The Death of "Smooth"

Before we give you the assembly instructions here, let’s talk about that last ingredient – the non-alcoholic beer reduction. The first thing you have to do is source a non-alcoholic beer. Now, O’Doul’s is a pretty ubiquitous brand, but it’s not our favorite. Heineken has a good option these days, and Beck’s also has a pretty decent no-ABV beer, so if you can find them, we’d use one of those. To make the reduction, all you need to do is pour a bottle in a small saucepan and simmer for about 20 minutes, give or take, so that it loses about 30-50% of its volume due to evaporation. This darkens and focuses the flavor of the malt base and really accentuates the sweeter, darker aspects of the beer.

To make this drink, you’ll want to let that beer reduction chill down in the fridge, then combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice, shake for about 15-20 seconds, and then strain into a coupe glass and garnish with a nice sprig of fresh Rosemary.

This might be one of the best mocktails we’ve ever had in terms of complexity. The earl grey tea adds depth and tannins, the ginger lime shrub contributes lightness and brightness, the rosemary syrup bridges those two worlds with its woodsy sweetness, and the beer reduction takes all the other ingredients and wraps them in a malty hug that simulates the distiller’s beer from which our favorite spirits are made.

Preface

This essay, at its core, is an investigation about differences between generations and how the current up-and-coming generation can do a better job as stewards of the spirits and cocktail landscape. It has to do with understanding what you personally value in a drink and how you choose communicate that to other people as we all strive to all be part of the tide that raises all ships.

That said, we hope you enjoy this essay by CEO Eric Kozlik about why he thinks the word “smooth” needs to go away. Please enjoy.

Scotch & Cribbage

I was sharing a drink with my dad recently over the holidays. If you’re curious about the specifics, we were comparing Balvenie Double Wood (a Scotch finished for 9 months in Oloroso sherry casks) and Monkey Shoulder, which is a blend of Single Malt whiskies. Both really interesting.

I commented that I wasn’t keen on the heavy sherry notes on the Balvenie. Personally, I’m more interested in the flavors that come from the base grain and the fermentation than the notes of the barrels that the whisky was aged in. And my dad’s response was,

“Oh don’t get me wrong, I love Monkey Shoulder. But this Balvenie is just so SMOOTH.”

That’s it. We enjoyed our drinks. We played a few games of cribbage, which is our father-son activity where we can bullshit and catch up with one another – and then I went home. But since then, I’ve been really thinking a lot about this word “smooth.”

To me, “smooth” is uninteresting. A smooth landscape is just a flat plane with no topography or defining features. Smooth is boring. It’s the absence of a feature, somehow communicated as a good thing. Smooth is comfort derived from homogeneity, a welcome blandness that lulls you – or some part of you – to sleep.

But clearly to my dad, and to other folks like him, smooth is a good thing. To him, smoothness indicates craftsmanship – that ability to take a set of raw materials and finesse all the roughness out of them. To him, smooth is stepping into a shower or a pool that’s just the right temperature, as if the world somehow anticipated your desires and adjusted itself to meet them.

When my dad tells stories about his college days – where he first started drinking booze, he references playing endless hands of – you guessed it – cribbage while drinking Cutty Sark blended Scotch. Now, before I proceed to throw Cutty Sark under the bus here, I want to put in the disclaimer that I’m not a snob. I value all sorts of spirits at all sorts of price points. But the fact of the matter is: Cutty Sark is a lower-middle-shelf blended scotch whisky. It’s fine, but it’s nothing to write home about.

I can’t say for sure how Cutty Sark tasted in the 70s when my dad first drank it – but even taking today’s product as our frame of reference, it has a few harsh, somewhat unrefined flavor notes that come from making a low cost commodity whisky at massive scale. So when you put it in context, it makes sense why my dad might place “smooth” whisky on a pedestal. It’s a step up from humble beginnings, which means that “smoothness” must be associated with higher quality products.

Swamp Rats & Moonshine

Pop culture also seems to bear this out. Just look at that popular cartoon trope from the mid-20th century where some character takes a swig from a jug with three “X”s on it and then breathes fire or at the very least, sputters and makes some unpleasant faces. In the show notes page for this episode, I’ll put a couple video links to this type of scene, sourced from the 1977 Disney movie, The Rescuers. In the film, a couple city mice end up in the bayou, where they encounter some of the local swamp animals, including a rat with a big ol’ jug of moonshine in tow. At one point, the liquor is used to revive a dragonfly in the same manner that you’d use smelling salts or a defibrillator to jolt someone back into the world of the living.

Basically what’s implied here is, there’s two types of spirits in the world: the kind that make you breathe fire, and the kind that don’t. And I suppose, on the face of things, I can’t really disagree with that. But it does seems just a bit too simple, doesn’t it?

Spirits as Commodities in the 20th Century

One way to throw a little more light on the situation might be to stick with the historical or generational take on the spirits world for just a bit longer and ask the question: why was this binary smooth vs. rough spirits stereotype so prevalent in the mid-20th century that it continues to influence our preferences and word choice decades and decades later?

