Some times, I so want a book (or a spirit) to be one thing that I can’t help but feel disappointed when it is something else, no matter how good it is at being what it really is.
Artisanal Cocktails by Scott Beattie
This is how I feel about Scott Beattie’s Artisanal Cocktails: Drinks Inspired by the Seasons from the Bar at Cyrus
That’s not what it is. It’s a beautiful, coffee-table quality cocktail recipe book. It’s a showcase of Beattie’s ability to fashion beautiful and delicious drinks from local ingredients. Unfortunately, it elides the journey he took to get to each drink.
Scott Beattie is bar manager at Cyrus Restaurant. As he states in his introduction, Cyrus is compared with Thomas Keller’s French Laundry. He felt challenged to create a drink menu that rose to that standard. He had the backing of the management to use local, fresh ingredients and high quality spirits, as long as he stayed on budget.
Artisanal Cocktails documents many of the results of that journey. Organized by season, he lists several of his greatest hits on the Cyrus cocktail menu.
Drinks such as the Lotus Potion, which includes Hangar One mandarin orange vodka, freshly squeeze orange juice and Meyer lemon juice, Chinese five-spice syrup, and is then garnished with orange foam, a lotus root chip, and rosemary blossoms. Even if what you are served on site is half as beautiful as the photograph, it will be a feast for the eyes, and the descriptions makes it sound delicious.
And there’s the rub. Beattie’s focus on local, fresh ingredients make me despair that I can ever recreate this cocktail at home. Yes, he includes the recipes for the lotus root chips and orange foam. But they are involved processes, including the suggestion of using a dehydrator for the lotus chips. Each molecular mixology ingredient seems to take hours. The foam recipes to provide enough for 20 or so drinks, but that’s a lot of investment to try out a recipe that I may not like.
And in most cases, I would be having to use replacements and less fresh ingredients. I live in the Pacific Northwest, where citrus doesn’t exactly thrive. Sure, I’ll be using California citrus, but mine will be shipped in on trucks, while Beattie can buy his from the grower or pick from tress near the restaurant.
Most of the recipes call for specific Bay Area liquors that I can’t get through my state’s control board stores without special orders. And it’s hard to ignore the sense that these are highly honed recipes, designed to work with the specific liquors when named, to the determent of any substitution.
There’s a lot to like about this book. In addition to the cocktails, it is full of excellent techniques for making syrups, foams, and even pickling liquid.
Yet I sorely miss the section I wish was there. Beattie refers in his introduction to the amount of time he spent in experimentation, both when he first started trying to create great cocktails in general, and then for Cyrus specifically.
I wish he’d detail that experience, and what he learned. It’s one thing to see the final product. But I’d like to hear what he learned from the failures. I’d like to see his ideas on why the final drinks work, and what didn’t work in experiments to get there. That’s the sort of information I need to take these recipes and modify them to my needs, to use them for inspiration for my own creations.
I feel the absence of this missing information the most when I come across several standard cocktail recipes that were included. Beattie’s take on the Margarita, Cuba Libre, and Gin and Tonic really doesn’t contribute to my understanding of these drinks or his techniques. They seem to be there to pad out the page count to something more convenient for the printing process. So why not, instead, include expository about the drinks he did invent?
I know I will refer to this book, and try several of the techniques. I bet I will learn from this book, and make better drinks as a result. I may even learn a thing or two that will improve my own processes for inventing new drinks and using local ingredients.
And yet I can’t shake the disappointment that I will probably have to learn through making many of the same mistakes Beattie made himself. While there’s a lot to be said for learning from experience, there’s more to be said for a teacher who lets you learn from his.
This post is cross-posted on the Mixoloseum blog
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow…GREAT review Stevi. I felt much the same way about Beattie’s book. Obviously I don’t have the same state control board issues, but at the same time, so many of these recipes call for such fine tuning of the drinks that isn’t really expounded on in any way to help you get a better feel for them.
Kudos on a terrific write-up.
Nice take, Stevi. I agree with you on pretty much everything you mentioned. The book itself is wonderfully put-together, but I realized as I paged through it I’d be able to reproduce almost none of the recipes. I love the idea of pushing the envelope when it comes to unorthodox ingredients, but trying to find some of that stuff here in PA would be an exercise in futility.
Still, it’s great to browse and use as a springboard for some of your own ideas.