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Modern, modern, modern, modern, modern.
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We're prepping for a voyage Modern. The force of an old fashioned equals whiskey Mass times bitters acceleration.
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Why don't you make that a double
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Modern Bar cart What's shakin drinks fans, welcome to episode 311 of the Modern Bar Cart podcast. I'm your host, Eric Kozlick. Thanks for joining me for part two of my data driven conversation with Dr. Kevin Peterson. He's the creator of the acclaimed Detroit cocktail bar and fragrance shop combo Castalia and Sfumato. And in the first part of this interview we dug into his latest book project, which is using years worth of survey data taken from his bar guests to try and crack the code for how to match any person with their perfect drink. So if you haven't already tuned into part one, go ahead and do that and I'll meet you right back here. But if you're already caught up, fantastic. Let's reward you with a cheeky drink. This episode's featured cocktail is Kafka Dreams. To recreate this somewhat bizarre Castalia favorite, you'll need 1 ounce of Singani, which is a Bolivian grape spirit, 1/2 ounce Gentian liqueur. Kevin used either Faccia Bruto or St. George's Brutto Americano, 1/2 ounce coffee liqueur, 1/4 ounce cherry liqueur. Like cherry hearing, 1/4 ounce chocolate liqueur and 1 milliliter cricket tincture. Combine all ingredients in a rocks glass with a large clear 2 inch cube. Stir for 10 seconds, garnish with an expressed orange twist and enjoy. According to Kevin, Singani is an unaged Bolivian brandy that, to be perfectly frank, is pretty harsh. It comes out of the still with lots of bright fruity notes, but also a notable burn completely by accident. I discovered that adding a cricket tincture to drinks containing Singani masked the harshness while leaving the fruity notes present. Rather than using the crickets to add flavor. The crickets, which have a flavor reminiscent of sunflower seeds, act as a selective flavor. Flavor eraser subtracting rather than adding. Try making this drink without the cricket tincture. Take a few sips, then add the crickets and experience how the off notes get masked. End quote. Now, Kafka Dreams might seem like kind of a bizarre cocktail to feature, but it gets a lot of play toward the end of this episode and I wanted you to have a vivid image of it in your mind and some sense of its flavor profile. That's because this drink made a very specific sort of impression on guests at Castalia, something that reveals how memory and time impact our recollection of flavors we once tasted. So definitely keep your ears open for when this libation comes back into the conversation later. Oh, and by the way, if you want to make that cricket tincture, you can pick up some dried crickets either from Amazon or at your local international food market and all you have to do is macerate some in a mason jar with some 150ish proof grain neutral spirits for a week or two, then strain everything through a coffee filter and bottle in one of those cute little eyedropper bottles for dispensing. So now that you've realized you now have to check all your fancy cocktails for bug tincture next time you visit a fancy cocktail bar, let's turn our attention back to the interview in part two of my exploration of flavor and memory with Dr. Kevin Peterson. Some of the topics we discuss what the Big Five Personality Index, also known as ocean, might be able to teach us about how guests think about factors like novelty and comfort in the cocktails they enjoy, the difference between the highest rated drink on average on most Castalia menus versus the highest rated drinks for specific individuals, how people respond when asked to describe their ideal cocktail, including the aesthetics and memories they tended to focus on and which qualities they most often left out of such a description. We also explore a somewhat half baked theory that I propose about flavor as an attractor, which is an explanatory concept taken from complex system science that deals with nonlinear dynamics. Along the way we muse on the complexities of serving Baijihau cocktails in the Midwest, what kinds of cocktail experiments Dr.
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Peterson would run if we were all
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guinea pigs in his flavor lab, the sublime transcendence of cauliflower and pomegranate, marinated lamb, and much, much more. Please head on over to sfumatofragrances.com to check out Cocktail Theory and pre order his upcoming book Data Driven Drinks. And I hope you enjoy the thrilling conclusion of my latest interview with Dr. Kevin Peterson.
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You know, you mentioned archetypes and I think really what we're zeroing in on now is this fact that we've got human archetypes that are walking through that door and then cocktail archetypes that we're sort of trying to to match them with. And that all makes me think of the Big five Personality Index. Have you ever played around with something like that? You know what I'm talking about?
