‘Tis the Season for Seasonal Cocktails
Daedalus Howell
A native of San Francisco, “bar chef” Scott Beattie worked the bar at Postrio, Azie and the Martini House before being chosen to shape the cocktail program at Healdsburg’s critically lauded Cyrus Restaurant. The 33-year-old Beattie is currently touting his tome Artisanal Cocktails – Drinks Inspired by the Seasons from the Bar at Cyrus, published last summer by Ten Speed Press. FineLife editor Daedalus Howell had chat (and a drink) with Beattie in Healdsburg.
Daedalus Howell: How did you come by the notion of artisanal cocktails? Did you come by this naturally or did you just run out of things and had to go foraging in the garden in search of ingredients?
Scott Beattie: I don’t know what the root of “artisanal” is – you can buy “artisanal bread” from Safeway, but I think that for me, cocktails don’t look all that interesting for the most part. I think that if you can create something that is visually stimulating, then I think your mind already wants it to taste really good, and if you can make it taste really good, then you’ve already got a winner. I spent a lot of time sorting out unusual ingredients to make these drinks look amazing. This, of course, is all in the context of working at Cyrus Restaurant. You know, the best of the best, the best service, the best wine program, and obviously, some of the best food you’ll ever have. I think early on I realized a lot of people’s first experiences, with anything at Cyrus, like when they sat down at the table, would be a cocktail. People that I worked for never said, “what you’re doing sucks,” it was really me putting the pressure on myself to make better and better things. Things that are visually unique and amazing.
DH: And it’s worked out, as represented by the recipes in the book. What is the “natural history” of the cocktail? Clearly the cocktail has evolved from mixers and canned ingredients to this relatively new artisanal aspect. It seems that it’s a few guys like yourself who are making an active decision to upgrade.
SB: Well, you can even go farther back looking at the history of people drinking alcohol or distilled spirits, which is a fascinating subject. In fact, there’s a book called A History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage, which traces the history of beer, wine, coffee, tea, distilled spirits and Coca-Cola. It’s very interesting how relevant that is to world history.
DH: What was the first popular liquor?
SB: Probably rum, even though vodka and various forms of distilled grain go back a long way. Rum really caught on like crazy; exploration of the New World was centered around the sugar trade and one of the byproducts is molasses, and you distill molasses to make liquor. You got this free thing, this stuff that works. Gets you drunk real quick, and they were making rum all over the Caribbean and East Coast of the U.S. There were rum distilleries before there was the United States of America.
DH: When did bartenders enter the picture?
SB: The mid 1800s – Jerry Thomas might have been first real bartender. He was very much a showman, but concerned with making cocktails that tasted really good. It may have started with him and a couple of other people taking this distilled spirit, and that distilled spirit, and this wine and putting it together and making something that was tasty. By the time you get into the late 1800s there were people training to learn to do this stuff.
DH: I would assume that Prohibition eventually sullied this burgeoning talent pool.
SB: By the time Prohibition comes around, it just stops it. People just went back to drinking what worked, which was mostly cheap, mass-produced stuff coming from Canada, made by Bronfman Brothers [noted distillers who acquired Seagram Company, Ltd. in the early 1900s]. Two of the smartest people that were ever born. There was also moonshine and whatever little bit you could get from other places. For the most part, people wanted to drink and would get whatever they could get their hands on. Once Prohibition ended, the quality did not return – it took a long, long time. Except for a few Tiki bars created by soldiers returning from World War II, it’s been very recently that people have tried to bring the quality up.
DH: It seems an increased awareness of food’s potential has coalesced into a conscious movement in recent years in general – including the Slow Food movement.
SB: Well, think about how people have been eating for quite a while in this country. It’s been only the last 20 years that we’ve seen increased awareness of “gourmet food.” It was a slow process, and now you have the Food Channel and all these magazines, and people are really eating better food. And now you mention Slow Food, with people trying to connect with where their ingredients come from. It’s been less than 10 years that people have really tried to add quality and balance to everything else in the cocktail room. It can’t be the BS we have been drinking for years.
DH: In your book, I particularly liked your evaluation of tonic waters. One forgets that every element of a cocktail affects its taste. While reading your book, I made a mental note – “Get some Fever-Tree Tonic Water.”
SB: Have you ever had Fever-Tree Tonic Water?
DH: Sadly, I haven’t.
SB: It’s like night and day. With gin and tonics, everyone’s like, “use this gin, use that gin.” But then the tonic people are using is this stuff that comes out of a bar-gun that’s got high fructose corn syrup in it and it’s artificially flavored. It’s not that hard to get really good gin, but tonic water matters so much more. It’s more important than the gin.
DH: Have you found an ingredient that you have yet to incorporate into your cocktails?
SB: I really wanted to do something with jeweled dates, but I’ve never come up with anything that worked. A lot of these drinks use things that work well in food, but I think that there is a line you cross where it tastes like food. It’s like when people put bacon into their drinks—I love bacon, but I don’t know if it really belongs in a drink
DH: That’s a good point, when does a drink become a soup?
SB: I figured this out the other day. The answer lays in the five flavors your palate recognizes. I think in the realm of cocktails, most people like sweet drinks. There’s always a sweetening component to all drinks, but people are finding that sour—even bitter—adds a little excitement. And those three are already in the realm of cocktails. Salt is something that might be incorporated into something like a Bloody Mary. You need to have salt to bring out the flavors in tomatoes. But once you throw in umame [a Japanese word that describes the savory elements of meats, cheese and broth] it’s definitely food. Once you get into the fifth thing, you’ve crossed the line. That may be the evolution of the drink, and that’s where it’s headed. It started out with these things and now it’s sort of moving toward truly savory things, which is fine.
I’m experimenting with pickling liquid. [Offering a sample to Howell] This has balsamic vinegar, it has celery salts, have we crossed a line? I don’t know, but we are definitely teetering on it. FL
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