This month’s Food & Wine brings a pretty illuminating profile of Eben Freemen, the resident cocktail genius at Tailor (and the one man who has come through the review process completely unscathed). Freeman talks about his current creations, such as smoked Coke and brown butter rum, not to mention some of his more outré plans, such as alcoholic breath strips and a Coppertone-flavored cocktail (“That would be the ultimate summer drink.”)
But the most interesting thing in the piece, for our money, was the drink wizard’s new technique of “hard shaking,” a practice so difficult that only its inventor, Kazuo Ueda of Japan, and Stanislav Vadrna of Czechoslovakia have successfully mastered it. Freeman, we are told, “cups his hands around the sides and holds it in front of his chest, his elbows out. He starts by slowly agitating the shaker while bringing it up and down in front of his body, then accelerates; the shaker sounds like a train gaining speed. When he reaches full momentum, the red-faced Freeman looks like he’s performing some kind of ritual dance.” Whether it works, just the fact that Freeman knows about something like that makes us want to go back to Tailor for drinks. Just not Coppertone drinks.
Secrets of a Cocktail Master [Food & Wine]