Flavor Mapping is a fun little technique I adopted when I got back behind the bar after a few years at OLO in Victoria. It tends to cut down on a little trial and error......most of the time. It also gives you the opportunity to find some fun pairings that you may not have had the experience with or not even contemplated. All this is thanks to books such as the Flavor Bible by Karen Page & Andrew Dornenberg, this has become irreplaceable behind the bar for me.

I am sure everyone that does cocktails in this day and age has some sort of methodology behind their madness. For me as Bar Manager with a somewhat eccentric chef as an owner of our small restaurant, it gives a rhyme and reason to each cocktail we have on the menu. From a chef's and my own perspective, it shows on paper what we were thinking in creating the cocktail while tasting and critiquing the final product. You would have seen an example of the flavor mapping in one of my articles, Please Sir, I Want S'More.

The basic run down I show my bartenders is to the right, it is pretty self explanatory but we do have a final rule that can make or break any cocktail, ticket time. Some of the drinks I have posted seem complex with a ton of complicated recipes etc. but when it comes time to place a cocktail on the menu, that one rule applies. We have a standard 3-5 minute ticket time rule, if it can't be made in that time we try and make it faster; if that can't be achieved, it's scraped regardless how good it is. We are in the business of service and making money, if a drink doesn't do either than it's counter productive.

You have seen how we came up with the flavor map for the Please Sir, I Want S'More but here is another example of one of our latest cocktails, the All In & Wright (recipe to follow).

We wanted to create a cocktail that replicated all the sensations of a Root Beer Float without necessarily using root beer or vanilla ice cream. Sort of an anti root beer float if you will. For us, texture was a big thing, replicating the creamy/bubbly texture of the mixture of ice cream & soda was going to be one of the challenges but after pondering this over a Nitro Cold Brew Coffee at Hey Happy Coffee, it came to us. Nitro and CO2 similar to beer gas would give the texture we need to mimic the creaminess. Here is the flavor map and the recipe will follow in a future article.

All in all, flavor mapping could be the way of the future or it could be another fad that will trickle into oblivion like the rest. For me, working with my staff and chef, it helps us figure out how to achieve the final goal before we even heat a syrup or pour a shot (except for the ones that help with the process of course).