trader joe's has this orange espresso tonic that i got the other day to try, and it was a lot better than i expected. one of the things i noticed while i was drinking it was that my palette kind of got used to the coffee flavor as it went on, and more of the chocolatey notes of the coffee and orange started to come out as the coffee flavor got weaker. does anyone have any knowledge about things you can use this for in cocktails?
i would love to experiment with this more, but i am not old enough to drink where i live (although i'm ironically old enough to tend bar which is what i do for work right now), so i don't have a way of testing any ideas. i would be interested in knowing if coffee liquors have the same effect, and if there is some way to know if you "get used" to certain flavors faster than others. if anyone knows anything about the flavor science of this, please let me know or direct me to some articles that talk about similar things if you know
Not with coffee but Sips in Barcelona made a cocktail where they had disks of ice that had lemon leaves layered in between the discs and as the ice melted the flavor of the cocktail became more tart but also meshed with the other ingredients to provide a different tasing cocktail from top, middle and bottom
Just here to agree with you that the TJ’s orange espresso tonic is way better than one would expect!
This is the mark of any well-balanced food or beverage. As you drink through a serving, the initial flavors fade and secondary then tertiary notes emerge. Also other changes cause the drink to evolve as well, as coffee or tea cools, as a cocktail warms, as wine breathes, etc. The main fulcrum on which this kind of balance functions is acid. If you have the right acid level supporting the other flavors in the drink, and those other flavors are balanced wrt each other, then each different flavor will "separate" and ring clear as a bell on your palate. Too much acid and sourness starts to dominate. Too much of any one flavor and it blunts everything else instead of ringing alongside it. Too little acid and all of the different flavors "collapse in" on each other and muddle together, sort of like listening to a great recording of a symphony on a hi-fi stero vs AM radio. It's not *just* acid, but that's the main one. Salt and in some cases umami flavors can also play a similar role to some extent. If none of this is making sense, or you think it's all just a bunch of elitist hooey, here's a test you can do to convince yourself that it's real. Get yourself a dozen or so shotglasses and number each one. Mix up a slightly sweet solution of sugar water — just slightly sweet, like 1 tsp sugar to a cup of water (or maybe two cups, test it out and see). Line up the shot glasses in order and fill them up with the sweetened water. Then get yourself some vinegar, skip the first one, put 1 drop in the second one, 2 drops in the third, 3 drops in the second, etc. Now put some painter's tape over the numbers on the shot glasses and mix them around. Your task is to sip each one and put them back in order from "no acid" to "most acid." (The proportions might be off a bit here so you might have to experiment with the amount of sugar and vinegar you're using, I haven't done this in years so you might have to dial it in a bit.) Prepare it for your coworkers and friends to try too once you get the details adjusted. What you would expect is that you'll be able to put them back in order from "sweetest" (zero vinegar) to "most acidic." What you'll find instead is that there's some amount of acid that everyone agrees tastes the sweetest. Why is this? Because your tongue isn't lab equipment, it doesn't measure concentration of sugar, acid, etc, and tell your brain the amounts it detected. Instead, it figures out the neutral baseline and then detects deviation from that. So when you taste the no-acid sugar water, the perceived sweetness you are sensing is the gap between the sugar water and the neutral water baseline. When you taste slightly acidified sugar water, the "neutral baseline" you are tasting sweetness against is now a little bit tart — the gap has grown, and so you perceive it to be sweeter even though it is objectively not…it's the opposite, it's more tart overall than the no-acid version. Furthermore, the slightly amplified sweetness you do taste in the slightly acidified version will be a "cleaner," less "cloying" sweetness. If you repeat this experiment with some slight flavoring added to the sugar water, like replace the vinegar with lemon or lime juice, then you'll see the no-acid version muddles up the sugar with the citrus and they blur together, whereas the slightly acidified version will have a clear, clean sweetness to it and a distinct, separable citrus note. You'll see that this effect dies when you move into the shot glasses that have too much acid in them, instead of tasting cleanly separable flavors, everything just starts to get overwhelmed by acid.
To me the most iconic example would be a traditional old fashioned. Your first sip is very whisky-heavy. As the ice melts and you get to more of the sugar at the bottom, the whisky becomes less pronounced.