Making a tasty cocktail requires a good nose for the details

Mention aroma in the context of wine, and everyone gets it. But cocktails? Aroma is as essential to a well-crafted drink as it is to your favorite Pinot, but it’s not something we think much about.

Sure, we like the whiff of citrus a lemon twist gives a hot toddy, or a grating of nutmeg over our eggnog. But aroma is about more than your nose. It’s the many hundreds of chemical reactions and sensations throughout your nasal cavity, mouth and brain that together create the larger part of what we usually consider flavor.

“Smell is 95 percent of taste,” George Dodd, aroma scientist, biochemist and master perfumer, explained during a session about gin’s aroma during the 2012 Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans.

And knowing that is the key to combining cocktail ingredients in a way that yields balanced, innovative and delicious drinks. Just ask Chris Conatser, who topped this year’s Paris of the Plains Bartending Competition in August. The win came just as Conatser was winding down his tenure at Justus Drugstore in Smithville.

Conatser wowed judges with a Manhattan (in)Verse that upended the traditional roles grapes and grain play in the cocktail. A classic Manhattan calls for rye whiskey, sweet vermouth and a cherry garnish. Conatser instead used brandy, his own beer-based vermouth and a cherry-candied almond.

A neat idea, to be sure, but taste alone wasn’t enough to pull it off. For that, Conatser relied on his understanding of aroma.

“If you’ve got a better idea of how those aromatics function, you have a whole lot better theoretical basis for pairing ingredients,” says Conatser, who recently moved to Corvallis, Ore., to pursue graduate degrees in biological and ecological engineering and soil science at Oregon State University. He’ll also be bartending at Terminus, one of the town’s best-known craft cocktail bars.

Combining flavors of course requires an understanding of taste — the sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami (savory) characteristics that our tongues detect. Flavor is also affected by a food or drink’s texture and sensation caused by chemical reactions, like the feel of bubbles or the burning of a chili pepper.

Most important, though, is aroma. Each distinctive aroma is a composite of many different volatile compounds. Vegetables, herbs and spices might have a dozen or so of these molecules, while fruits may have several hundred, according to “Harold McGee’s on Food and Cooking” (Scribner, 2004).

They fall into families — esters produce fruity aromas, terpenes range from flowery to herbaceous, and phenols are spicy and pungent. They’re all detected through retronasal olfaction, which happens when aroma molecules drift up into your nose from the back of your mouth, Conatser explained during one of this year’s PoPFest seminars.
So, when you think you taste something, you may actually smell it. Don’t believe it? Then pinch your nose and take a sip of sweet vermouth. You’ll taste sweet, sour and a little umami, but nothing else, Conatser says. Then let go of your nose, and notice the flood of aromatics.

“Each of those smells is complex,” he says. “There are dozens of chemicals in each one.”

Putting words to those smells can be challenging, though. Dodd teaches classes and sells aroma kits for gin, whiskey and wine ( aroma-academy.co.uk) to help enthusiasts develop an aroma vocabulary.

Conatser pores through perfumers’ catalogs and books like “Neurogastronomy” (Columbia University Press, 2011) and “The Secret of Scent” (Harper Perennial, 2007). His advice for the rest of us?

“Smell everything,” says Conatser, who also won what was then called the Greater Kansas City Bartending Competition in 2008, placed second in 2010 and third in 2009.
A piney Christmas tree, firewood, chocolate, oranges and pomegranates, cinnamon and cloves — smell it all, and then deconstruct the aromas, author McGee recommends.
Do the tree’s branches smell different from the wood? Is it milk or dark chocolate? How does the aroma of whole fruit change after cutting it? How does heat change the spices? And what does each scent remind you of?

The exercise helps you identify similar aromas and flavors that will combine well, or pick contrasting ones to give drinks balance, Conatser says. It can also help you break down familiar flavors, only to rebuild them in creative ways.

That’s what Conatser did with his Manhattan (in)Verse. He started with brandy, a grape-based spirit that handily stood in for whiskey. Even the bitters weren’t too challenging; he only had to “modernize” Jerry Thomas’ Own Decanter Bitters with a bit of grape blossom and cedar.

For the beer vermouth, Conatser blended several Boulevard beers, brought them up to proof with Maker’s Mark bourbon, added a spiced apple cider reduction and sweetened it with barley malt syrup and honey. Then he stayed up until 3 a.m. before the competition, adding various herbal and spice tinctures to get the right balance before finally tweaking it with a lemon juice reduction.

To make the candied almond garnish, he used Luxardo Maraschino liqueur, a clove tincture and other ingredients to re-create the cherry flavor. Conatser served some 300 samples of his winning cocktail during the competition. Although no one walked away with their nose in the glass, aroma was an essential part of the experience.

“It was definitely there in the composition, in how I created the drink,” Conatser says.