One might balk at the suggestion that the Gin & Tonic is the most important drink in modern cocktail history. After all, the G&T is so often relegated to a call drink, making it little more than an afterthought for many bars. Plus, the two-ingredient drink is hardly modern. But the techniques that Dave Arnold developed on his quest to perfect the simple Gin & Tonic into its bubbly, crystalline ideal have gone on to permeate just about every corner of the contemporary cocktail landscape.
In his book, Liquid Intelligence, Arnold describes his childhood memories of emulating his father’s Gin & Tonics with his own glass of tonic and ice. But in his gin-loving adulthood, Arnold, founder of New York’s Museum of Food and Drink and the pioneering cocktail bars Booker and Dax and Existing Conditions, found the mixture utterly disappointing. “Imagine if you grew up drinking tonic water and then you like gin, but somehow the combination is never right,” he says. “It’s never as bubbly. It was never the way I wanted it.”
For most people, perfecting the two-ingredient recipe would constitute an exercise in bottle selection. But where others saw a bottle of tonic, a squeeze of lime and a soda gun, Arnold saw quinine, acids and CO2. “The goal I always had was, how can I decouple variables so I can choose the combination of variables I want for a given situation,” he explains of his approach to breaking down the drink into its fundamental building blocks.
Arnold’s chief complaint with the common Gin & Tonic is its weak fizz, so the first variable decoupled was carbonation. Knowing that no tonic on the market met his standards, he decided to force-carbonate the entire beverage. “I knew I had to master carbonation so that I could separate the volume of tonic from the quantity of bubbles in the cocktail,” Arnold says.
Standing in the way of optimal carbonation, however, was lime juice. Even well-strained citrus contains thousands of nucleation points, which act as bubbly escape routes for precious CO2. To carbonate lime juice, he’d need to extract that pesky organic matter. “I tried distilling lime, then adding the sugar and acids back to the distillate to create lime,” says Arnold, explaining that the acids that make lime pop do not survive the trip through the still. Ultimately, the process was too time-consuming (but it led him to figure out acid-adjusting, the practice of adding citric, malic or other acids to mimic the pH of lemon or lime, which has become a standard technique in cocktail programs across the world).
With distillation inviable, Arnold studied culinary clarification methods in search of a carbonation-friendly lime juice. After many experiments with gelatin and agar-agar—and developing a faster agar clarification along the way—he found a solution in the centrifuge. By treating lime juice with Pectinex Ultra SP-L and wine fining agents, then spinning it at a few thousand times gravity, Arnold could quickly produce clear, CO2-holding citrus. (This led him to create the Spinzall, a centrifuge designed specifically for food and drink applications.)
Perfecting the tonic portion of the drink proved less arduous, but brought along a new set of variables. Arnold had no intention of reinventing tonic; he only wanted “hyperfresh, hypercrisp, crystal-clear and impeccably clean-tasting tonic.” However, quinine sulfate, which makes tonic tonic, is hard to purchase without connections to a lab, and even USP-verified, food-grade quinine can be fatal in large quantities. Plus, it’s pricey.
Undeterred, Arnold makes his tonic syrup by blending just 0.5 grams of quinine sulfate into one liter of simple syrup. This level of dilution is completely safe, though Arnold cautions that no one should attempt this recipe without a scale accurate to 0.1 grams and a working knowledge of the safety concerns. (For those wary of the risk or the price, Arnold offers a recipe that replaces quinine sulfate with powdered cinchona bark. The resulting syrup produces a better-than-store-bought tonic, but will not meet the translucent ideal.)
The final step is much more straightforward. Arnold combines the clarified lime juice and tonic syrup with filtered water and chills it to –5 degrees Celsius (23 degrees Fahrenheit). Once the mixture is very cold, he force-carbonates the entire beverage before serving it in a champagne flute sans ice for a fiercely bubbled, lucent Gin & Tonic—the type he’d been searching for all along.
Arnold knows, however, that not every G&T drinker wants to hit the lab for a single beverage. “We’re willing to do a lot to make a particular product the way we want, but we have to realize that’s not everybody’s life,” he explains. “You want to be inclusive for people who aren’t as anal as you are.” For them, he offers The Best G&T You Can Muster If You Can’t Muster Much, as it’s titled in Liquid Intelligence.
This recipe eschews special equipment to hyperfocus on the procedure of building the drink for maximum carbonation with the ingredients on hand. In preparation, Arnold places the preferred gin and glass in the freezer and an unopened glass bottle of tonic in an ice bath. “The colder you get your drinks, the more CO2 they can hold without foaming and the less carbonation you’ll lose when you serve them,” he explains. To save even more bubbles, he advises memorizing the rise of the drink in an identical glass with five ounces of water (the total volume of the combined gin and tonic) to forgo the need to measure the tonic with a separate measuring vessel.
“The order of operations is important,” says Arnold. “You want to mix the two ingredients thoroughly without any bubble-liberating activities.” To eliminate agitation (a bubble-liberating activity) resulting from pouring gin into the tonic, the freezing gin goes into the chilled glass first. Then, with the glass held at an angle, three and a quarter ounces of tonic are delicately poured on top. After a squeeze of lime, he gently slides a large ice cube, straight from the freezer, into the glass with as little agitation as possible.
Arnold’s attention to detail and precision is not only a reflection of his particular ability to reimagine and improve upon common practices, it’s an invitation to slow down and focus on the simple pleasure of the task at hand, done well. The recipe is not complicated, he explains. “What’s involved is the instructions. The actual thing is just asking you to pay attention to what you’re doing.” And all that attention paid yields a fizzy, crisp G&T very close to the platonic form.
