Episode 280

Cocktail Futurism

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Cocktail Futurism

Episode 280

What’s shakin, cocktail fans?

Welcome to Episode 280 of The Modern Bar Cart Podcast! I’m your host, Eric Kozlik. Thanks for joining me for this audio essay episode, where I select one topic from the vast sweep of the spirits and cocktail universe and delve into it curiously and deeply on behalf of you and all our other listeners.

This time around, I’m excited to finally start easing our way into a cluster of topics that’s been nagging at the corners of my attention for quite a while now, those topics being the more future-oriented aspects of the drinks world–stuff like Artificial Intelligence, emerging beverage technologies, and the simple, yet slippery question of what bars and drink culture might look like in the future.

My hope is to make this an occasionally recurring mini-series of episodes, kind of like our “Breaking Bloody” series on the Bloody Mary that long-time listeners will recall. Ideally, I want to feature a whole spectrum of voices and perspectives, just like I did in that other series, but for right now, I’d like to do some introductory work on the subject. Essentially, I’d like to introduce you to this notion called “cocktail futurism.”

So in the spirit of kicking off this new project, I hope you’ll join me over at the bar so that you and I can whip up a preparatory drink to speed us on this journey.

Prologue

I’m not sure if you can relate to what I’m about to describe, but recently I’ve been experiencing this sensation that’s a little bit like the slow release of pressure that’s been built up for such a long time that I’ve simply gotten used to it. Like when your sinuses finally open up after a long illness, or that knot in your back finally relaxes and you can stand and breathe normally again. If there’s any baseball fans listening, it feels like I’ve been warming up in the on-deck circle for a long time–years, if we’re being honest–and now that I’ve removed the weighted donut off the barrel of the bat, it feels almost comically light, like a toy in my hands.

Now, the thing about the human body and brain is that it never takes long for a person to become accustomed to a new baseline state. But in this precious window of time when I’m still delightfully cognizant of the shift (when my unconscious brain hasn’t quite caught up to the rest of me), I’ve found myself, for the first time in a LONG time, thinking optimistically about the future.

And there’s probably some of you who are thinking right now: how can you say something like that during this tire fire of an election year? Or What future? The earth is literally burning down and climate change is killing us. Or Didn’t you hear? Fascism is on the rise worldwide!

And unfortunately, all I can say is that when a pressure comes off, you can feel it. And for me, that feeling is happening right now. And it’s making me curious, in kind of an upbeat way, about the future. So I figure: why not lean into that?

I suspect that a lot of other people and businesses in the spirits and cocktail world might also be able to relate to this feeling. I mean…it’s not easy out there. And I’m certainly not implying that we should just pretend the pandemic didn’t happen and go merrily on our little way. Obviously, things are different now in the drinks industry than they were before. The rise of No-and low-ABV cocktails, hard seltzer and RTDS, QR code cocktail menus and ordering drinks from your phone…just like a forest fire scars the landscape it consumes, we see visible evidence every day that reminds us just how transformative the last few years have been.

But in the wake of a fire, there’s also new growth. When the flames have subsided and the land has had a little time to heal and recharge, suddenly there’s an explosion of life. In this quiet, humbled pause following a disaster, we so often observe a spurt of novelty: new ideas, forms, and designs crawling out of the woodwork to fill the voids left by the catastrophic event.

As I wrote this, and now, as I’m recording it, there’s this massive, aggressively blooming dogwood tree in the neighbor’s yard across the street shamelessly flaunting its pink flowers against the blue sky outside my window. And in the face of such vibrance following the mushy cold and gray of winter here in the Mid-Atlantic, all this burgeoning has me hungry and on the lookout for novelty everywhere I turn.

From a thermodynamic perspective. Novelty is the emergent spirit of the universe. It’s what you get when you take an ordered system and sorta “mess it up a bit” – create more surface area, more possible ways for bits and particles to interact. And it’s also what you get when you take a disordered system and give it more structure: you take all the disparate, free-floating, chaotic bits and pieces and chunk them together in ways that create meaning where previously randomness prevailed.

This is how a physicist would think about the emergence of novelty, and they’d think about it as occurring subject to what the legendary astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington coined “the Arrow of Time.” This is the notion that, no matter how hard we try to find a way around it, time seems only to flow in a single direction: toward the future.

