I hosted on New Year’s Eve and a one of my guests is a whisky connoisseur and a close friend. It’s always good fun because we have a bit of a play around with the new alcohols we have procured that year. At one point though I made him a simple old fashioned using some Woodford Reserve, some sugar syrup and dash or two of bitters. I stirred the concoction for about 25 seconds in a cocktail shaker with ice before straining it into a glass.
“Not bad” he told me with a mischievous look in his eyes, “but it would have been better had you stirred it for much longer.”
So here’s the question: why and how does stirring for longer improve the taste? Surely the molecules have all been mixed thoroughly after only a few seconds.
“…using a special non-reactive stirring device, in a counter-clockwise motion, for exactly 37 seconds (slams drink, hands back glass). Now, let’s keep trying that again until you get it right.”
Since it’s a little early in a FQ thread for just a jokey answer, my BIL is similarly exacting about bourbon and making the perfect old fashioned, so I tried to think like he would. The only thing I can come up with is, as @Zoobi mentioned, more stirring would have caused more of the ice to melt into the drink, perhaps changing the dilution level and temperature to a just so amount.
ETA: That’s weird, it was listed as FQ in the ‘Latest Posts’ column. Must have gotten moved to CS at some point.
I was sort of hoping for a scientific reason but I guess there isn’t one if we accept that the cocktail tasting “better” is subjective. Perhaps I should have use the word different. Anyway, happy for it to stay here.
The dilution from the ice melting may be even more important than the cooling effect from it. I’ve heard from whiskey / Scotch / bourbon aficianados like my BIL, that when drinking it neat, it helps to add a few drops of pure water to ‘open up’ the flavor. I’ve wondered, why would you need to add just a few drops of water when the whiskey / Scotch / bourbon already has (x)% of water in it? Didn’t the distiller decide what the perfect proof should be for that particular batch or style of spirit? But it’s the act of dilution in the moment, apparently, that causes certain more volatile flavor molecules to be released, and thus add to the aroma and taste.
I was at a cocktail bar in Japan once, and the bartender would cool the glass down by filling it with ice and stirring the ice around, then dump that ice to make the cocktail. She had a whole ritual around it.
I’m kind of a messy one, m’self…
But I question a whisky aficionado getting picky about an Old Fashioned (a drink that my Bourbon Buds will make using their less expensive whisky, or even brandy).
Now, a good Old Fashioned is by far my favorite drink*, but that’s because I’m not a whisky snob. Though on quiet winter evenings, I’ll sip a smooth bourbon neat (yet messy… I always wear a flannel shirt to wipe up spills).
.
*Come to think of it, my favorite OF bartender stirs her magnificent concoctions less than ten seconds…
Generally speaking, bartenders/mixologists want a certain level of dilution. Not too much, but if there’s no dilution, it’s often too strong/unbalanced.
And certain drinks are meant to be consumed cold, so stirring longer makes it colder, up to a point.
Same exact thing with shaking- you want it shaken for 15 seconds or so, or it’s not going to be properly diluted or cold enough. Past that, and it doesn’t dilute or chill much more either.
Yes but, not to put too fine a point on it, what I said was that I used to wonder why adding just a few drops of water to a neat glass of whiskey would cause much of a flavor improvement. And the answer, according to what I now understand, is that it’s the act of diluting the whiskey that ‘opens it up’ by releasing flavor compounds as it dilutes, not the amount of dilution in itself.
I think it’s a combination of changing the pH, sugar concentrations, etc… through dilution.
I seriously doubt there’s anything “released”- that sounds like pseudo-scientific nonsense. Most whiskey is at least half water anyway, so a tad more isn’t going to cause any kind of chemical changes, only dilute what’s there a tad.
I mean, if you were to get 80 proof and 100 proof versions of the same whiskey, and you diluted the 100 proof by the right amount, it should be exactly the same as the 80 proof version straight out of the bottle, as they just water down the barrel-proof whiskey (52-66% abv) to those particular proofs (40% abv or 50% abv) for bottling anyway.
For cocktails, it dilutes the sugar and acidic components, changing the pH and sweetness, as well as cooling it. You can see this in recipes for bottled cocktails like Manhattans; they always have some amount of just straight water added.
Well, I would tend to agree with you, at least to the extent that I bet most so-called ‘connoisseurs’ who claim to taste an improvement when adding a bit of water to a glass of whiskey are really just imagining it, but apparently there is some real science behind it. The OP wanted science, here’s an article with some science! Particularly the section ’ Why whisky may taste differently when diluted in the glass’. There’s a lot of talk of things like ‘phenol rings’ and ‘solvation chains’ and ‘amphipathic molecules’ which I’m not sure I understand, but the bottom line seems to be “adding water = tastier…to a point”
