What is Reddit's opinion of Liquid Intelligence: The Art and Science of the Perfect Cocktail?

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Cocktail pairing is hard since cocktails are like dishes, they're composed flavors meant for each other. Some of the most experienced bar tenders I've had the pleasure of working with avoid cocktail pairings because it's almost impossible.

I like everything, from traditional to funky.

Buy this book, have fun

Liquid Intelligence by Dave Arnold

TL:DR -- Dave Arnold appears to have done this work on contract for PolyScience

More words... If memory serves, Nils Norén and Dave Arnold (at the time, both at the French Culinary Institute (FCI) in New York) were contracted by Philip Preston at PolyScience to help come up with some standardized info around Sous Vide. The goal had been to help PolyScience make it easier for professional kitchens to have an idea how to use circulators as another tool in their cooking toolbox.

The blog used to be great, but over time Mr. Norén left his post at the FCI and Mr. Arnold went at it on his own. He was posting a lot of primers, but seemed to post drafts, get distracted and not return to them - leaving topics incomplete.

Mr. Arnold posted an article on modifying an electric pressure cooker that made the legal team at the FCI want to distance themselves from from the blog (presumably to avoid liability if people 'tried this at home'). The site went solo and more or less just turned into Mr. Arnold's blog where he'd post something he was interested in and then answer questions every so often.

About this time there was a hacker that took over the website and it was really messed up. Some community users of the site tried to help clean it up and the final result is what you see on the site today.

Unfortunately Mr. Arnold seems to have lost interest returning to the site. He's someone who seems to think big, move fast and not return... Since the site, he's started a bar - Booker and Dax - under the Momofuku umbrella of properties. I believe they are still looking for a second site after the bar closed to make room for an expansion from Momofuku.

He released a few products - Searzall, Steak Decorator and Cocktail Cube. There was an effort or release a 'reasonably' priced centrafuse that didn't pan out and throughout he has kept up his radio spot/podcast - Cooking Issues. Along the way he's made time to be a guest lecturer for the Harvard Science and Cooking Cooking classes and he wrote a book on cocktails - Liquid Intellegence (Google Books, Amazon). He also co founded Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD).

The radio show/podcast is semi-controlled chaos as Mr. Arnold starts to address topics, but stops to take a caller to the show. This distracts him and he doesn't always get back to the topic he was on before the call - often times he carries topics over from show to show. If you are able to listen to the show enough there is loads of great info buried in the show's format.

Yes: https://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Intelligence-Science-Perfect-Cocktail/dp/0393089037

Not OP but Liquid Intelligence by Dave Arnold is one of my absolute favorite books. He really pushes the boundaries in this one. Here is him making a Daquiri, and he explains the importance of water management in frozen cocktails.

Liquid Intelligence is a good book to start with on this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Intelligence-Science-Perfect-Cocktail/dp/0393089037

if you're looking a good bar book to give you street cred:

Liquid Intelligence

A clear 1¼" cube has a tactile difference to a 2½" cube? Funny, they feel the same to me.

Read Liquid Intelligence to learn about chilling and dilution. The cocktail should be finished before our choice of ice becomes an issue. If you're relying on large format ice to chill longer than a Kold Draft, the cocktail is way overdiluted and long past the point of any quality experience. Perhaps try serving smaller cocktails? The 2½" cube has 6x the volume. It dumps a lot of water into the cocktail as it melts.

The only reason to use large format ice is presentation. It looks pretty, no doubt. But with greater than 3x the energy use and the increased cost and time investments required to maintain a craft ice program, our resources are better allocated elsewhere. The large format ice is as pretentious as mustaches and garters.

Lay Off the Artisanal Ice, You Ignorant Hipsters

I've read a bunch of different cocktail books and I've learned the most from <em>Liquid Intelligence</em>. He has a shopping list in the first chapter split into separate sections based on how much you want to get into it, it's absolutely on point. The first few dozen pages explain all the different options for each piece of equipment and why he recommends the one he does (and he's right on the money every time).

Example: Which cocktail shaker should you get? The Boston shaker, a cobbler, use one shaking tin and a pint glass, or shaking tins, and why? He goes through each one and explains why you'll spend money on each of these because they seem cool, but then end up replacing them one by one because they leak or have some other issue until you wind up with shaking tins and you're happy. For awhile, then you'll end up replacing those with heavy-bottomed shaking tins from Koriko. So just skip all that and buy the Koriko tins. This book will save you a lot of money this way, even if you're just getting the basic bar kit.

One thing that plagues us non-pros is that you'll make an excellent drink one day and be happy you finally worked it out, only to discover you can't repeat it. Non-reproducibility is the bane of our existence. If you follow his advice on measuring and how to handle ice properly, you won't have this issue. You'll be able to nail the same drink every single time. Once you do that, you'll be able to start tweaking with reproducible results.

