Recently in Science Category

I've always like the idea of molecular mixology, but not necessarily the name or some of the end products. The name has been abandoned by most practitioners of the art, but the media refuses to move on. So be it, it's just a name and if it promote's better drinks / solids / foams / beads then that's fine. Hence forth the anti-bitters discussion will be classified as "taste science". So what the hell are "Anti-Bitters" anyway, and why would one want to be anti-bitter? Aren't bitter flavours all the rage and what the cool bartenders are doing?

I am addicted to caffeine. There, I said it, but I think anyone that knows me would just yawn at that statement. Nothing feels quite as good as the warm, glowing, hug of caffeine in the morning. But, some killjoys have attempted to besmirch my good friend. They say that it causes heart disease, dehydrates you, hypertension, cancer and bone loss. All those things are crap and not true. Don't believe me? We'll here are some stone cold scientific facts.

What is it about High Fructose Corn Syrup that makes it different from other sugars, like common table sugar? Obviously, the sugars come from two different plants corn and sugar cane / sugar beets. But the key factor, and the one that causes the most discussion, is that the sugars produced from corn are a products of a multi-stage enzymatic process that breaks down corn starch into simple sugars. For sugar cane, and sugar beets, the simple sugar (sucrose) is already present, so it is a matter of extracting, or refining the plants pulp to a point of relative purity. Many people deem the process to make HFCS to be “unnatural”, but on a basic chemistry level is it any worse than refined cane sugar? Does it really affect the flavour of beverages significantly?

High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is all the rage these days. Actually, its more likely to cause opinionated rage, at least on the Internet. In the summer of 2006 I was going to discuss this topic but got distracted by all the boozy goodness. Then Scott, at Scott's Rum Pages, brought up the point about HFCS in the Rum and Coke post. This reminded me that I was going to write something about this to clear up some misinformation. For cocktail creators, the key things is flavour and does HFCS mess with that. For the imbibers, I’ll look at the perceived health issues that pop up every now and then. Hopefully I can help demystify some of this.

Recently the news headlines have been reporting on some research that fruity cocktails may be healthy for you. This isn't the first study indicating health benefits from drinking alcohol in all its forms. The wine industry has been riding high on a wave of positive research and the beer industry is basking in some glowing research. But, the world of cocktails hasn't had much luck, until recently. The image associated with hard alcohol is still not very positive, but there may be hope on the horizon. Remember for anything alcohol related you should live by this statement; Drink Better, Not More.

For the past few days I’ve been working on a vodka study that I’m looking to publish in the next month or so. This vodka study is similar to the study involving malt and blended scotch identification, with a few modifications and additional analysis. First, the tasting involved 13 people, tasting six different vodkas, three times. There were a number of different vodkas based on price and starting material. The participants answered three questions; was the vodka standard or premium, was it potato, rye or wheat based, and on a hedonic scale of 1 to 10 how much they enjoyed a particular sample (1 being poor, 10 being great). The second step will be running the six vodkas through a gas chromatograph / mass spectrometer (GC/MS) to identify the congeners in the vodka.

This is the second part of this write up on a persons ability to distinguish one spirit from another. In the first research paper it was concluded that an inexperienced whisky drinker could not distinguish between a single malt or blended scotch. Also, experienced whisky drinkers have a difficult time distinguishing the two types of scotch in a blind test. The experiment design led to some results being skewed because the experienced drinkers indicated “blend” significantly more than “malt”, making the results look like they could identify a blend, but after statistical analysis, it was shown that even experienced drinkers were just guessing. In a follow up experiment conducted by Dr. Campbell at McMaster University, they attempted to assess whether a person could differentiate whisky from cognac.

This is the first article, in a series, that will be intermingled with the other posts over the next few months. Basically, I've been looking at some scientific research on alcohol, beer, wine and bitterness published over the past few decades. Basically, these are studies that are conducted in a scientific fashion and have been published in peer review journals. The two research papers that I'll be discussing, in this two part writeup, both focus on a persons ability to distinguish one spirit from another based on the sense of smell and taste. The three spirits used in the two studies are single malt whisky, blended whisky and cognac. Because each one of these products tends to have a loyal following of people who may have some "snobbish" leanings, it makes for interesting research. These two papers were published in the December (Christmas) editions of the British Medical Journal in 1983 and 1994, so they are a little less rigorous then most studies, but the results are still valid.

Recently I received an email question from Bryan, a regular reader of The Art of Drink. In his email he had some questions about the process for making rum and requested some information, if possible. Well, I’m always willing to answer questions, really, just email me. In this case the answer is appropriate for an article so I did a little bit of research and this is the result. This article is the short version of the process for creating distilled spirits. The key point in the distillation of any spirit is to collect the fraction that contains the ethanol and the flavour components, while avoiding the collection of the methanol and other not so tasty molecules.