BY STU BALE
Perfume is fucking fascinating – I really think that once I learned more about perfume, I definitely started thinking differently about how I put drinks together.
At Colebrooke Row, Tony was known for being into fragrance so that was probably my introduction into both using perfumes as inspiration, and some of the perfumery techniques applied to drinks. One of the drinks on the menu was Lipstick Rose – a translation of a fragrance created by Ralf Schweiger, flavoured with raspberry, rose and violet. Every drink was served in a glass stained with a beeswax based scented lipstick we made – it looked cool but was a right pain in the dick to clean… We also had a cocktail called Blush, still one of my favourite champagne cocktails, made with rhubarb, rose and pink grapefruit – it was inspired by the Hermes fragrance house.
Probably around that time, in like 2009, I discovered this mad website called BaseNotes – an unbelievable resource for anyone making drinks. In fact, I would say that it totally changed how I put drinks together. That triangle, with top, mid and base notes all separated out, really helps me to arrange the flavours and aromas in a way that makes sense, and allows me to troubleshoot a drink in progress if it isn’t quite hitting the mark. Even if you break down something as simple as an old fashioned – Angostura bitters are your base note, bourbon is the heart note, and orange zest is the top note. Without one of these, the drink falls apart.
In 2011/12, I really started getting into perfume. I was working at Strange Hill and we had just been tasked with the opening of Bulgari Hotel in Knightsbridge. The client wanted the drinks menu to be reflective of the Bulgari Brand Perfumes -this was an incredibly exciting, yet daunting experience. As is often the case with these kinds of things, for me anyways, I found myself going deeper and deeper down this wild rabbit hole of flavours and techniques. I read a book called Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, by Patrick Suskind which is a fucking trip… Based in Grasse, it tells the story of a guy who goes on a bit of a killing spree – he embalms and enfleurages the bodies of his virgin victims to create perfume, and as far as I can remember the whole thing ends in a fairly graphic orgy. The film is a bit weird, but the book is joyfully dark and a bit silly.
Anyways, I took myself to Grasse for a few days of research. It’s a small village in the south of France and it’s known for being kind of a home of the perfume industry. A lot of the big fragrance houses still have their headquarters there – they have museums and tours where you can see all kinds of old perfumery processing equipment. It is one of those rare places, where as you walk down the street you really can get a sense of what it was like a couple hundred years back. You can pop your head into old, abandoned doorways and the smell, whether lavender, orange blossom or jasmine, is really ingrained into the walls and linger years later. Every August, they have a Jasmine Festival and much to my regret, I’ve not yet made it down for that. They have a fire engine filled with jasmine water going up and down the main street spraying everything in its path and a whole parade thing where everyone dresses up as flowers – looks mental. I highly recommend going to Grasse, and if you make it to the Jasmine Festival before me, I will be extremely jealous.
Interestingly, it was the jasmine industry in particular that influenced the creation of one of the most common ‘modern’ bartending techniques – fat washing. What is known in the perfume industry as enfleurage was designed to help capture super delicate aromas that weren’t necessarily soluble in alcohol straight away – like jasmine for example. Jasmine is particularly awkward and peculiar, as the aroma only really comes out at night and it also has a short season – typically about a month in the south of France. To get around these issues, the perfumers pioneered a technique where each night, they would take a portion of their crop and lay out the flowers in beef tallow to let the aroma soak into the fat. The following night, they would replace the flowers with fresh ones and let their aroma soak into the fat as well. The process was repeated until the full crop was infused, and by the end of the season the tallow would be jammed full of wonderful fresh jasmine aroma. The aromatic fat was then dissolved in alcohol, and after the fat was then removed you were left with a supremely scented jasmine absolute. It’s fucking really cool when we see how bartenders have taken this ancient practice and properly ran with it. These days we see all manner of fat washes being used as a staple of any respecting cocktail menu.
Back to the Bulgari project, I threw myself into that menu with a new found enthusiasm. One of my all time favourite drinks I made for it was the Au The Vert, based on the perfume of the same name. The cocktail was a mix of gin, citrus, oakmoss syrup, and jasmine tea. Fast forward to when Davide Segat and myself were working together on a new project – the opening of The Edition Hotel – we liked the Au The Vert so much that we decided to recycle it and it became one of the mainstays in the infamous Punch Room.
Another highlight from the Bulgari opening project was having to fag packet maths, pre-opening, on how much bergamot sorbet we would need for a year, as one of the drinks on the menu was a bergamot sgroppino and the season was super short. We ended up ordering something like a ton of bergamot and made it all into sorbet, so that we could order it for the rest of the year.