It turns out that how you treat ice is super important, and it's invisible when you're at a bar because at a bar the ice is always tempered and always has the same amount of cling water when scooped from the well, so just by being in an environment with consistent ice, a pro can reproduce a drink with the same dilution every time. At home, on the other hand, you have to make sure you control that. This book has an entire chapter on ice and how it works in cocktails, really picking through this chapter and understanding it was a game changer. (Now if I could only get top quality citrus on the reg, I'd be home free.)

He explains in detail the how's and why's of how to make:

• built drinks
• stirred drinks
• shaken drinks
• carbonated drinks
• infusions
• clarifications

It's all the techniques you need to go from basic to as far as your skill and budget will take you. It will also help you understand how different drinks are balanced.

What this book will NOT help you do is understand the cocktail families so you can remember how to make a lot of different drinks. To do that, I recommend <em>Cocktail Codex</em>. The premise of this book is that there are six different cocktail families, and pretty much all cocktails are built from one of these: the old-fashioned, the martini, the daiquiri, the sidecar, the whisky highball, and the flip.

This book will give you a framework so as you learn a few drinks in each category, you have a mental model where you can start slotting them in. Once you have that down, you still will have a tough time remembering a bunch of cocktails, though. Was it a 1/2 oz or 3/4 of lime juice? If you're not mixing a fixed menu of drinks all the time, and you're not a pro dedicating a huge fraction of your day to it everyday, this is still not going to get you there.

So the last piece of the puzzle is <em>Shake. Stir. Sip.</em> The premise of this book is it gives you 50+ cocktails that are all equal-parts drinks, divided into 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-ingredient drinks. It's absolutely brilliant because once you're familiar with the families from Cocktail Codex, this will help you start putting some pins in each family with drinks that are dead simple to remember, which means you'll start to remember other drinks that aren't in equal parts by how they deviate from their equal-parts siblings.

If you put together a bar from Liquid Intelligence, pick a few simple drinks and perfect them so you can make it the same way every time, and then study these other two books, within a few months you are legit going to look like a mixology genius that went from 0 to 100 mph to everyone you serve.

One final note I'll add to this … don't try to cheap out on ingredients. Everyone does it at first, I thought I'd be messing up so let's just start out with cheap spirits. It's pointless, if you can't actually taste the drink you're trying to make you won't know when you've hit the mark, so don't cheap out when you build your bar. It's fine to buy something less expensive if you like it better, but don't compromise if you don't.

The other problem, I've found, is when I hit it out of the park and make a great cocktail, one satisfies. It's when I slightly miss that I end up doing three or four trying to get it right. I always felt guilty discarding a drink that didn't quite hit the mark, but after a few tough mornings I realized it's just the cost of an education, and it's far cheaper to do that than to enroll in a legit mixology program. Toss the misses and drink the perfect one.

Liquid Intelligence: The Art and Science of the Perfect Cocktail https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393089037/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_HRGGW7FMVSCXJBDM3AXV

This guy has done all the research you need

This one has helped me quite a bit.

I don't like whisky stones either because the fact of the matter is that the specific heat of stone pales in comparison to the heat of fusion of water. Or, to put it how Dave Arnold does in his fundamental law of cocktails: "There is no chilling without dilution. There is no dilution without chilling." (http://www.cookingissues.com/index.html%3Fp=4585.html)

If you like that, buy his excellent book: https://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Intelligence-Science-Perfect-Cocktail/dp/0393089037/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1523124676&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=liquid+intelligence

/r/Cocktails

Liquid Intelligence is fascinating if you're a science/chem type.

The Bar Book and similar books.

For this week’s theme, I wanted to make something more than just a simple steak prepared well. Instead, I started with a version of Steak Diane, a classic steak dish. I also wanted to make a side dish, and came across this recipe for Potatoes Romanoff from Strip House, a NYC steak house. This came out with mixed results. I have to say that I was not in love with the Diane sauce. There were a ton of flavorful ingredients and the end sauce was pretty underwhelmed. The potatoes, on the other hand, were killer. I couldn’t grate them because I haven’t found my grater yet since the move, so I did a rough chop and it worked out fine. There was perhaps a touch too much sour cream for my taste (my wife thought it was perfect) but it was extremely balanced.

For my MetaTheme, I wanted to find a classic steakhouse cocktail. Reading about it, it seems like the big commonality is that old-school cocktails are very common there, so I went with one that I haven’t tried before, a Sidecar. This gave me a chance to try out my newest cocktail book, Liquid Intelligence. This was a fascinating cocktail. The ingredients are pretty simple (Cognac, Cointreau, lemon juice and simple syrup) but the flavor of the drink changed throughout the sip. I’m not sure why this is the case, but I am definitely a big fan.