastic container with a lid or even a jam jar, the barspoon swapped for a dessertspoon, and a sieve/strainer used in place of a bartender’s hawthorn strainer. The notion that a cocktail is indulgent and worthy of respect is not something that I think should be challenged, but behind closed kitchen doors nobody cares how elegant the process of making them is. Indeed, as a professional bartender I have travelled the world with little more than a jigger, beaker, barspoon and glass, and still managed to knock together some crowd-pleasing cocktails when the circumstances required me to.

Limes don’t have to be squeezed with a fancy lever-style citrus press (often known as a Mexican elbow), and instead of silver ice tongs, any similar tong-type kitchen tool will suffice. When bartending on shift I will, of course, present drinks using the arsenal of tools available to me, but when making a nightcap at home you had best believe that I often utilise some unconventional equipment to achieve common bartending tasks, and it’s not unusual to see me working by the light of the open fridge door. But, for your guidance only, here is a list of the most common bartending equipment and their uses.

JIGGER

The jigger is the most important utensil in the home bartender’s arsenal as it allows you to measure ingredients accurately. Doesn’t sound like much fun, does it? Perhaps not, but inaccuracy causes imbalance and imbalance is the root of all evil where cocktails are concerned. Get used to thinking about measurements (in millilitres, or in fluid ounces if you must) but more than that, get used to thinking about ratios – ‘two parts of this, one part of that’. Where a drink has more than five ingredients this can become tricky, but approaching each drink as a ratio of ingredients rather than a sum of numbers will be useful if you’ve misplaced your jigger and for when you need double, triple or quadruple quantities. Once you have ratios mastered, you’ll find that an egg cup or shot glass can function nicely as a stand-in jigger.

BARSPOON

Probably the second most important piece of kit, a barspoon is basically a weighted teaspoon with a long, usually twisted, shaft. Bar spoons are useful for a variety of tasks, the most obvious of which is stirring. Since stirred cocktails require quite a lot of ice, a conventional teaspoon is far too short to reach the bottom of the glass. A dessertspoon or tablespoon is too cumbersome to achieve the required level of gentle manipulation, so that really only leaves you with a barspoon. Except, of course, for the fact that a pair of chopsticks also does quite a good job of stirring ice in a tall beaker or glass.

Barspoons are however generally quite unreliable when it comes to measuring. The bowl of the spoon varies in volume between brands, but generally sits somewhere between 5 and 10 ml (or the equivalent of 1 and 2 teaspoons). The bigger problem lies in the fact that a ‘full’ measure from a barspoon varies from person to person and from pour to pour, ranging from a meagre droplet to a wobbly daub of liquid barely held together by a thin meniscus. In my opinion, it’s far better to use your jigger for small measures and keep the barspoon for what it’s best at, stirring.

There are however a couple of other uses for a barspoon. The ones with a flat, coin-like piece on the end are designed to assist with floating or layering ingredients in cocktails that call for it – Irish Coffee, for example (see page 125). The idea is that you rest the base of the barspoon on the surface of the drink, then pour the ingredient that is to be floated down the spiral shaft of the spoon. The shaft slows the descent of the liquid by twisting it around and the base disperses it evenly over the surface of the drink. The situations that call for such a trick are few and far between however, so I wouldn’t go out and buy a spoon for this reason alone. That flat base can also be used in place of a muddler (see page 12) to squash soft fruit or bruise herbs. Beware though – I have seen glasses smashed and hands scarred in the engagement in activities such as these. Do it only as a last resort.

SHAKER

Most shakers are made from stainless steel and are comprised of either a steel ‘tin’ and ‘boston’ glass, or of a tin with clip-on strainer and cap known as a ‘three-piece’ shaker. There are positives and negatives to both designs: the boston tends to hold more liquid and has the benefit of a glass so you have an idea of what you’ve put in there (and what you haven’t). The glass part also means it’s breakable and the design means that you need a strainer of some sort to stop the ice from flooding out when you pour the drink. The three-piece is a self-contained unit with a strainer built in, but these shakers tend to suffer from being a bit small – for my appetite, at least.

A large plastic three-piece is surprisingly a good solution, though perhaps not as appealing or good-looking as a stainless steel one, it is virtually unbreakable, easy to clean, and a good insulator of temperature, meaning that your drinks will get colder quicker and with less dilution of flavour.