And I guess this would be an appropriate time to air a gripe that I’ve had with cocktail culture for about a decade now. Since very early on in my participation in the drinks world, I’ve been sensitive to the cyclical, revolving way that beverage trends or fads capture the imagination of the drinking public. Maybe you can relate to this. Right? It seems like every year, the cocktail community has a new darling to fawn over. One year it’s milk punch, the next year it’s spritzes, the next year it’s tiki…wait, no, tropical drinks, then spicy margaritas, then espresso martinis, and on, and on, except nothing actually changes. We just pick a different thing to focus on from the finite, but sprawling menagerie of drink formats and techniques that have been at our disposal, in many cases, for over a century.

So does this revolving attention constitute novelty? Sure, I guess. But novelty like my two year old daughter experiences it when my wife or I take one of her toys and stick it up in a closet so that we can break it out in a few weeks and she can enjoy it like it’s new again.

But I would contend that there’s a deeper, better way to think about novelty than this “cycle of recurring fashion,” which is a term used in the fashion world to explain when certain styles of jeans or hair or wedding dresses will become popular again.

I would argue that, as useful and externally valid as the Mr. Potato Head theory of “riffs on a classic” cocktail construction may be, I’m personally way more interested in the bizarre notion that a different, more interesting potato is waiting somewhere just around the corner to be discovered. And I hold in my mind the distinct possibility that it may not look like a potato head at all and that it could perhaps completely re-write the way we think about cocktails in the first place.

For lack of a better term, I call this kind of thinking “Cocktail Futurism,” which is a way of being in the drinks space that’s influenced more by quantum physics, science fiction, and magical realism than it does from Punch, and Eater, and Michelin.

In a broad sense, futurists tend to be multidisciplinary and perhaps even a bit avant-garde in their thinking. And I mean that in the literal sense: they want to place themselves in the vanguard – on the bleeding edge – of technology and culture. This is in service of imagining and perhaps even giving birth to better futures than we might otherwise achieve if we were to simply maintain our current modes of living and operating in the world–instead of just sitting, waiting for the “cycle of recurring fashion” to loop around again.

There are professional organizations for people like this, such as the “Institute for the Future” and the “Association of Professional Futurists.” There are conferences and summits where these folks all meet to discuss ideas and create working groups. And so for the remainder of this episode, I’d encourage you to imagine yourself as a “cocktail futurist” and that the topics I’m about to present to you are seminar listings for a conference you’re about to attend. These are emerging and very real topics of debate that will have very real impacts on the future of the drinks world. And perhaps, if we approach them with the right mindset, we can use them to drive true novelty in our community and create actually new forms of beverages and experiences so that twenty years from now, we don’t find ourselves saying, “Huh, looks like spicy margaritas are popular again.”

Part 1: Artificial Intelligence

One buzzword that seems to be lurking in every business headline and dominating your LinkedIn feed these days is, of course, AI (Artificial Intelligence). And I think this is a logical place to start our exploration of possible futures in the drinks world because it’s a very real technology that’s actually out there creating new opportunities and exposing new potential flaws and dangers that need to be addressed. AI is happening right now.

And personally, I’ve been using it for the past few months to generate episode-level artwork for the podcast – including the image for this episode. In addition, I’m sure that a plurality of folks listening right now have also played around with large language models (like ChatGPT or Scribe) – basically AI chatbots that can answer questions or formulate pieces of writing on your behalf.

But how do we get from internet-scraping chatbots and art generators to the kind of AI that could actually affect the way our cocktails get made?

To investigate this, we’ll come at the issue from a couple different directions:

One would be: what could it look like to train an AI program on a “cocktail dataset?” After all, the more you look into AI, the more you begin to understand that its powers and limitations as a tool are very closely tied to the amount and kind of data that are available to (quote, unquote) “train” the AI.
Another angle we’ll consider (and this will please the AI proponents in the room) is the potential for AI to uncover new and unexpected flavor pairings, combinations, or service methods that might spawn new cocktails or drink formats. There have been pre-AI rumblings of this sort of potential in modernist cuisine, but with the added computational power of Artificial Intelligence, we might be in for some truly wild and exciting discoveries.
Then, to balance things out for the skeptics in the room (and, at least for now, I think I side more with this group in principle), we’ll try to at least partially untangle the issue of whether AI could possibly have anything intelligent to say about flavor if it doesn’t have sensory organs and a biological brain capable of human-like memory or emotions. This raises questions about what it means to be conscious, to experience tastes and smells, and to internalize a seemingly random pattern of electrical inputs into a retrievable memory trace that affects the way we act in the future.

