Cocktails of the Future

My reader, D.W. I, asks a number of questions about cocktails:

1. What is a good source for classic recipes?
2. What are the cocktail equivalents of the innovators like El Bulli and Fat Duck?

For classic cocktails, I'll just mention the Professional Mixing Guide, published by the Angostura-Wuppermann Corp. in 1947. My father or uncle probably picked it up at Stengel's Liquors in Brockton MA. My observations: They drank a lot more gin, and a lot of cocktails had egg or egg whites. We don't do that any more, do we?

Now, for cocktails of the future. Ferran Aria of El Bulli is famous for futuristic food, but has done as much for cocktails. Most of his tricks involve changes of state - decomposed cocktails with hot and frozen ingredients, cocktail caviar (liquor encased in little bubbles of sodium alginate/calcium chloride), aerosolized martinis.

Fat Duck on the other hand, is famous for molecular gastronomy - discovering unusual combinations of flavors based on the molecular compositions of the flavor molecules. Its liquid cousin, molecular mixology is somewhat less well known.

One famous Fat Duck combination is mango and Douglas fir. Can you imagine the piney note in a mango's scent? This seems like a cocktail recipe to me.

I have a recipe for Douglas fir infusion (basically, stick a clean branch of fir into a bottle of gin), but I have also found an interesting liqueur: Zerbenz stone pine Alpen liqueur. Pale red, slightly sweet, very piney. To the laboratory!

My results:

• Mango juice/Zerbenz (various ratios): FAIL. The flavors somehow cancel out, leaving a watery tasting cocktail
• Mango juice/Gin/Zerbenz (4:2:1): FAIL. The gin doesn't add anything, might even subtract something.
• Gin/Zerbenz (3:1): WIN. This martini variation, using Zerbenz in place of vermouth is herbal and sweet. I used Anchor's Junipero gin, which has a big juniper flavor (and is SF Bay area based).

OK, so I didn't wind up going with mango/fir. Just couldn't get it to work. Maybe it takes a real molecular gastronomist. I did, however, invent the:

Stone Fox
1 jigger Junipero gin
1/2 oz Zerbenz stone pine liqueur

Shake over ice and serve up in a martini glass. Garnish with a pine cone or something.