This article was taken from the March 2016 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
You've heard of nose-to-tail dining; mixologist Ryan Chetiyawardana is bringing that same waste-nothing approach to cocktails. The London-based former chef's "closed-loop" recipes upcycle ingredients that bars would traditionally bin. "Say you squeeze a lemon -- you're taking the acidity, the sweetness and some of the flavour and throwing away the bulk of it," says Chetiyawardana, the 31-year-old behind London establishments White Lyan and Dandelyan. "Doing that is completely at odds with the way I would cook."
For example, bars produce lemon husks in abundance: Chetiyawardana's solution is to steep them and make a sweet syrup called falernum, just as he employs his fruit scraps in acetic fermentations. These by-products can then be transformed into entirely new concoctions. At Dandelyan, falernum and vinegar are mixed into a gin sour: "Almost like a compost cocktail, I suppose." He's even working on giving eggshells an afterlife. "It's an edible ingredient. It's not something you're ever going to chew on but you can dissolve it."
This approach is not without its challenges. The menu has to be finely balanced: include too many citrus drinks, and the bar will end up making more falernum than it can use. And he hasn't found new purposes for everything. "Coffee grains and tea bags are difficult. Yes, we do a coffee oil and a tannin tincture from the tea -- but it becomes quite weak and you still end up with bulk matter."
Chetiyawardana is known for his experimentation: White Lyan bottle-ages its cocktails and forgoes perishables, and it hosts an ingredients lab where his team experiments with techniques such as fermentation. Dandelyan, on London's south bank, boasts a menu based around botany -- each drink is grouped by ecosystem rather than ingredient. But it's never for its own sake. Closed-loop drinks offer cost savings -- "a bar has certain margins it needs to make to function" -- and ecological value.
He attributes his interest in the latter to his childhood and stories he was told by his mother. "My mum grew up in a big family in Sri Lanka and when they bought a cow they used every last bit of the animal, partly because of their Buddhist upbringing," he says. "My parents instilled it into us to try to be more thoughtful about whatever you're using."
Mixology, he explains, has been transformed. "People [once] treated bartending as something you'd do on the side. So it didn't attract people who wanted to look at things differently. You didn't mess around with the formula."
So how has the rest of the drinks world reacted to his innovations? "When we opened White Lyan [in 2013], people saw it as an insult"- that is, until they tried the drinks. "We had a restaurant critic who came in and said, 'I wanted to hate this, but these are the best that I've ever had.'"
Recipe: Money Martini
Ingredients
- **210ml butter-washed Belvedere Unfiltered:**Spicy and nutty
- **52ml coffee distillate:**Fruity and spicy. Distilled from old coffee grounds
- **Drops of coffee oil:**Earthy and bitter, extracted from used coffee
- 2.5ml lemonbalm distillate: Rich, light citrus notes. Made from used lemon garnishes
- **2.5ml lactic acid solution:**Bright, creamy flavour. Extracted from used lemons
Method
Vat together the vodka, lactic acid, coffee and lemonbalm distillates, birch syrup and 180ml of mineral water. Stir over ice, strain into a chilled coupette and dot with coffee oil.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