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Ocean, the openness and yeah, yeah, yeah, greebleness. I forget what they all are, but yeah, you this has come up. Some people have mentioned this before and. And yeah, I think there, there is some crossover. I, I haven't collected that data, but one of the sort of non ingredient variables that I was collecting was how do you feel about novelty? You know, specifically novelty in the realm of spirits, which, you know, you basically just went on a riff few minutes ago about your appreciation of novelty and. Yeah, and some people want a new weird drink. Like, it would be very hard for them to list the ingredients and drink that they want because they want ingredients that they don't know what they are. So how can you list that? It's like, well, that's my job. I'm a bartender. I got to go out and seek out all this weird stuff and sort of have that available for you. And I remember that from my early days at Castalia, where in particular we had a baijiu drink on the menu at one point, which is Chinese spirit. A lot of people drink it, but not a lot of people in the midwestern United States. And it's quite polarizing. And one of my guests was like, oh, I want this drink. And I'm like, oh, have you had baijiu before? No, I said, do you like baijiu? They're like, I don't know. I'm like, oh, have you had it before? No, never had it before. Okay, well, yeah, it's a little polarizing. Like, what, what is appealing to you about this drink? Oh, the baijo, it's like, oh, okay, well, yeah, let's go for it then. And, you know, after that, I started to notice that this is a pattern that, you know, some people want that novelty, and that's one of the cool things about the cocktail world, is that there's just always new little realms you can push into. How many kinds of rum are there out in the world? Or just new liqueurs being introduced all the time. And on the producer side, there's always that push for novelty, and from the consumer side, there's a pull, you know, for novelty. So it keeps pushing or, you know, it keeps driving the cocktail world into new realms. And that's very awesome. But there are also those people who just want the same old fashioned every time. And it's good to know which kind of customer you're dealing with before you start grabbing whatever weird new patchouli liqueur you just got from some foreign country or something.
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Yeah. One of the things that I try to emphasize to distillers when I talk to them, and this is fresh on my mind because I was just talking to a room full of dozens and dozens of distillers is the extent to which bartenders don't know who just sat down in front of them. And I do a lot of translation between the distilling world and the world of people who produce products that are sold in bars and carried by bars, and the world of people who actually do the, do the work of customer service. And there is this total lack of appreciation for the fact that there's so many ways, different ways to slice and dice the preferences of a person who has just walked in the door. And bars are actually marvelously well optimized. And even, even just an adequate cocktail menu is marvel, ridiculously well optimized. Not so much to give them their perfect drink, but to get them to the place where they will be adequately happy with whatever is being passed to them, despite the crazy amount of variation that we've been describing this entire conversation. So, I mean, another thing too is like, if you go back to this big five personality index, I think what you were describing mostly there is like openness, right? It's like the amount to which you actually gravitate towards the, the, the novelty or new experiences. But there, but there's so many other different ways to slice and dice a person. I'm curious that if, if you might be able to get some of these folks who have filled out these surveys to go and just take a big five personality index and, and report back to you.
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Probably. I got a lot of their email addresses, so.
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Just saying, you know, you, I know, you know, I know you want more
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data to sift through, but yeah,
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I feel like we've got, I feel like we've got a decent sense of the problem that you're working with as you've been looking at all these data that you've collected. You're coming from this mechanical engineering background, which is very quantitative. You're coming from this bar ownership background, which is also very quantitative in that you're dealing with things like poor cost and seat turnover and all that, right? So as much as everyone who walks in that door is a living flesh and blood soul who you want to make deliriously happy, they're also a number on the, on the balance sheet. Have you found yourself throughout this process? And I know that you're still very much in the middle of analyzing these data, have you found yourself looking to any philosophy or any aesthetics or art as a way into these problems? I saw a social media post where you just casually dropped like the Wittgenstein tractatus So I'm curious if you've gone philosophical or aesthetic on any of these issues.