I think some of it has to do with the way our culture (and other cultures around the world) recovered from two world wars and (at least here in the U.S.) Prohibition. During the 20th century, almost everything we consumed here in the United States became commodified, and when something turns into a commodity, meaning that it’s almost universally available and inexpensive enough for mass consumption, there are some definite pros and cons.

Commodities are great if you don’t have a lot of money or if you don’t have the time or resources to make or source a given item yourself. But if you’re looking for quality or a particular unique character in the product you intend to consume, commodities are terrible.

So in the second half of the 20th century what you saw in the international spirits market was the rise of brands that had enough manufacturing power to produce affordable spirits, smart enough technicians and executives to settle on formulas that tasted decent despite being made at massive scale, and marketing departments that could tell a compelling enough story to get consumers on board.

During this time, the word “smooth” came into play when you could hold a bottle in your hand that had the price tag of a cheap commodity, but the flavor profile of something a little bit better. I mean, come on, everybody likes a deal, and that, I believe, is the little dopamine rush that reinforced our cultural penchant for somewhat bland spirits that were just tasty enough to avoid being labeled commodities.

Plus, during that same time frame, people also gravitated toward spirits that were supposed to be flavorless, like vodka. And we were dumping so much sugar and juice into our cocktails that it really didn’t matter too much what the spirits tasted like. Fast forward to today, and we’re relieved that great, nuanced cocktails are back on the menu, but that pesky, reductive word, “smooth” is still hanging around, like your great aunt who still thinks she’s living in the 70s.

Accuracy, Precision, and Low Ceilings

At this point, I think we’ve delved deep enough to understand the divide between those spirits that are “smooth” vs. those that invoke fiery breath. And I think we know why my dad uses the word “smooth” as a quality indicator. Because it is, but only for some people, and only in a manner of speaking.

But the question remains: what crawled up my ass and died that I feel the need to dedicate a whole episode to my objections about this word?

Well, it’s got a little something to do with the difference between accuracy and precision. See, it’s possible to be accurate, but not precise. Like saying “the suspect is a young Caucasian male between 5 and 6 feet tall.” Perhaps this is a true statement about this suspect, but it ain’t gonna help you pick him out of a lineup. So in that respect, it’s an accurate statement, but not a precise one.

I feel that we need both accuracy AND precision in the spirits and cocktail world – certainly from the people behind the bar – and ideally, from a better educated class of consumers who have benefitted from the explosion of learning resources available over the past decade. And because I feel so strongly about this, every time I hear someone use the word “smooth” to describe a spirit or a cocktail, I either get the sense that they’re lying to me about its quality (trying to make it sound better than it is) so they can make a sale, or that they don’t know what they’re talking about because the best word they can come up with is “smooth.”

Let’s take this word out for a test drive so I can show you what I mean.

Here’s an example for you. Both silk and velvet are smooth. But they’re differently smooth. Is silk smoother, or is velvet? And if they’re differently smooth, then how come there’s not a word for the smoothness of velvet that’s different from the word for the smoothness of silk?

And if we define the word “smooth” as “not harsh” or “free from roughness,” then about the smoothest beverage I can think of is a glass of room temperature water. But it’s not like you walk up to that glass of water, take a sip, and then rave about how “smooth” it is. So what gives?

Well, for one thing, smooth is relational. My mashed potatoes could be smoother than your mashed potatoes, but it’s entirely possible that both our mashed potatoes are a far cry from the smoothness of a batch whipped with cream and butter using a commercial mixer. So in this situation, where do we draw the line between smooth and not smooth?

And here’s the biggest kicker of them all: smooth works as a descriptor only when all parties in a transaction are drawing from a shared set of memories or expectations.

Like when you travel by plane and someone asks you if you had a smooth flight, you know exactly what they mean because air travel is notorious for turbulence (literally rough air) and inconvenient delays that can be very irritating. So when they say “smooth,” you know they’re really asking you if you managed to avoid the many possible inconveniences posed by air travel.

But let’s say you were traveling with a friend on a completely different continent, and he had been there before but you hadn’t. You get to the airport, wait for an hour in the security line, and then you get patted down and suspiciously interrogated before finally being allowed to pass through. You might think: wow, what a hassle that was!, whereas your friend might turn to you and say, that went pretty smoothly. Normally I get strip searched!

All of this is to say that the word “smooth” has an extremely low ceiling – in fact, lower than most words I can think of – when it comes to precision. It’s almost impossible to describe exactly what you mean without throwing in some added color or relying on a shared assumption from someone else. So I feel strongly that smooth is a blunt instrument, and despite its prevalence, I don’t think it conveys any independent value or meaning in the spirits and cocktail world.

Alternatives to “Smooth”

That being said, I think we need to look into some alternatives for “smooth,” and maybe even review some of the cases where it might be somewhat semi-okay to use it from time to time (if you NEED to).

The first litmus test you should use is to ask yourself, am I trying to explain the absence of something bad, or the presence of something good in my spirit or cocktail?