Over on our community Discord, I’ve actually been messaging back and forth with one listener who has some training in AI and large language models, so if you’re interested in learning more about what a “cocktail dataset” might look like, or if you want to actually engage in some actual hands-on work in this project, please feel free to join that community and I’ll be happy to loop you into the conversation.

Part 2: The Future of Mixology

If AI is an emerging technology that’s coloring both the present and the near-term future of the drinks world, no matter how deeply we dig into this subject, there are still going to be unanswered questions about what the medium- and long-term future of the industry will look like. For example, what will people be drinking in 100 years? 200? 500? Obviously, for the sake of argument, we’re positing that there will still BE a human race imbibing at each of those various points on the timeline. And one way to speculate about their potential preferences and habits is by asking what new drink options technology might present to a society that manages to survive that long.

Things we’ll cover in this “Future of Mixology” segment will include:

Some of the current ways that technology is being employed in the cocktail space, and what future breakthroughs these (admittedly primitive and clunky) inventions might prefigure. In the past several years, I’ve had a number of people approach me to work on these devices that are essentially K-Cup machines for cocktails, and I’ve also been pitched other drinks technologies ranging from robot bartenders to quantum coasters. And even if these inventions aren’t exactly revolutionizing the way we drink here in 2024, we can always say, “okay, but what would this technology look like if it didn’t suck?”
This will lead us naturally to the “replicator” question. And before I go too deep on this, I need to admit that I have a very specific bias toward how I think about the medium-term future, which is through the lens of the Star Trek television franchise. I wouldn’t say I’m a “trekkie,” by any stretch of the imagination, but I do deeply enjoy these shows and movies. I’ve watched many of them multiple times. And so when I say the word “replicator,” I’m talking about a device that one can walk up to and that will produce any food or drink you’d like with just a voice command. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Jean Luc Picard (played by Patrick Stewart) frequently uses the replicator to make his favorite hot beverage (Tea, Earl Grey, hot). But interestingly, throughout multiple Star Trek series, there remains a tension between food and drink that is “real” versus stuff that comes out of a replicator. This, obviously, is something worth thinking about.
Finally, we’ll consider what probably constitutes Star Trek’s most famous “update” to mixology: synthehol – literally: synthesized alcohol. Now, this perhaps isn’t the BEST possible term, since alcohol synthesis is a natural process that describes how alcohol gets produced, but I think you get what they’re driving at. Humans (in this speculative future) have applied some sort of technology to the alcohol creation process and synthesized a new formula that hacks the chemical formulation of ethanol to maintain all the good effects and reduce the negative effects virtually to zero.

Taken in aggregate, all these subjects will force us to consider how our world would look if these technologies just suddenly appeared tomorrow, and, on the other hand, what changes or (dare I say) advances would need to occur in order for the future to be populated with replicators and synthehol as portrayed by Star Trek.

Part 3: The Future of Bars and Bartenders

As a logical conclusion to our cocktail futurism series, I’d be remiss if I didn’t include some work on bars and the people who run them. After all, the importance of bars as “third places” has been an important component of human culture for millennia before the cocktail was even invented. So in some ways, questions about how the physical spaces of bars and the roles and responsibilities of bartenders will evolve in a speculative future are even more essential than questions about what will be on the menu.

Luckily for us (or, depending on your TV preferences, unfortunately for you), Star Trek once again presents us with two very well developed (and very different) looks at what bars could be like in the medium-term future.