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Yeah, a lot of what, what the bartending world already has is sort of anecdotal evidence of what works. And that, that was something I wanted to address in my first book. You know, it's like, okay, well this person says 2 ounces of rum and 3 quarter lime and 1 ounce of simple syrup is the best. And somebody else says it's two half, half. And somebody else says it's two, three quarter, three quarter. And like doing the experiment is not that hard to just like do, you know, do a sweep of all the daiquiri riffs. But in whatever, more than a century of cocktail books, like, nobody did it. It took me, whatever, a couple afternoons and two or three bottles of rum and that's it. And so there are these like anecdotal ideas that we've all just kind of settled on. And you know, I guess just running a bar is sort of an experiment in, in its own way. But how do you bring more, more sort of analysis, more precision to that process? But then the other half of that is, well, there are all these other fields that study these same ideas just in a very different light. And in some ways a cocktail is about beauty and about. Well, actually here let me approach the. In a different way. For the drinks that people loved the most, it was rarely just the drink. It was usually. There was almost always some conceptual element to it where either there was something intriguing in how the drink was created, there was some intriguing ingredient. It was rare if not non existent that somebody just took a sip and said, yummy, top 10 drink of my life. Here we go. It was always pushing them. There was always some tension. Some tension was built and then released. Like. And you can make analogies to music or visual art or. Yeah, all these different art forms where you're like, okay, well that really seems like the way a multi course French dinner unfolds. And you've got complexity that's built up and then you've got this intermezzo where you've got kind of this light palette cleanser. And then you go back to the complexity or you know, crescendos and decrescendos and musical pieces and drawing analogies to that. Yeah, I actually was a philosophy major for a couple years before I switched to physics, so got a little bit of that in my background. I wouldn't say it's something that I necessarily called out real explicitly, but a lot of those thought patterns are present and you know, Maybe, maybe sort of to make it more tangible. One of the things I saw was that for one, it's very hard to get every drink right. Even when I had everybody's data, they'd answered 100 questions, I knew exactly their total flavor background, and I had all the time in the world to make them drinks. I usually could not nail. Like, like every drink that I made them was not a top 10 drink. Often, at least one of the drinks I made them was a top 10 drink. But as a supplement to that, I would ask people to rate the eight drinks, Just the normal guests coming in a normal night rate the eight drinks, and then rate the overall experience. What I saw was that even people that did not rate a lot of the drinks very highly still rated the overall experience very highly. So it's like you don't have to get every drink right. And there, there's a combination of factors. Like, some people knew that this drink was well made and it just wasn't for them. Which is kind of the, like the gin and tonic issue I was talking about early on. I know what this gin and tonic is supposed to taste like. I can tell this is a well made gin and tonic. I just don't like it. You know, for some people, it was just the amount of thought that they could tell that went into all the drinks and they're like, yeah, like, I just think this drink sucks. But you guys worked on it really hard and I have some appreciation for that, how much time and effort went into it, you know, so it's like as long as you nail at least one or two points in the experience and then just offering that breadth of flavors, it's like we're hitting all these different points, you know, and maybe the person's not a novelty seeker, but they still enjoy being pushed out of their flavor comfort zone from time to time. And even though they don't enjoy it, they're like, yeah, that was still a cool thing. I'm glad I did it, even though I didn't enjoy it in the moment. So, yeah, that was a long and winding answer to your question about aesthetics.
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Well, let me hit you with, with a quote here that I was able to pull up. This is taken from a book on poetic criticism. This is from a guy named Stanley Plumlee, who was, he was a teacher of mine. And the book is called Argument and Song. So you can see almost attention right there, almost like science and art. And it's about these kind of archetypes that we've been circling around during this conversation. So the quote is, this archetype is the machinery through which autobiography achieves something larger than the single life. And autobiography is the means by which archetype is renewed. And I love that. And I was thinking about that because what you're describing is data that doesn't seem to want to cooperate and yet actual lived experiences that are rather positive on the whole, right? So it's like, it's almost like, I don't know, I served these people these drinks, they left happy and now I like, I just can't, I can't get these data to response, possibly squeeze into the patterns that I think should represent that. And to me that's just a tension, right. And so it reminds me of this tension between archetype, which are these big buckets, like the old fashioned or like the bitter boozy fan, right? There's archetypes on both sides and then there's the individual expression. There's also individuals on each side, right? There's the individual cocktail that expresses that archetype of the bitter boozy drink, and then there's the individual person who is that very specific idiosyncratic expression of whatever archetype they are, you know, and multiple archetypes, in fact. Right. Like you can unfold multiple archetypes out of both the cocktail and the person. So really, I think the important thing and the thing that that seems to carry through here is that tension and it's, it seems less about, you know, ultimately less about maybe making the perfect drink and more about finding a way to navigate that tension in such a way that we pull something off. I don't know. What does that make you think of?