MIXING BEAKER

This is a large, open-top vessel used for stirring drinks. Any shaker can serve the purpose, but I think it’s sometimes nice to stir drinks down in a lipped glass and watch as the corners of the ice cubes round off as the drink chills. If a mixing beaker sounds a lot like a small jug/pitcher to you, you’re not wrong at all. The only difference is they tend not to have handles.

STRAINER

Hawthorn strainers are comprised of a perforated metal plate with a coil of wire running around the edge and they sit over the top of a cocktail tin when pouring, so as to hold all the ice back. They are essential if you’re shaking cocktails with a boston shaker, but surplus to requirements if it’s a three-piece that you have.

Another type of strainer is a julep strainer. These are like large perforated spoons that were originally designed to stop ice from falling in your face when sipping on a Mint Julep (see page 106). They’re unsuitable for straining shaken drinks as the holes either get blocked or let too much ice through, but some bartenders like to use them for straining stirred cocktails where there is little risk of tiny ice fragments ending up in the glass.

The final type of strainer, which there’s a good chance you have already, is a tea strainer, a.k.a. a small sieve/strainer. Finer (smaller holes) is better where these things are concerned, as tea strainers are used as a secondary strain when pouring some shaken drinks as a means of keeping the fine ice shards produced by aggressive shaking out of your drink. Double straining is a practice that is deemed necessary by many professional bartenders, and there may well be a few occasions at home where a pristine-looking cocktail is called for.

MUDDLER

On occasion it’s necessary to get physical with some ingredients and engage in a bit of a scuffle. Whether it’s squashing raspberries into submission or ruffling the tips of some mint leaves, extracting flavour from fresh ingredients is sometimes done using a ‘muddler’. As stupid a name as it might be, it does exactly as one might expect.

Muddlers are like small police batons and generally made of plastic or wood. If you have a rolling pin in your house, you have no need to buy a muddler (use the money for a nice bottle of bourbon or gin instead) as the bakers’ most prized tool will do the job just fine. Note: a muddler is a poor substitute for a rolling pin when flattening pastry dough.

CITRUS JUICER

As I’ve already mentioned, citrus presses are a useful component of your home cocktail cabinet but are by no means essential. Having said that, lemons and limes are not getting any cheaper, so it’s perhaps wise to extract every last drop of juice you possibly can from them!

A lever-style press (referred to by many as a Mexican elbow) is your best bet, and these contraptions do a nice job of liberating the oil from the skin of the citrus fruit too. A standard kitchen citrus reamer will work ok too.

KNIVES AND PEELERS

If you don’t have a knife and vegetable peeler in your kitchen drawer already, it raises serious concerns about your commitment to freshly prepared food and drink!

A small vegetable knife (or one of the razor-sharp serrated ‘tomato’ knives) fits the bill for chopping most fruits, and I opt for one of the ‘Y’ shaped vegetable peelers for stripping healthy lengths of citrus zest.

ICE PICK

Not the kind you go mountaineering with, but the kind of hand-held pick with one or three spikes on the end that is used to chip away at blocks of ice. This is one tool that can’t be substituted easily with another kitchen implement so it’s worth investing in one if you’re planning on freezing big chunks of ice (which you really should be doing if possible).

GLASSWARE

Your favourite cocktail bar may stock a whole range of seductive glassware finely tuned to meet the needs of different drinks, but truth be told 90% of cocktails can be served in one of three glasses: coupe, highball and old fashioned (also known as rocks).

Settle on a sensible-sized coupe that can handle both a tiny Dry Martini (see page 40) or a shaken higher-volume drink, such as a White Lady (see page 71). The 150-ml/5-oz. size is usually about right – it won’t look like a half-full bucket when serving said Martini and it won’t be full to the brim when mixing a Cosmopolitan (see page 81). Your highball and old fashioned (rocks) glass will usually be around the same volume, only one will be taller and more narrow and the other more squat, heavier and wider. Think about which drinks you like to make the most and consider which size will suit them. Of course you don’t need to limit yourself to only these three glasses – see pages 14–15 for a visual guide to what you might enjoy collecting and using. But remember if the drink tastes good, it tastes good – most often the serviceware is there only to improve the experience and enhance the environment. In my time I have been know to quite contentedly consume cocktails from tea cups, egg cups, or even mixed directly back into the bottle when the need arose!

