All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Welcome to Booze Science! What can I get you?
Actually, we haven't exactly figured out how to deliver cocktails via the Internet. (Our tech folks are working on the API.) In the meantime, we're going to be making videos that dig into the chemistry and physics that are the shadow ingredients in our favorite drinks. Science is what makes booze taste good---and we're going to be showing you how to bend that science to your will and make drinks better at home.
In this, our very first episode ever, we're straight-up chillin'. Which is a joke. Because in it I'm talking about the amazing ways that ice can change a drink---not just how strong it is, but its flavor and even mouthfeel. We visited one of my favorite San Francisco bars, The Interval at The Long Now, where Jennifer Colliau has developed some ways to use ice that are really...here it comes...wait for it...cool.
The great part is, you can use most of Jen's ice methodology to make better drinks at home, too. But not all of them; Jen even out-nerds the ice nerds.
I don't have a recipe for you this time---that'll come later---but I do have a reading list. I didn't talk much about ice in my book (you could buy it if you wanted, but no pressure), but some of my favorite booze writers have made it their own special study. Here are a couple great places to start:
Liquid Intelligence: The Art and Science of the Perfect Cocktail, by Dave Arnold
Arnold is the Gandalf the White of bartenders, the mad genius behind New York's Booker and Dax bar. He's the kind of guy who builds his own carbon dioxide system to get the size of the bubbles in fizzy drinks just right.
The Bar Book: Elements of Cocktail Technique, by Jeffrey Morgenthaler
The drinking world suffered a real loss when Morganthaler, who runs Clyde Common in Portland, stopped blogging about cocktail technique. But his book almost makes up for the loss by drawing together a few of his favorite recipes and many, many of his favorite tricks. His ice game is, as the saying goes, on point.
Cocktail Techniques, by Kazuo Uyeda
Arguably Japan's most famous bartender, Uyeda invented what's called the hard shake, a technique for shaking a cocktail that's supposed to imbue it with better mouthfeel. Candidly, this book is pretty weird, since Uyeda's explanations feel more spiritual than scientific. But the technique is pervasive enough that Arnold felt compelled to try to disprove its claims about temperature reduction live one year at Tales of the Cocktail, the San Diego Comic-Con of booze.