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Yeah, so one of the big findings was the highest rated drinks on average for every seasonal menu where I took data which was about, I think eight menus, nine menus. The highest rated drink on average was always sort of an archetype drink. There's like sweet and sour, clear spirit, mostly familiar ingredients. It's like if you just kind of had to pick an easy like margarita esque, gimlet, lemon drop kind of drink, that was always the one that scored the best on average, but it was almost never the one that an individual said was the favorite.
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That's fascinating. I have a personal opinion that like the margarita is the most diabolically like evil drink in that it just hits every, every base desire that humans don't realize they have, but actually have a lot. So sorry, but that's, that's so funny that that that's what the data show.
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And, and when you get into weirder drinks. So, like, one of the weirdest drinks was a. It was riffing an old fashioned, but it was a clear spirit. It was made with aquavit and then absinthe and it was spicy. So basically three very polarizing elements. And. And this was the most hated drink, you know what, or let me say the most people hated this drink of any drink, but the second most people loved that drink. So. So a lot of drinks, you know, as I'm collecting this data, a lot of times it's pretty grouped. Like, okay, this drink, a lot of people give this a four and a few people give it a five, and a few people give it a three. You know, so, like, it's pretty clustered. This drink. It was like very spread across the entire data range. And you could almost break it down and see, like, well, I like spice, but I don't like black licorice, but I do like clear spirit, you know, and like, depending on how many of those features people were into, like, you could kind of predict like where they were going to fall on that rating. But then the weird thing is for the people that loved it, and especially so I had people rate on a 1 to 5 scale or they could give it like a heart if it was a top 10 drink of their life. The people that said it was a top 10 drink, and there were a number of them, they didn't talk about the ingredients. They didn't say, I loved spice and black licorice and clear spirit forward drinks. They would say, this was unique. This is unlike anything I've ever had before. This pushed me into new realms. Or a few people were like, I don't have words to describe this. Like, it pushed them into just some, you know, ecstatic, wordless state where they couldn't even talk about what it was they were experiencing. You know, that that drink would never make it onto a menu at Applebee's. That drink would never make it. You know, and even like my bar, which was very weird and push weird things and that was like our calling card. I remember us all sitting around being like, is this too weird? You know, like, we have to like, serve this to people for the next several months for the seasonal menu. Like, can we look people in the eye and give them the strength? And. Yeah, and it turned out to be amazing for an admittedly small percentage of people. But. But one of the big takeaways is for all of the drinks. There really was no drink that everyone loved or everyone hated. Every drink had some kind of spread. And what that says is that like, no drink is inherently good or bad. It's the matching of the drink to the person, right? Whether that's through a menu, whether that's through a questionnaire process, whether that's through an algorithm, like, that's where the improvement needs to happen, is the matching and not the drink making. At least at my bar, yeah.
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No, I mean, that's why we don't have stories where every character is basically the same and just has, you know, they just have different names, right? To monotone, you need sort of a landscape, you need movement, you need diversity. Like, all these things create an interesting experience. I'm going to hit you with a hot take here, and I think this might hit on some of your physics, this might hit on some of your science. I think of flavor and especially these flavor archetypes as an attractor. Have you spent any time thinking about attractors?
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A little bit, yeah.
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And to specify what I mean by that for listeners, basically, an attractor is. Is a mathematical or physical theory, all right?
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It's a.