Around the same time as the Bulgari project, we were doing some work with the guys at the Fat Duck, making the drinks for the TV Christmas special… I bonded with Jocky, a kind of crazy Scottish guy with a constant mischievous glint in his eye, over a shared love of Buckfast. At the time, he was head of R&D for Heston, having worked his way up from the pastry department. Nowadays, he’s the Head of Development of all of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants – he’s insanely talented and an absolute zoomer to boot.
Anyways, Jocky put me onto this almost kind of mythical book written by Arctander. It’s a self published book from the 1960s with an insanely in-depth breakdown of basically any perfume ingredient you could think of – it tells you how to process it, what it smells like, and gives recommended scent combinations. It is fucking ridiculous, and once I managed to track down a copy, it’s still a book that I come back to again and again. If you’d like to see the PDF copy click here. Don’t say I’m not good to ya.. Arctander is definitely not a light read, but serves as a point of reference for research, and for that it is unmatched.
If you do find yourself going off on a perfume tangent, another piece of essential reading would be ‘Nose Dive’ by Harold McGee. He’s the proper Grandaddy of food science and everything that man writes is fucking legendary, so of course this book is ridiculously in depth and wonderful.
And if you are really really off on one, maybe check out some of the research done into pheromone bombs and pheromone aroma experiments in shopping centres. I reckon after that you will decide that that’s enough internet for the day.
As you can see, perfume has been a constant in my career, so when last year Hendricks approached me to create the centrepiece scent for their Eau De Cucumber travel retail activation, I was extremely excited to dust off the old perfume books and get stuck in. The starting point for the project was a perfume called En Passant by Olivia Giacobetti – a wonderfully fresh and summer fragrance. Although it would have been too much for it to work as a garnish on a drink, I still really enjoyed it and it was a great inspiration to kick off the process. The formulation that we settled on is a blend of geranium, which sits at the base, melon and cucumber that sit in the middle, and bergamot on top. It’s bright, sunny and compliments the gin without overpowering it. I think part of the reason the Hendricks perfume has resonated so well in the airports is that it’s one of those transportative smells – it makes you think of being outside in the sun, which is exactly what you are looking for when you are in an airport!
You can read more about the Hendricks activation here.
Perfume
Lipstick Rose, Colebrooke Row
BY STU BALE
Perfume is fucking fascinating – I really think that once I learned more about perfume, I definitely started thinking differently about how I put drinks together.
At Colebrooke Row, Tony was known for being into fragrance so that was probably my introduction into both using perfumes as inspiration, and some of the perfumery techniques applied to drinks. One of the drinks on the menu was Lipstick Rose – a translation of a fragrance created by Ralf Schweiger, flavoured with raspberry, rose and violet. Every drink was served in a glass stained with a beeswax based scented lipstick we made – it looked cool but was a right pain in the dick to clean… We also had a cocktail called Blush, still one of my favourite champagne cocktails, made with rhubarb, rose and pink grapefruit – it was inspired by the Hermes fragrance house.
Probably around that time, in like 2009, I discovered this mad website called BaseNotes – an unbelievable resource for anyone making drinks. In fact, I would say that it totally changed how I put drinks together. That triangle, with top, mid and base notes all separated out, really helps me to arrange the flavours and aromas in a way that makes sense, and allows me to troubleshoot a drink in progress if it isn’t quite hitting the mark. Even if you break down something as simple as an old fashioned – Angostura bitters are your base note, bourbon is the heart note, and orange zest is the top note. Without one of these, the drink falls apart.
In 2011/12, I really started getting into perfume. I was working at Strange Hill and we had just been tasked with the opening of Bulgari Hotel in Knightsbridge. The client wanted the drinks menu to be reflective of the Bulgari Brand Perfumes -this was an incredibly exciting, yet daunting experience. As is often the case with these kinds of things, for me anyways, I found myself going deeper and deeper down this wild rabbit hole of flavours and techniques. I read a book called Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, by Patrick Suskind which is a fucking trip… Based in Grasse, it tells the story of a guy who goes on a bit of a killing spree – he embalms and enfleurages the bodies of his virgin victims to create perfume, and as far as I can remember the whole thing ends in a fairly graphic orgy. The film is a bit weird, but the book is joyfully dark and a bit silly.
