Evolution of modern mixology toward increasingly processed ingredients

Cocktails and mixed drinks
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@Camper has posted a mildly provocative ingredient-centric essay on the arc of the Cocktail Renaissance through today.

I think it’s a compelling angle for looking at the history.

He adds a warning at the end that all these artificial techniques could inadvertently lead us back to a bad place we’ve been before. I suppose my knee jerk response is that bad drinks never went away, there are just more good drinks to be had now if you look for them.

One of the examples is sour mix, and if you’re using Super Juice, yeah, you’re just a hop, skip and jump from recreating that. But what a difference a little understanding and intent can make.

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Recently I was chatting about the post-pandemic staffing/quality issues with some old school bartenders, and one said, “It used to be that the best bars were all about being Bespoke, now all the supposedly top bars are Batched.”

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I believe Angus Winchester has recently been fulminating about batching.

When we say “batched” in this context, do we mean the entire drink is simply poured into a glass out of a carafe from the fridge, or do we mean that a portion of the ingredients are premixed, but other ingredients are added, and then the drink is shaken/stirred/served/garnished?

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I see lots of each method, but increasingly fully-batched and clarified and made last week or earlier.

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Batching is the beginning of the erosion of other skills among younger bartenders.

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Counterpoint: there are a lot of restaurants and bars where bartender skills will never be developed or facilitated in the first place. Quality batching could yield better and more consistent results in these situations. Some of these establishments could even forego the pretense (charade/farce/parody) of having (institutionally incompetent) bar staff, because their servers can simply dispense the drinks like they do the beer and wine. (I’ve already encountered this in a few restaurants.)

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VinePair had a parallel podcast entitled “Is bartending getting harder?” about bars who want awards making up drinks that only they can make. Opposed to the earlier years when the sign of a great bar was that other bars’ bartenders were serving those drinks.

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This is largely my approach and understanding of the topic.

For context, i’m managing a Bar that is attached to a 200pax Fine dining restaurant, which is separate from the restaurant itself and services walk in guests. For the restaurant, all the drinks that can be batched, or make sense to batch are so that we may expedite them during service to runners.
All of the batched drinks still maintain a visual process of shaking, wet or dry and topping with champagne/ice/garnish in one way or another, which gives guests at the bar a visual theatre to appreciate, however; drinks that are made from ingredients on the back bar, Negroni, Old Fashioned, Martini’s they’re currently not batched, as it removes requisite skill from the process but it also makes the job boring if everything that can be batched is batched.

I think the balance is in making sure that if something is batched then it is done so for the benefit for the customer and the service and also to the benefit of the drink - in such a way that it would be excessive to try and replicate a build of this complexity a la minute. I wouldn’t expect a chef to make a Hollandaise sauce every single time they get an order during breakfast, I imagine they’d make a large batch and serve it over the eggs on an eggs Benedict with a ladle. same is my theory for batching.

To touch on the area of which ingredients we are using and how processed they are is an almost separate topic, but one i’m fond of also.

Beta cocktails is a little booklet that has a page called “precepts”
I’ll quote entry 3. “ Inspiration for new cocktails is not found in the produce isle at Whole Foods. However, it may be found in dusty bottles on your back bar.
” - by Kirk Estopinal + Maksym Pazuniak

This has been one of my main focuses for the new side menu i’m building drinks at work as i think this philosophy is important. doing a half-milk-punch-basil clarified-martini with some fancy flower mist and odd bitters might make for a great drink, but is the preparation worth it versus a regular martini. I feel the answer to this question comes about if you ponder for a moment what the intention of the drink is. what is the drink about, what is it really spekaing to? do you need to milk clarify basil and vodka, or is there a more strightforward method to catching that flavor component without the technical set up? are there basil tinctures i could use instead? bitters?

To that - If you’re adding infusions, clarifying techniques or making punch syrups they should be in aid to focus your drinks - not to add complexity or use technique for the sake of it. you shouldn’t be doing oleos from peels and arguing that “it’s environmentally friendly” when you now are bound by menu to buying that amount of fruit each time just for the peels to make your special syrup, it is contrary to the intention - use the peels from the lemons you squeeze but make the resulting drink a special so that you only use what you need.

Do i think batching removes technical skill of bartending, yeah - a bit, do i think it gives you room to put out more complex drinks without needing to touch 6+ bottles - also yeah. I feel Donn beach made the Donns mix #2 with that same necessity in mind - and i feel to harken to that other thread about blending rums, that’s also pretty close to pre-batching drinks or at least making your own house blend of rum so you don’t need to touch three bottles.

my two cents.

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The only thing I’m going to say about this is that last February I spent three nights in London. Second night in, sixth bar in total, I taste a drink and think: “Wow.” I take another sip, realise the drink is fine but no great and ask myself: “What wow-ed me in the first place?” I take another sip and realise the drink is made with fresh citrus juice. Actual freshly pressed citrus juice. Yes, I was on my sixth bar of the trip and, finally, I got a sour drink with fresh juice. This is crazy, whichever way you choose to look at it.

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Last night I had an experience that helped me understand the dark side of batching better (I’m so sheltered):

I went to the fashionable COTE Korean Steakhouse and, because I arrived early, I started at the bar. All the drinks on the cocktail list are batched. Order comes in, they dispense the drink from a labeled bottle in the well into a shaker (or whatever), shake (or whatever), strain, garnish, serve.

The drink I ordered was called the Master Bandit, and it was described as: Khee Soju, Fords Gin, Lime, Lemongrass, MSG, Peychaud Bitters. What I got had no aromatics to speak of. The spirits were indeterminate and background. Lime was present. It was balanced in terms of sweet/sour. That’s about it. The drink was DOA and cost $18.

Mercifully, my subsequent dining experience was excellent, but I’ll be avoiding their cocktails.

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I feels that’s not the result of batching as a technique but inexperience in putting drinks together with intention. That would have been just as bad had it been made in the moment

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Speculative. There are at least three possibilities:

  1. the drinks were shit to begin with, so the batches are shit
  2. the drinks are good, but the batching is sloppy or mishandled, resulting in shit drinks
  3. the drinks started out good, but entropy has set in over the entire enterprise, and now it’s all shit, or at least wildly inconsistent

The bartenders are no longer mixologists, so when it comes to mixed drinks, they’re basically servers following an assembly protocol. I don’t recall seeing any of them checking whether the drinks tasted right. So at least more possibilities:

  1. they don’t know the craft and have no idea the drinks are shit to begin with
  2. they know the drinks are shit but have no any agency or reason to care
  3. the assembly protocol isn’t bullet-proof and they’re making errors, resulting in inconsistency

I can see how with a completely batched bar—like any manufacturing situation—it’s easier than ever for dozens of compromised products to go out to customers before anyone notices.

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From Wayne Curtis’ recent article Are Cocktail Bars Leaving Craft Spirits Behind? on Punch:

But it’s not just economics at play. In the age of the high-concept cocktail and an increasingly saturated industry where bars strive to differentiate themselves, there’s greater emphasis on housemade products—house-infused spirits, inventive syrups and proprietary tinctures. Such twists can also keep customers returning, as it’s harder to replicate these creations than, say, a Manhattan variation using products easily bought at any liquor store.

“In the baseline culture of bartending, it’s no longer about taking care of the guests, it’s about showcasing yourself,” says Alex Pisi, bar director of Washington, D.C.’s Eastern Point Collective, which oversees bars including The Wells and The Duck & The Peach. Drinks become more complicated, more showy and less tied to base spirits, he adds. “My friends send me recipes, and I’m like, dude, I’ve been doing this [job] for 22 years, and I’d have a hard time making this.”