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It's a concept where you can think of almost like a black hole as a type of attractor, right? As you. As you approach the black hole, this. The pull to come into the black hole is a little bit stronger, Right. You can also think of a coffee table as an attractor, right? You realize that when you have your living room feng shui in a certain way, people keep on banging their shins on the coffee table. But when you feng shui in a different way, that coffee table is no longer a shin attractor, right? So it is a very real and manipulatable thing. And it has to do with when certain bodies end up getting pulled, whether those are mathematical entities, quantities that you're measuring, you know, using math, or literal physical shins in a living room and a tractor is something where things tend to converge. So I think of flavor archetypes almost in the same way. And the reason why I've started thinking that way, Dr. Peterson, is precisely because of the issue of everybody's palate is different, right? Because it. To me, that seems to solve if instead of thinking of flavor as a thing that is like a specific activation pattern in the brain, that happens in the same way in everybody's brain. Well, we know everybody's different. So instead of thinking of it as the same type of pattern in people's brain, if we think of it as a type of convergence that we can get and that we can over time measure and that people can over time formulate a resonance to, and opinions and relationships with. Then I think the attractor status allows us to be sufficiently mathy that we can study it, but also sufficiently in touch with reality that everybody gets to be their own person. Thoughts.
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That's a lot, you know, I guess in a general sense one of my big questions has been how do you map cocktail space? How do you visualize it? Which, you know, the language of attractors. And that lends itself to some visualization too. But you know, what are, what are the axes? Is it spirit? Is it degree of bitter, is it ratio of sweet to sour? Is it novelty and complexity? Some of these things are non linear. Like rum is not two times whiskey, which is half of gin. Like, they're just distinctly different thingies. And so, you know, I think pulling it into some realm where you can apply math is great, but it's not super straightforward. You know, some elements of flavor don't really lend themselves to like quantification in any way that I've come across.
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Well, I think it actually ties back to the work that you did in cocktail theory about like defining daiquiri, right? Like you, you, you, you did a pretty good job of circumscribing daiquiri space and negroni space, right? And so in that respect, what you did is you sort of plotted an attractor where on one side of that you were either just barely in that, in the orbit of that, that thing that was, that's pulling you into the, the notion of daiquiri hood. And if you're smack dab in the middle, there's absolutely no question as to whether you're there. So I think weirdly, right, like you've got these, you've got these averages and I think, you know, in, in a space where you and I have seen and experienced these transcendent moments, we tend to maybe shove the averages to the side because we know how, how problematic and how, how sketchy that is from a mathematical standpoint. But I think actually if you're thinking about flavor attractors, I look to the places where there's the highest amount of convergence on like what people agree is an old fashioned or what people agree is vanilla or what people like, you know, you were mentioning before, like that pineapple thing of just like, oh, there's definitely no pineapple in that drink. But like, if enough people agree that there is something PI, that maybe there's not pineapple in it, but maybe it's pineappling in their brains, right? That, so, you know, it's again, very difficult to measure. I agree with you. But I think. I think I look to the places of those like average convergence to kind of. Kind of bear out some of those attractor qualities. Now, again, mapping those is above my pay grade as an MFA in poetry.
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Nice. Nice. I don't know. I had a thought. I lost it.
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That's okay. That's okay. That was a total left turn. I'll let you marinate on that. And you can. You can send me an unhappy email if it ends up wasting. Wasting your time as you. As you draft this book. Anything else that you want to share about this project that you're working on before we jump into a few lightning round questions?
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Okay, one, one interesting finding. So. So part of the idea is how do you match a drink with a person? Most of the time, you know, a menu is the tool for that process. One of the questions that I asked people was, hey, read through the menu, Tell me which drink you think you're going to like the most, which drink you think you're going to like the least. And people got those answers right less than half the time.
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Interesting.
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Which. Which is maybe more dramatic at my bar because tend to use weirder ingredients and whatever, a little more esoteric stuff. But, you know, the. The analog there is like when a guest comes in and orders one drink a la carte, that exactly what they're doing is saying, what drink do I think I'm gonna like the most? I want to order that. And turns out like more than one out of two people are not getting the drink that they would like the most. For some percentage of people, the drink they thought they were going to like the least, they wound up liking the most. So the, you know, the beauty of the tasting menu is you drink all of them whether you like them or not. But, you know, then. But then you wind up drinking things that you wouldn't have ordered because not too many people come in and order eight drinks just for alcohol quantity as much as anything. But yeah, if you've had six bad ones, you're like, you know what? I'm gonna go ahead and not have these last two on the menu because I'm pretty sure this place is not good.
