Liquid Intelligence: The Art and Science of the Perfect Cocktail, by Dave Arnold
This book is less a recipe book and more a book that happens to contain recipes chosen in order to demonstrate a point. The author is the most enormous nerd about cocktails you can possibly imagine (however much of a nerd you're thinking, he goes further) and he painstakingly explains to the reader every facet of cocktail making that can affect the flavour/appearance/mouthfeel of the drink, the science behind it, and all of his complex techniques for achieving the most desirable outcomes. I am not the kind of person who will ever be making cocktails to these exacting specifications, but reading Arnold's deep and abiding feelings that these things matter was actually a very enjoyable experience! The last section of the book was all about his feelings about g&t's, which happen to be one of my favourite cocktails, so it was kind of the perfect note to end on in terms of thinking about what matters to him versus what matters to me. An actual quote from the book: "In 2005, I realized that I would never be satisfied with a traditional G&T. It was a profound moment. [...] I felt compelled to break down the entire gin and tonic and rebuild it from first principles." I love his passion, and also, no I will NOT be making my own quinine syrup (using pure quinine extract, which is difficult to get your hands on because you can easily kill someone with it) or clarifying lime juice (lime juice is apparently particularly hard to clarify! but he put a lot of work into it and eventually came up with a many-step process involving three different chemical agents plus a centrifuge). However, I was interested to learn that apparently your standard tonic water is supposed to have a lemon-lime flavour along with the quinine bitterness, which might explain why some venues I have regrettably purchased a bad g&t from have not added any lime juice to the drink. They are WRONG (the addition of lime juice is vital to the flavour experience) but I now understand why they went wrong! They thought there was already sufficient citrus flavour! Probably my biggest actually useful takeaway from this book is that temperature significantly affects perception of flavour, so it is actually relevant what temperature your drink is. It's not in fact akin to how some people just really like their water ice cold where I prefer mine tap-cold only. The balance of flavours in a drink will be affected by how cold it is, because different flavours are more prominent at different temperatures, and the mix of ingredients has been calibrated for a specific temperature. But I wasn't reading this book for useful takeaways, so this was merely a nice bonus. I was reading it because it looked like it would be fun to read. And it succeeded in what I was looking for from it!