One of these bars is the lounge at “Ten Forward.” According to the Star Trek fandom wiki, “Ten Forward was situated at the extreme forward end of the saucer section [of the Starship Enterprise] and was designed with several large windows, which offered a spectacular view of space ahead of the vessel.” This bar (and its bartender, Guinan – played by Whoopi Goldberg on Star Trek: The Next Generation) exemplify what you might imagine if I asked you to think about a bar on a starship. It’s sleek, it’s placid and serene. The atmosphere comes off as relaxed and contemplative, especially with its stunning view of the universe. But nonetheless, it serves as the venue for certain important events, like weddings, and performances, and receptions for visiting dignitaries. Guinan herself is an updated version of the “wise old bartender” archetype, frequently helping characters on the show with their problems when they sit down at her bar burdened with troubles.
Ten Forward, stands in somewhat stark contrast to a bar in another series (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine). This venue, called “Quark’s Bar, Grill, Gaming House and Holosuite Arcade,” feels more like a wild west saloon, complete with gambling, smuggling, deception, and even the insinuation of sexual commerce with alternate reality holosuites that you can “rent by the hour.” Quark, the eponymous proprietor, exerts a disproportionate influence over what takes place on the space station, and although he’s always working some slightly shady money-making angle, he normally ends up acting in the best interests of the community at-large.

So we’ve got these “dueling perspectives” of what bars could look like in a space-voyaging future. They both paint very different pictures, and the people who run them couldn’t be more different from one another.

The real questions seem to be: how far would we have to advance in order for our bars to look more like Ten Forward? And should we also hold room in the future for the Quarks of the world? Our journey through these two divergent “third spaces” will prompt us to examine subjects ranging from architecture and location, to the economics of black markets, and everything in between.

Epilogue: The Panoramic Gaze

To round out this episode, I’d like to return, in a slightly different way, to what I was saying at the beginning. Naturally, and without even trying to do this intentionally, this episode is going to air almost exactly four years from the day the world completely shut down at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. And everything I said at the outset about creative destruction and novelty, and feeling like a pressure has finally been released flies directly in the face of one undeniable fact: it’s difficult to think about the future if you’re in survival mode, if you feel like you’re fighting for your life. And this is not the sort of thing that ONLY happens during a pandemic. I’m sure there is a non-zero number of listeners right now who will hear that and think, “yeah, I do kinda feel like I’m in survival mode right now.”

And I’m sure, to many folks, thinking about cocktails in space, robot bartenders, and Star Trek mixology probably seems like a superfluous waste of time. And, they’re right. It’s certainly not urgent. But if you feel like you’re on the fence about this whole “cocktail futurism” thing, let me offer you a brief anecdote and a short exercise to see if I can, perhaps literally, change your mind.

During the pandemic, my wife and I would take long hikes in Rock Creek Park in here in Washington, DC. And mid-way through our hike, we’d always stop to take a break in a big ol’ field ringed with trees, where people would do big ol’ field activities like throw frisbees for their dogs or have kids’ birthday parties, or, like we did, just sit and enjoy the openness without the restriction of a mask on your face. And the more we took hikes like this, we began to notice how much easier and more approachable problem-solving became–so much so that we started intentionally “book-marking” certain topics or tough issues for the weekend hikes because we knew having the conversations outdoors and in a wide-open area would make it easier for us to have those conversations successfully. These were big, hard conversations, like how we’d handle raising our first child, how to establish a work-life balance as new parents, how to negotiate closing down a failing business…not easy or trivial things. In fact: all these things were sources of a great deal of stress.

But somehow, doing it where there was a horizon–where there was this great big bubble of sky above us where we could stick our heads up and rise above the chaos of the pandemic for a few minutes and just breathe in an open space–made all the problem solving seem more doable.

That was the anecdote. Now here’s the exercise.

Next time you’re able to, find an open space of your own. I know we don’t all have access to mountain vistas or ocean expanses, so just find someplace that feels open, spacious, and at least a little bit natural. Someplace, ideally, where you can see the sky and some sort of horizon. Once you’re there, take a deep breath and allow your focus to bleed out so that it incorporates your peripheral vision. Take in the whole scene, not focusing on any one thing, but on the whole, the gestalt.

This is what some experts refer to as “panoramic vision,” and it’s the type of seeing that we do when we’re not focused and zeroed in on something urgent. It’s a type of seeing that’s antithetical to being in survival mode. It’s most often accompanied by positive physiological changes like slowed respiration, decreased heart rate, and other biological indicators of relaxation. And, although we didn’t have an explanation for it at the time, it’s the type of seeing that took us out of survival mode long enough to find creative solutions that helped us get un-stuck.