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C
Well, I think that that validates certainly both the need for the project. Right? Like, the fact that less than half of people are actually getting this right means that work should be done on this. And also the method that you've used with this tasting menu seems to be borne out by this as well. So that is a very, very interesting fact. It just occurred to me that we should also probably give people a way that they can follow your progress on this project. So maybe before we jump into the lightning, how do people follow along and keep tabs on what you're working on?
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Yeah, that is a great question. My Instagram is Dr. Kevin Peterson. That is where I put my cocktail experiments and sort of progress on the project. I had a Kickstarter to publish the book that was fully funded and it is now available for pre sale on my website sfumatofragrances.com so I still sell the fragrances that I was selling when I had the bar online and that is S F u M A t o fragrances. Sfumata fragrances.com not only are the scents available for sale, but my first book and pre sales of my second book as well.
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C
Amazing. Amazing. Well, we will link to all those now a few quick lightning round questions. So speaking of the transcendence idea that you seem fond of, have you ever had a bite or a sip of something that has brought you to tears and those could be tears of pleasure or potentially tears of pain?
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Yeah. On my five year wedding anniversary my wife and I went to a tasting menu place called Albina here in Detroit. And you know, so, so very similar setup to the, to the cocktail tasting menu. We're getting all these little bites. And I guess hearkening back to your previous comments, I don't really even know what spices were on this. Like it was cauliflower, I know that much. But something about the depth and complexity of this bite. It was like I felt it in different parts of my head and body than I ever felt flavor before. And it blew my mind. You know, it was like the seventh bite out of 12 mini courses. And you know, you're just trying to keep up with like all the stuff that's coming and then this bite hits and you're just like whoa. Okay, hold on guys. Like the room is spinning. I gotta like grab the whatever countertop just to like make sure I don't fall out of this stool here for a second. And yeah, I remember exactly how it made me feel and not not only like emotion but like a physical feeling. It's like something happened like in other deeper parts of my body where flavor doesn't normally exist. And thinking, thinking back to some of these comments, like if, if somebody had just sort of given me that bite randomly as a one off thing, would have it, would it have had the same experience or was it like being with my wife and the dinner and the ceremony and the sort of like all the other bites were also good. So was it like the crescendo that the chef had built leading up to that? Probably, yeah.
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C
You got to have your suspicions, right? Like, the element of surprise kind of snuck up on you there. I have one in my back pocket and I've never told it on the podcast. I think this is a perfect time. You'll appreciate this. I was at a place in Philadelphia called Zahav, and it was actually for a wedding rehearsal dinner. And in between the time when this rehearsal dinner was booked and sketched, scheduled, and when it actually took place, they won some sort of James Beard Award. So very, very. And it was at its peak of whatever it was doing, food, food wise. And so we went there and I'd heard amazing things about their lamb, and I like me some lamb, so I was excited to try it. So we're at the table, we're doing the. The mezze. The, you know, they're. They're pumping bread and hummus into us so that we're not too expensive on the. On the other front, right? So we're having a good time eating the. Eating the pre. You know, the mezze and. And having a couple of drinks. And then I read the description of the lamb, and I'm like, it's got, like, pomegranate molasses in it. I'm like, God, like, why. Why do you have to do that to a perfectly good piece of. Of, you know, I'm sure it's perfectly fine. Why do you got to soak it in sugar and. And pink and, like, are we serious right now? And so I was like, all right. I just wrote it off. And so, like, whenever it came my way, I was involved in a conversation and, like, casually took a bite and just almost blacked out for a second because it was just the most perfect bite that had ever hit my palate. It completely subverted all my grouchy expectations of what it. What it was going to be based on the description. And it came right when I was not expecting it. And I, like, people were like, what's wrong? Like, are you choking? Are you like, did somebody just say
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people start doing the Heimlich?
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No, they're like. They're like, why are you. Is he crying? Like, what's happening right now? And I was just like, I think I might have also been the first person to taste it. And I was like, no. Like, I just. I just needed a moment to compose myself. So I. I've all. I, too, have been there. It's why I have this question on, on the lightning round, and I, I, I deeply, deeply sympathize with, with what you went through.
