A guide to the “platonic ideal” of a Negroni and other handy tips

The most hand-wavy one to me is the impression matching. Rosemary smells cold, and Fernet-Branca tastes cold even when it’s room temperature. If the scent has rosemary, is Fernet now a good match for that? Some of the neuroscience stuff that I’ve read has indicated that these more abstract ideas are represented by the same sort of neural-firing patterns. Initially, I was hesitant; cold and cold, it doesn’t feel as fulfilling to me. But then I did some more reading and realized there’s some science behind it and have been more intrigued by that lately.

Ars Technica: You do come up with some surprising flavor combinations, like a drink that combined blueberry and horseradish, which frankly sounds horrifying. 

Kevin Peterson: It was a hit on the menu. I would often give people a little taste of the blueberry and then a little taste of the horseradish tincture, and they’d say, “Yeah, I don’t like this.” And then I’d serve them the cocktail, and they’d be like, “Oh my gosh, it actually worked. I can’t believe it.”  Part of the beauty is you take a bunch of things that are at least not good and maybe downright terrible on their own, and then you stir them all together and somehow it’s lovely. That’s basically alchemy right there.

Ars Technica: Harmony between scent and the cocktail is one thing, but you also talk about constructive interference to get a surprising, unexpected, and yet still pleasurable result.

Kevin Peterson: The opposite is destructive interference, where there’s just too much going on. When I’m coming up with a drink, sometimes that’ll happen, where I’m adding more, but the flavor impression is going down. It’s sort of a weird non-linearity of flavor, where sometimes two plus two equals four, sometimes it equals three, sometimes it equals 17. I now have intuition about that, having been in this world for a lot of years, but I still get surprised sometimes when I put a couple things together.

Often with my end-of-the-shift drink, I’ll think, “Oh, we got this new bottle in. I’m going to try that in a Negroni variation.” Then I lose track and finish mopping, and then I sip, and I’m like, “What? Oh my gosh, I did not see this coming at all.” That little spark, or whatever combo creates that, will then often be the first step on some new cocktail development journey.