You may have heard me say on the podcast at certain points, “what if we ‘soften our gaze.’” It’s a bit of a hand-wavey yoga instructor thing to say, but I do it as a way to introduce a slightly different way of seeing or a different type of openness into the conversation. This calm, curious, wide-open mindset is precisely the kind of thing you want when you’re about to talk about what the future may look like. So, cocktail futurism notwithstanding, I hope you can take this panoramic vision exercise and apply it to your own life in a way that helps you.

In closing, I’ll also mention that, as serendipitous as it may be that this episode is airing on the anniversary of a pandemic, I also happen to be recording it on the day of the Spring Equinox – a point in the year when everything is supposed to be in a supreme, cosmic sort of balance. And even though that balance won’t last long, it’s nice to know that we’re turning toward the light.

I’m your host, Eric Kozlik. Thanks for joining me for this survey course on cocktail futurism that will help pave the way for all the specific rabbit holes we’ll dive down as we continue to investigate the topic, and as always, I invite you to drink responsibly and experiment boldly.

Cheers.

Featured Cocktail: The Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster

This episode’s featured cocktail is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. I’ll get the real-life ingredients in just a second here. But I figured that at least a few of you might suspect that this is a made-up drink, so I wanted to cover that little detail first.

Introduced to popular culture by the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books by Douglas Adams, this cocktail is described by the Hitchhiker’s official fandom wiki (and yes, unfortunately I am going to have to rely on these as actual sources in this series), the drink is described as follows:

“The Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is an alcoholic beverage invented by ex-President of the Galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox, considered by the Guide to be the “Best Drink in Existence.”[1] Its effects are similar to “having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.”

Beeblebrox advised that you should “never drink more than two Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters unless you are a thirty ton mega elephant with bronchial pneumonia.”

It was also said of the drink that:

“After two of those babies, the dullest, most by-the-book Vogon will be up on the bar in stilettos, yodeling mountain shanties and swearing he’s the king of the Gray Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine”

Before we get to a recipe that some actual real-life humans have invented for this drink, there’s a couple details to note. First is that Adams has clearly appropriated this potency script from Donn The Beachcomber’s famous Zombie cocktail, which basically shared the same legend. The bartender always cut you off after two because they were so potent.

According to the book, the recipe for the drink is as follows:

Take the juice from one bottle of Ol’ Janx Spirit.
Pour into it one measure of water from the seas of Santraginus V — Oh, that Santraginean seawater! Oh, those Santraginean fish!
Allow three cubes of Arcturan Mega-gin to melt into the mixture (it must be properly iced or the benzene is lost).
Allow four litres of Fallian marsh gas to bubble through it, in memory of all those happy hikers who have died of pleasure in the Marshes of Fallia.
Over the back of a silver spoon float a measure of Qualactin Hypermint extract, redolent of all the heady odours of the dark Qualactin Zones, subtle, sweet and mystic.
Drop in the tooth of an Algolian Suntiger. Watch it dissolve, spreading the fires of the Algolian Suns deep into the heart of the drink.
Sprinkle Zamphuor.
Add an olive.
Drink… but… very carefully…

There are plenty of folks who have tried their hands at adapting this recipe to traditional, terrestrial ingredients. But I figured that I’d feature one of the oldest recipes, originating at a nightclub called “Spiders” in Hull, UK in 1981. To make their rendition of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, you’ll need:

25ml Vodka
25ml Pernod
25ml Galliano
25ml Blackcurrant
25ml Orange juice
Enough cider to top up

As a note, 25mls falls right between ¾ and 1 full ounce, so as long as you rock an equal parts measure on this, the results should translate. Build this drink in a bucket glass or a Collins glass over ice, top up with cider, stir gently to combine, and enjoy…I guess?

Now, one slight problem is that this isn’t going to taste like you’re getting your brains bashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a gold brick. It’s probably going to be overly sweet, and you may even find yourself wanting to make some substitutions. And that’s okay. I think mixology has obviously evolved quite a bit since 1981, and I’m excited to know if anyone tries their hand at modifying this recipe.

Cocktail Futurism

Prologue

Part 1: Artificial Intelligence

Part 2: The Future of Mixology

Part 3: The Future of Bars and Bartenders

Epilogue: The Panoramic Gaze

Featured Cocktail: The Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster

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