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Well, you know, just, just to build on that briefly, there, there was a category of comment that kept coming up which was, I don't normally like X, this drink has X and I love this drink. I don't normally like gin cocktails, but this gin cocktail is fantastic. And yeah, it's almost like it's a dangerous game to put something in there that somebody doesn't like. But when you do pull it off, you know, there are also plenty of comments saying, I don't like gin, this cocktail is gin, and I hate it. But like, when it, when it works, it's like it gives you that extra boost to be like pomegranate molasses, like, yuck. And then when I do get it right, you're like, oh, well, now we're onto something. Yeah.
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C
And I think like, does, that's, that's almost like the, that's almost sort of what breaks that attractor thinking. Right? And maybe that's the brain's desire for plasticity. Right. Because flavor attractors of any sort aren't about divergence, they're about convergence.
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Right?
- [36:42]
C
And so when you have these divergent situations, in a flavor sense or otherwise, it either messes with the data, so you're angry about it, or it unseats a lot of assumptions and things that you were previously able to just like, not consciously process. Right? This is all background stuff and be like, all right, we'll just assume all this stuff and suddenly all that's on its head. But I think there is something about the human brain that simultaneously, like it's part partial, partially, it's that novelty craving thing. But I think more generally it's just that plasticity, right. It's almost psychedelic in nature when it happens.
- [37:17]
A
Right.
- [37:17]
C
You were describing some extra sensory things going on and it's like there's this. So I think, I think maybe there's, along with the attractor talk, there might also be a role that plasticity has to play.
- [37:31]
A
Yeah, yeah, I agree.
- [37:33]
C
Cool. Next up, what are one or two of your most, your proudest menu creations from Castalia? Obviously, you know, you mentioned that you're wearing this kind of like fairly emotional and sort of tender afterglow. And so I think this would be a good, good opportunity for you to let list a couple of these things by name and maybe give us the name of the Aquavit one and pick another one.
- [37:58]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Aquavit one was called Reversing Day and Night. One of my bartenders, Erica Castle, which one of my co owners, came up with that one? She. Yeah, she always. She would almost always have like, one of the most popular drinks and one of the least popular drinks on the menu. And it's like, okay, I don't know if you're doing this on purpose, but data keeps showing that you are splitting the difference, you know. So one of. One of the most remembered cocktails and one of the most asked about cocktails was called the Kafka Dreams, and it involved a cricket tincture. And, you know, I was kind of on this kick where I was reading about bugs as food, and bugs are the future of food and this protein source. And I was like, well, can we put bugs into drinks? And, you know, this. This was like in the first year or two of Castalia was on the menu and people kept asking for it. And I would often ask people, like, do you remember what's in it? Do you remember anything about it? It was the cricket one. It was the cricket one. Couldn't remember what kind of glass, what kind of ice, what color, any ingredient in it other than the cricket, you know, and that's just kind of like the nature of the memory is like, that was such a novel element that literally everything else dropped away. And then when I would serve it to people, they'd be, oh, it tastes exactly. You know, like once they had the actual input in front of them, they could remember that it was. That that was the flavor. But, yeah, the memory only held on to, or, you know, the mind only held onto that one fraction of the memory, which was kind of the novel piece.
- [39:56]
C
It's so weird trying to do all this with the brain because we understand so little about is crazy. And I think that's. That's precisely why it's interesting to hear all these. All these little examples that you give, because it's like, yeah, we're pretty smart, but, oh, the brain. The brain is always going to win at the end of the day. That is something. All right, I'll give you your suspension of reality question here. So let's set aside all the normal constraints, laws of physics. Customer. We don't care about the. We don't care if anybody. Nobody needs to like this, right? You're not trying to please anybody. You have all the money in the world, right? You're Bezos. Right? Now you can do whatever you want. What is a cocktail experiment or a cocktail ingredient or process that you would inflict on the masses if there were literally no rules.