If you’re trying to describe a spirit as free of flaws – in essence, trying to communicate to a friend or a patron or a customer that it’s not going to cause them to breathe the proverbial moonshine fire, then I think you can start with “smooth” because it’s a word that puts people at ease. It’s a word that’s great to use if you’re trying to make a sale to someone skeptical or very uneducated about spirits and cocktails.

For example, if you’re a rum distiller and someone walks into your tasting room who has traditionally hated rum, but you want the opportunity to change their mind on the category, maybe you lead with smooth to try and explain that your rum is different because it doesn’t contain the flaws she or he is used to tasting. You’re trying to convey an absence rather than a presence.

However, if you’re trying to describe something about the aroma, or the flavor, or the mouthfeel, or the finish of a spirit or cocktail, smooth just doesn’t cut it. All of those sensory experiences need something tactile and grounded in order to make sense. So here’s a list of descriptors that get way closer to the truth, and all of them apply to one or more aspects of a flavor experience:

You could call something soft, well-rounded, decadent, rich, palate-coating, luscious, warm, balanced, unctuous, refined, clean, mild, mellow…the list goes on.

So, if you’re looking to give someone a succinct alternative to the word smooth, just grab an appropriate word from the list I just spat out and pair it with one or two food words, and you’re golden. I can tell you with absolute certainty that most people would rather enjoy a drink that is described as “nutty and decadent” or “herbaceous and refined” rather than one that is merely “smooth.”

A Cautionary Tale

And if you’re still not on board with me here, I’ll give you one more reason why I think people in the spirits and cocktail space should be more precise with the words they use. It’s a matter of respect.

I was recently driving out of DC on New York Avenue – one of the few places in the city with billboards, and I happened to pass by a spirits advertisement from a massive distilling company that I won’t name, but I’m also not going to lie to you about what the billboard said. So if you really want to find them, you can.

The billboard had a picture of a spirits bottle on it, and in big, bold words, it read:

Triple Distilled,
Twice as Smooth.
Taste, That’s Why.

Not having any kids myself, it’s easy for me to look down on the parenting move known generally as “because I said so.” It’s not something I grew up around, and I happen to feel that knowledge and the right to question things are pretty essential to living a full, meaningful life.

So when I drove by that billboard, I felt talked down to in a really dangerous way. Not only is this massive distilling operation trying to get me to buy its products using subjective and hard-to-quantify terms like, “triple distilled” and “twice as smooth,” but they also have the gall to look me right in the face as I’m sitting there in DC traffic and say, in not so many words:

And in case you wonder why any of this matters, we’re doing it in your best interest, even though we can’t tell you exactly what that is, so don’t even bother asking, Just trust us. P.S. give us your money.

If, like me, you feel bad when somebody talks down to you. And if, like me, you prefer to drink spirits and cocktails because of their present attributes rather than the simple absence of a major flaw, then I think we need to make a concerted effort to avoid using the word smooth when we’re trying to say something meaningful about flavor.

It’s a matter of respect for the product and for the person who will purchase and then consume it, and I understand why the marketing departments at these massive spirits conglomerates think it’s a good idea to talk to the lowest common denominator, but I don’t have to agree with it. It’s inherently disrespectful to the people who keep this great industry afloat, and even worse, it reinforces one very dangerous trend that I’d like to cover as I wrap up this little audio essay.

This Is Water

In his extremely-famous commencement speech to the Kenyon College graduating class of 2005, entitled “This is Water,” writer David Foster Wallace tells the following parable:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

Foster Wallace goes on to explain that we’re all kinda walking around as slaves to our own minds. We’re the hero of our own narrative, and so, at least as far as the camera recording the movie of our life is concerned, we’re the center of the universe. He calls this the “default state” or “default setting.”

What the parable about the three fish is meant to convey is that it’s possible to, in Foster Wallace’s words:

Learn[…] how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

He goes on to caution:

The so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along on the fuel of fear and anger and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

These words were spoken 15 years ago now – before the iPhone, before the proliferation of social media and the electric polarization of American democracy.

I wanted to invoke them as I wrap up this episode because I know SO many bartenders, distillers, authors, and home enthusiasts who are trying to actively make the spirits and cocktail world a more interesting and vibrant place. And I think if any of those folks were to call me out for making too big a deal about the word smooth, I’d agree with them, but only to a certain extent. Because when I drove by that billboard that was erected in order to bleed me of resources and rob me of meaning, something in me felt violated, and correctly so.

If anything in this audio essay felt true to you upon listening, I hope you know that it’s not so much about the word “smooth” as you might expect. It has so much more to do with how you choose to think and communicate to others and the type of communities that really mindful interactions can generate.

So as I close out this episode, I’ll say this:

I hope you pick and choose your spots when using the word “smooth,” and I hope you can largely replace it with more precise terms that indicate a greater level of focus and care. I hope that when you see a bottle or an online ad, or a billboard from the so-called real world talking down to you that you can find a moment to intentionally ignore it. And I hope you can recognize what David Foster Wallace tried to alert us to almost 15 years ago:

[That] the really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

THAT is hospitality, and that is what great spirits and cocktails are all about.