Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
307 | Kevin Peterson on the Theory of Cocktails
Mon, 03 Mar 2025
A lot of science goes into crafting the perfect cocktail. Balancing sweet and bitter notes, providing the right amount of aeration and dilution, getting it to just the right temperature and keeping it that way. And even if you have no interest in cocktails as such, the general principles extend to other activities in art and in life. I talk to scientist-turned-mixologist Kevin Peterson about how to think about the simple magic of a perfect drink.Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/03/03/307-kevin-peterson-on-the-theory-of-cocktails/Support Mindscape on Patreon.Kevin Peterson received a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan. He is currently co-owner of both Castalia (an experimental craft cocktail bar) and Sfumato Fragrances in Detroit, Michigan. He is the author of Cocktail Theory: A Sensory Approach to Transcendent Cocktails.Mindscape Petrichor Negroni (from the episode)1 part gin distilled from vetiver(alternative: herbaceous gin such as Moletto)1 part St. George Bruto Americano1 part Antica Formula vermouthStir over an ice cube, express with orange peel (not shown).See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What is the Mindscape Podcast episode about cocktails?
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Frequent listeners to the Ask Me Anything episodes here at Mindscape will know that I am a fan of a good cocktail. It's not something I bring up very often, but it does happen.
In fact, I think I did a holiday message one year about cocktails, and certainly we've had plenty of AMA questions thinking about cocktails one way or another. And there's something fascinating about the idea of a cocktail. I mean, if you like wine, which I also do, what do you do? You look for a good wine and then you open it and you drink it. There's not a lot that you do to the glass of wine.
Maybe you decant it or something like that. You make sure to serve it at the right temperature. But mostly it's just about finding the wine unless you're the one who's actually making it. Whereas a cocktail, there's a certain amount of effort and even perhaps ingenuity that goes into it. You can make good cocktails and bad cocktails out of the same ingredients. There's something you need to know.
In fact, one might even say that it would be good to be educated in the theory of cocktails if there ever were such a thing. So imagine my delight when I came across a book called Cocktail Theory, A Sensory Approach to Transcendent Cocktails by Kevin Peterson, who is today's guest on the Mindscape podcast.
Now, Kevin, I didn't even know this when I bought the book, but you won't be surprised to learn, has a physics background. He got an undergraduate degree in physics and then got a PhD in mechanical engineering. but now works at a couple of places, Sfumato and Castalia. I'm going to try to explain this correctly if I understand what's going on. Sfumato is a fragrance store. They sell perfumes.
They make their own perfumes, and then they sell them. It's in Detroit, Michigan, and Kevin is part of the designing of different fragrances and so forth. But then at a certain time of day, it turns into Castalia, which is a bar, which is a mixology bar, an experimental craft cocktail bar. where they mix together different cocktails.
And you'll learn a little bit about, in this podcast, what that means, you know, what really goes into it. So the background in physics and engineering comes out very, very clearly in this discussion. Not only...
in thinking about what are the different ingredients that could go in, how do you make the temperature last at the right amount for the right time, what is the effect of aeration, you know, the little bubbles you get in your drink and the shaking and how much should you shake it, but also just the application of the scientific method.
You know, very similarly to when we had Kenji Lopez-Alt here to talk about cooking, but from an MIT graduate's engineering science background where you're going to experiment. You're not going to say, oh, I found this wonderful old book that has the best recipe in it.
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Chapter 2: Who is Kevin Peterson and what is his background?
So if you pre-chill some of your ingredients, you melt a little bit less ice, you wind up more in the middle of that kind of ideal zone for dilution. So actually at home, I started keeping my rum in the freezer just to, you know.
cut back on that dilution when I shake a daiquiri. And one thing is, you know, you're super scientific about what you are tasting, but then it's you tasting it. So I know that in some areas of science, like psychology, et cetera, we have the reproducibility crisis.
Do you know whether or not if someone else were tasting it, or even if you were sort of blind tasting the same thing, would you reliably get the same answer for how good it was?
Yeah, very good question. And that's probably the biggest caveat with the whole book is... I couldn't pay somebody else to also grant $1,500. Yeah, there is a section on uncertainty, actually, data uncertainty. So a couple things I did. Yeah, I did go back and recheck myself on certain points and say, okay, three months ago, I thought this was terrible or good or right on the cusp.
Do I still think that? I had some of my staff. I tested them as well. And then even like measurement uncertainty, when you're using a jigger, is that accurate to 0.1 ounces, 0.01 ounces on a Saturday night? How different than when you're doing it? for the sake of your testing. So, so I actually, yeah, I had some of my staff, I was like, all right, pour two ounces as quick as you can.
Like, you know, I had to pour it into different tins and, you know, we masked it out and yeah, there, there's something like a five to 10% variability in poor, um, poor level. So, so yeah, there's some analysis there. And basically what I said was, um,
There are some real outliers, people who just want zero sugar or the ultimate bitter thing or the whatever, and I'm not trying to capture those people in this data. 90% of the people that I talked to fell – well, probably 95.
Most of the people I talked to fell within this range where they said, yep, I pretty much agree, or maybe there's one point where I'm a quarter ounce more lime juice than you, which is – getting into that measurement uncertainty realm. So I kind of said, if you just kind of like squint your eyes a little bit when you look at my graphs, I think we're all going to agree here.
And, you know, so don't take it as, okay, down to the last milligram. But the other thing that I wanted to do was to just bring some of this thinking into the cocktail world and say, okay, a thousand years from now, are people going to look back and say, yes, that was the true Daiquiri form?
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Chapter 3: How do scientific principles apply to cocktail making?
I see.
Okay. You make better verbal connections. You have a more rich vocabulary of description. So yeah, you watch a sommelier pick a part of wine and they're doing all these one weird motions, but then they're saying, oh, I get tennis balls and I get warm weather and I get garden hose and this and that. And you're like, You smell the same wine and you're like, this just smells like wine.
It smells like wine, yeah.
But that's a good kind of training. That conceptual map actually, I suspect, does help you distinguish between things that otherwise would be just lumped together somehow.
Yeah, and I think another part of it too is your expectations get refined.
Yeah.
where now I've read enough about whiskey that I know, okay, these notes come from the barrel. These notes come from the grain. These notes come from this and that. When I'm smelling a whiskey, it's not like my mind is a blank canvas and somebody's just putting something up there and I'm trying to pick it apart. I'm looking for a green apple note. I'm looking for a nutmeg note.
I'm looking for a cinnamon note, which maybe not in a conscious way, but I've been primed through years of drinking whiskey to say like, oh, is this a rye, is this a wheat, is this a whatever?
And it's, yeah, it's a different experience when you're not trained in that world, it can feel overwhelming because yeah, it's just a bunch of random stimuli and you're like, I don't know how to differentiate these or what facets go together and what facets don't. And somebody that's done it for years and years can more quickly categorize, describe, picture these inputs.
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