- [40:48]
A
Well, let's see. You know, one, one process I've been very intrigued by that we've touched on a little bit is like, how do people acquire a taste? You know, you can't quite remember if you like chartreuse or not the first sip. There are a lot of things I remember absolutely not liking. My first sip of my first sip of espresso, I remember just like choking down my first beer at some college party, my first Negroni. I was like, seriously? And this was a while ago. I paid $8 or $9 for this. That dates, dates the memory right there. But you know, I distinctly remember not enjoying it. And it's one of my favorite cocktails now. And, and I guess what I'd love to study is like, do you just have to keep subjecting somebody flavor and eventually they enjoy it? Is it the right context? You know, I guess one thing that I need to do is like take those people that said I normally don't like June cocktails, but I like this, you know, I want to follow up with them and be like, have you gone down a gin rabbit hole? Like, where are you out with gin now? Was it just a one off thing one time when you were at my bar? Or is it now like a new angle of your life that we opened up and it's, you know, it's maybe not. We don't need to suspend the laws of physics, but we need to suspend the laws of business. Because this would require me like giving people a lot of stuff they don't like. Keep coming back in, keep drinking that thing you don't like. And then when you start to like it, then we're done here.
- [42:31]
C
I feel like maybe we just get you connected with, with the good folks at Malort and, and we run the Malort study. Like what to what, what degree of Stockholm syndrome needs to. Needs to exist in order for you to start liking Malort?
- [42:48]
A
That's, that is a great suggestion.
- [42:50]
C
There we go.
- [42:52]
A
Does anybody like it or is it just like, do you like the flavor or do you just like the idea of it?
- [42:59]
C
Well, I don't know.
- [43:00]
A
Maybe it's.
- [43:00]
C
I mean we've gone even further now.
- [43:02]
B
I don't know.
- [43:03]
C
Have you ever heard of evil Malort?
- [43:05]
A
I don't know if I have. It's, it's based where you try to make it even worse. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah.
- [43:10]
C
It's precisely. It's the, the in house Malort in extra infusion. And it was. This is something I've been meaning to do an episode on. I don't think it's got. I don't think it's reached the velocity that, that it's a national trend, but there's definitely enough people playing around. Enough not people. There's certainly enough degenerates playing around with it where it's a thing that bears
- [43:32]
A
people, if you want to call them that.
- [43:34]
C
Yeah. Yeah. Well, Dr. Kevin Peterson, as always a delight to speak with you. I am very excited to be one of the lucky members of your Kickstarter supporters. So I'm very excited for this book when it does come out and I hope that you hope that you're in a position to do a tour. Maybe we can work together to do some events together here in the mid Atlantic where you can, you know, get some boots on the ground and get some people excited about the book in the process.
- [44:04]
A
Yeah, we'd love that.
- [44:06]
C
I just appreciate you being a guest. And one more time, best Instagram for
- [44:11]
A
you, Dr. Kevin Peterson, Dr. K E V I N Peter E T E R S O N All right, well,
- [44:18]
C
thank you for your quantitative and organoleptic services as always, and thanks for being my guest here on the Modern Bar Cart podcast.
- [44:30]
A
Love it. Thanks for having me.
- [44:41]
B
Hey everybody, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, there's a
- [44:45]
C
couple things you can do to help the show.
- [44:48]
B
One would be to rate and review this program anywhere you enjoy listening to podcasts, especially on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The more ratings and reviews we have, the easier it will be for other like minded flavor nerds to enjoy the content that I produce. You can also follow the modern Barkhart YouTube channel where I post video clips from the podcast and beyond. And you can join our growing Discord community which is where our listeners submit questions for upcoming guests and chat about all kinds of fun spirits and cocktail shenanigans.
- [45:23]
C
It's also where I share fun perks
- [45:26]
B
and discounts that are too exclusive to blast out on the airwaves. To join our our Community Discord server or get in touch with me for any other reason, all you need to do is drop me a line by emailing podcastodernbarkhart.com this episode may be over, but for you, the mixological fun and boozy adventures are just beginning. So remember, drink responsibly and experiment boldly. This episode was made possible with editing and sound design by Samantha Reed, cocktail Insights courtesy of Dr. Kevin Peterson and a little bit of interview magic by yours truly. This has been a Direct Fire Studios production. Copyright 2026.
- [46:23]
A
Sa.