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Anyways, I took myself to Grasse for a few days of research. It’s a small village in the south of France and it’s known for being kind of a home of the perfume industry. A lot of the big fragrance houses still have their headquarters there – they have museums and tours where you can see all kinds of old perfumery processing equipment. It is one of those rare places, where as you walk down the street you really can get a sense of what it was like a couple hundred years back. You can pop your head into old, abandoned doorways and the smell, whether lavender, orange blossom or jasmine, is really ingrained into the walls and linger years later. Every August, they have a Jasmine Festival and much to my regret, I’ve not yet made it down for that. They have a fire engine filled with jasmine water going up and down the main street spraying everything in its path and a whole parade thing where everyone dresses up as flowers – looks mental. I highly recommend going to Grasse, and if you make it to the Jasmine Festival before me, I will be extremely jealous.
Jasmine Festival, Grasse
Interestingly, it was the jasmine industry in particular that influenced the creation of one of the most common ‘modern’ bartending techniques – fat washing. What is known in the perfume industry as enfleurage was designed to help capture super delicate aromas that weren’t necessarily soluble in alcohol straight away – like jasmine for example. Jasmine is particularly awkward and peculiar, as the aroma only really comes out at night and it also has a short season – typically about a month in the south of France. To get around these issues, the perfumers pioneered a technique where each night, they would take a portion of their crop and lay out the flowers in beef tallow to let the aroma soak into the fat. The following night, they would replace the flowers with fresh ones and let their aroma soak into the fat as well. The process was repeated until the full crop was infused, and by the end of the season the tallow would be jammed full of wonderful fresh jasmine aroma. The aromatic fat was then dissolved in alcohol, and after the fat was then removed you were left with a supremely scented jasmine absolute. It’s fucking really cool when we see how bartenders have taken this ancient practice and properly ran with it. These days we see all manner of fat washes being used as a staple of any respecting cocktail menu.
Back to the Bulgari project, I threw myself into that menu with a new found enthusiasm. One of my all time favourite drinks I made for it was the Au The Vert, based on the perfume of the same name. The cocktail was a mix of gin, citrus, oakmoss syrup, and jasmine tea. Fast forward to when Davide Segat and myself were working together on a new project – the opening of The Edition Hotel – we liked the Au The Vert so much that we decided to recycle it and it became one of the mainstays in the infamous Punch Room.
Another highlight from the Bulgari opening project was having to fag packet maths, pre-opening, on how much bergamot sorbet we would need for a year, as one of the drinks on the menu was a bergamot sgroppino and the season was super short. We ended up ordering something like a ton of bergamot and made it all into sorbet, so that we could order it for the rest of the year.
Around the same time as the Bulgari project, we were doing some work with the guys at the Fat Duck, making the drinks for the TV Christmas special… I bonded with Jocky, a kind of crazy Scottish guy with a constant mischievous glint in his eye, over a shared love of Buckfast. At the time, he was head of R&D for Heston, having worked his way up from the pastry department. Nowadays, he’s the Head of Development of all of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants – he’s insanely talented and an absolute zoomer to boot.
Anyways, Jocky put me onto this almost kind of mythical book written by Arctander. It’s a self published book from the 1960s with an insanely in-depth breakdown of basically any perfume ingredient you could think of – it tells you how to process it, what it smells like, and gives recommended scent combinations. It is fucking ridiculous, and once I managed to track down a copy, it’s still a book that I come back to again and again. If you’d like to see the PDF copy click here. Don’t say I’m not good to ya.. Arctander is definitely not a light read, but serves as a point of reference for research, and for that it is unmatched.
If you do find yourself going off on a perfume tangent, another piece of essential reading would be ‘Nose Dive’ by Harold McGee. He’s the proper Grandaddy of food science and everything that man writes is fucking legendary, so of course this book is ridiculously in depth and wonderful.
And if you are really really off on one, maybe check out some of the research done into pheromone bombs and pheromone aroma experiments in shopping centres. I reckon after that you will decide that that’s enough internet for the day.
As you can see, perfume has been a constant in my career, so when last year Hendricks approached me to create the centrepiece scent for their Eau De Cucumber travel retail activation, I was extremely excited to dust off the old perfume books and get stuck in. The starting point for the project was a perfume called En Passant by Olivia Giacobetti – a wonderfully fresh and summer fragrance. Although it would have been too much for it to work as a garnish on a drink, I still really enjoyed it and it was a great inspiration to kick off the process. The formulation that we settled on is a blend of geranium, which sits at the base, melon and cucumber that sit in the middle, and bergamot on top. It’s bright, sunny and compliments the gin without overpowering it. I think part of the reason the Hendricks perfume has resonated so well in the airports is that it’s one of those transportative smells – it makes you think of being outside in the sun, which is exactly what you are looking for when you are in an airport!
You can read more about the Hendricks activation here.