For chilled cocktails that are served ‘straight up’ (i.e. no ice), the glasses should always be chilled before use. Serving a cold cocktail in a room-temperature glass is like serving a roast dinner on a cold plate – the hot food cools down a lot quicker, just as a chilled drink will warm up a lot quicker. I personally like to use glasses chilled in the refrigerator for most drinks. These glasses will be at around 1ºC, which is an acceptable level above the common temperature range of most drinks (0ºC to -5ºC). Glasses from the freezer work too (and look cool!), but that freezing cold temperature can be a bit alarming to the lips on the first sip.

You can also chill glasses on the fly by adding a few lumps of ice and some water, then quickly stirring for a minute or so, emptying and pouring in the prepared cocktail. Taking the time to ensure the glass is at the correct temperature is a simple step that makes a big difference – as with most things, preparation is key.

glassware guide

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SHOT

This is a small, straight-sided glass with a solid base; it holds either a single or a double measure and is used to serve shots and shooters. It can also be used as a measure should you lose your cocktail jigger (a common occurrence even for the pros).

OLD FASHIONED (OR ROCKS)

A classic glass that is used for drinks that are served on the rocks (i.e. over ice). It should have a capacity of about 300 ml/10 fl oz. and can also house drinks like whisky and soda.

HIGHBALL

A tall, thin, straight-sided glass used for long cocktails over ice and also for serving spirits with mixers. Anything over 350 ml/12 fl. oz. should suffice.

HEATPROOF (OR LATTE)

Take your pick from the elegant wine-glass-shaped Irish Coffee glass, to the sort of tall, handled glass in which you might get served your café latte.

WINE

Classic small wine glasses are a good all-rounder and can be used for plenty of straight-up or punch-style drinks. Large balloon-shaped red wine glasses can work in place of the popular Spanish-style gin copa/balon glasses.

CHAMPAGNE FLUTE

As there is no real restriction on these, they can be as classic or ornate as you choose, though it a bit of bling is perhaps nice for a celebratory or festive offering.

MARTINI (OR COCKTAIL)

This is a stemmed glass with an inverted cone bowl, mainly used to serve classic cocktails. The term martini glass is often used interchangeably with cocktail glass. The longer the stem, the more ornate. Anything between 150 ml/5 fl. oz. and 200 ml/6 fl. oz. should suffice for drinks that are served straight up.

COUPE (OR NICK & NORA)

Also used for classic straight-up cocktails, mini coupes (sometimes known as a Nick & Nora), have a shallow rounded bowl and a speak-easy, jazz-age elegance. A classic coupe has a large, shallow bowl and a longer stem. It can be used as an alternative to the flute for serving Champagne and works well for sparkling cocktails

MARGARITA

This glass is also sometimes called the Marie Antoinette (so named as it is rumoured that the glass was shaped around the curve of her breast…). Note: a martini glass can also be used for a classic, straight-up Margarita.

HURRICANE (OR TULIP)

This multi-purpose glass comes in a number of different shapes and sizes. Generally seen as a glass that holds punches and frozen drinks, like an ice-blended Daiquiri.

TIKI MUG

These are novelty ceramic drinking vessels that originated in Tiki bars for serving Tiki-style, usually rum-based drinks. They depict Polynesian or tropical themes, the most common being the Easter Island Moai statues. Despite being called mugs, they don’t have a handle.

TANKARD

Often made from hammered copper, these handled cups are classically used to serve the Moscow Mule cocktail. Also, a traditional ‘Purl’ tankard (made from pewter or stainless steel) is used to serve the earliest known hot alcoholic beverages, like the Flip, where traditionally a hot poker was plunged into the liquid to heat it.

kitchen ingredients

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Unless you’re content drinking cocktails made entirely from booze (which can be very nice sometimes), you will need a basic catalogue of kitchen ingredients. There’s a good chance you’re holding stock of this stuff already, but it’s worth taking the time to check before embarking upon an evening’s cocktail making.

SALT

Perhaps not an obvious cocktail ingredient, but salt performs a similar role in mixed drinks as it does in food: elevating flavour and softening bitterness, sweetness and acidity. Cocktails rarely taste salty, but a small pinch of salt will improve most drinks – you’ll see I use it in both the Lime Rickey and Piña Colada recipes. Keep table salt for making syrups and infusions, and flaked sea salt for rimming glassware (as in a Margarita) and garnishing.

SUGAR

Caster/superfine sugar is a staple product that can easily be converted into a simple syrup for cocktails, or used as a base for flavoured syrups. You may wish to experiment with darker sugars too, such as Demerara and muscovado – these work particularly well in cocktails that call for aged rum. Make up a batch and have it to hand for when any recipe calls for Sugar Syrup. For Brown Sugar Syrup, simply follow the recipe below substituting brown sugar for white.

To make 1 litre/1 quart of simple sugar syrup mix 600 g/3 cups of sugar with 400 ml/1¾ of cold water and heat gently in a saucepan until all of the sugar is dissolved and the liquid becomes clear. Store in the fridge – any clean strewtop jar, like a large jam/jelly jar is an ideal container.

HONEY

A great modifier that can be used in place of sugar syrup in almost any cocktail, assuming you like the flavour of honey of course. Honey plays especially well with grain-based spirits like gin, vodka and whisky.

MAPLE SYRUP

Similarly to honey, maple syrup adds a buttery, candied note to mixed drinks, and it works rather well with American whiskey.

AGAVE NECTAR

Disproven as a health food it might be – but you’re not drinking Margaritas because they’re healthy, right? – agave nectar certainly has a strong affinity with agave spirits (tequila, mescal) as well as cachaça and agricole rums.

CITRUS

Citrus fruits store reasonably well and provide both theatrical and aromatic effect when freshly squeezed into a drink. Lime is generally the sourest of the family and can be as sour as 1.8 pH. Lime is comprised of both citric and ascorbic acid, whereas lemon is almost entirely citric acid and around 2.3 pH. Orange and grapefruit have a similar pH to one another of around 3.7 (oranges have more sugar in them, so taste less sour).

HERBS

Fresh herbs can be used as visually attractive and aromatically pleasing garnishes as well as components of the cocktail itself. Fresh herbs can be tricky to store however. Too much moisture can make the leaves go slimy and too little moisture makes them dry out, while excessive light turns them yellow. Store soft herbs like mint, basil and coriander/cilantro in the fridge, but arrange them like a bunch of flowers in a glass jar with water in the bottom. Woody herbs, like rosemary, thyme and sage, should also be refrigerated, but last longer when wrapped in damp kitchen towel and placed in a sealable container.

SPICES

Warm cocktails enjoyed in the winter months, benefit from dried spices. If you plan to mix up hot toddies or festive drinks, you might want to rummage and see if you need to replenish storecupboard stocks of any the following: nutmeg (always best freshly grated), cinnamon (ground and sticks), cloves and star anise. Peppercorns, both black and pink, can be useful too.

EGGS

The use of eggs, egg yolks and egg whites in cocktails has a long history. Many old-fashioned drinks like flips, possets and syllabubs require a whole egg for both a flavour and textural addition to a drink. Lots of cocktails that emerged from the golden era of mixed drinks (1860–1930) also call for egg white in the drink, such as the White Lady or Clover Club. Note: Eggs should be free-range and very fresh, and always wash your hands after cracking egg shells and before touching any other ingredients or equipment.

PICKLES AND PRESERVES

If your are fixing cocktails often, it makes sense to keep a jar of good Maraschino cocktail cherries on hand (but not the day-glow glacé kind used for baking). They are an essential garnish for a Manhattan – look out for the Luxardo brand. Also, a jar of small, green brined olives, stuffed or otherwise, for your Martini, and a jar of cornichons might also come in handy. All can be stored in the fridge. Oh and marmelade, if the Breakfast Martini on page 44 grabs your attention!

SODAS AND MIXERS

It may sound simple, but keeping a good stock of sodas and carbonated mixers can be a bit of a challenge as they tend to lose their fizz quite quickly once opened. A G&T without the bubbles is a sorry affair, just as a Mojito without that lick of spritz can also feel a bit flat. Soda water, tonic water, ginger beer and cola should make up the four pillars of your carbonated world and should always be freshly opened and well chilled.

A WORD ABOUT ICE

Last, but far from least… let’s talk about ice…

The simplest mistake when setting up a home bar is not having enough ice. As a rule, you’re going to need about twice as much ice as you think you will. Cocktails get through lots of ice and too little ice in the preparation or service of a drink will always result in an inferior looking and tasting drink. Try to reserve a drawer in your freezer purely for ice, so you can store ice cubes and larger lengths, even blocks of ice that can be chipped away at if the feeling takes you.

It’s cubed ice that will be the bread and butter of your drink-making regime however, so invest in some large ice-cube trays and get used to freezing, dumping and refilling them when you have a spare moment. You may wish to purchase a hand-operated ice-crusher – these items are inexpensive and produce good-quality ice nuggets that can be used for a variety of (usually) rum-based cocktails. A dish towel and a mallet can work as a last resort, but it can be tricky to achieve a consistent quality with this method. Blenders cannot be used to make crushed ice – they make snow.

The shape and size of the ice used makes little difference to the final temperature and dilution of a drink. Crushed, cubed and even big rocks of hand-cracked ice of the same weight all eventually achieve about the same levels of dilution and temperature. Only the time this takes changes because the surface areas of the different ice types vary. Stirring with crushed ice might take a Martini down to -5ºC in ten seconds but stirring the same Martini with the same weight of hand-cracked ice can take over two minutes to achieve the same levels of temperature and dilution.

The golden rule, no matter what type of ice you use, is to always take it straight from the freezer. Ice from the freezer is colder, of course, but crucially it is not ‘wet’ (partially melted) and therefore not going to unnecessarily dilute your drink.

the science of flfLavour

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There’s a lot going on when you take a sip of any cocktail. Tongue, mouth, nose, eyes and even ears work in harmony to glean every ounce of relevant information about the drink you’re sipping. In fact, flavour is amongst the most complex perceptions created by our brains.

Let us first see a description of how flavour is produced by flavour psychologist Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in 1825:

Man’s apparatus of the sense of taste has been brought to a state of rare perfection; and, to convince ourselves thoroughly, let us watch it at work.

As soon as an edible body has been put into the mouth, it is seized upon, gases, moisture, and all, without possibility of retreat. Lips stop whatever might try to escape; the teeth bite and break it; saliva drenches it: the tongue mashes and churns it; a breathlike sucking pushes it toward the gullet; the tongue lifts up to make it slide and slip; the sense of smell appreciates it as it passes the nasal channel, and it is pulled down into the stomach… without… a single atom or drop or particle having been missed by the powers of appreciation of the taste sense.

Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du Goût

(The Physiology of Taste), 1825

It is fairly common knowledge that as much as 80% of flavour is recognised as a result of the nose, rather than the mouth. This is mostly true, though it’s difficult to quantify exactly how much work the nose does in comparison to all the multi-sensory (or multimodal) inputs that the brain utilises. The brain’s ability to combine taste, touch and smell into a unified flavour image is called synesthesia.

SMELL

Much of this ‘flavour-mapping’ work is conducted through retro-nasal smell, that is ‘backward’ smell, through the back of the nose.

As we gargle, masticate, swill and swallow, tiny aromatic molecules, only visible on an atomic level, are exhaled up through the throat and out of the nose. As they pass through the nasal passage, they come into contact with the olfactory epithelium – this nasal tissue is the nose’s direct hard-line to the brain. It sends minute signals to the olfactory bulb, which converts signals into a smell image, the main component of flavour. Contrary to whatever bad publicity you may have heard about the human sense of smell, it is truly an incredible thing – better, in fact, than even the most advanced molecule-detecting equipment that our brains have been able to devise.

TASTE

Taste and the palate also play an important role in flavour perception. Taste begins with the taste buds – a collection of sensory cells, each with fine hairs that respond to stimuli. Taste buds are located within the tiny visible folds on the surface of the tongue, known as papillae. The different receptors in taste cells detect five primary tastes: salt, sweet, sour, bitter and umami (a savoury-like taste which is particularly common in tomatoes, soya/soy and Parmesan cheese). These tastes are detected all over the tongue, though some areas have higher concentrations of specific receptors. Signals are sent to the brain for processing, along with other sensory input.

The tongue and mouth also conduct the important role of detecting mouth-feel. Although more relevant to eating than drinking, mouth-feel can have a profound effect on our appreciation of cocktails. Mouth-feel is not a wholly understood science, but it is known to include such sensory submodalities as touch, pressure, temperature and pain. Each of these affects the image of flavour in different ways. Ever noticed how flat cola tastes different to fizzy cola? That’ll be the pain receptors in your mouth altering the flavour image when triggered by the tickling of CO2 gas in the bubbles of your coke.

VISION

In the most basic form, our eyes tell us whether something will fit into our mouths, and whether or not it’s likely to hurt us. But going deeper, the way that a drink looks plays a huge part in how we determine its flavour. I’m not just talking about pretty garnishes (although they do help), but fundamental things such as colour, size, glassware and temperature indication (frosted, steam).