Mixing Cocktails Safely With This New Website
The words “cocktail safety” probably conjure up memories of scorched eyebrows from mistaken flames and nothing more, but it turns out that your fancy drink may contain more than a few potentially dangerous ingredients . Thankfully, a new website has emerged to help industry professionals and budding mixologists navigate the complex, largely unregulated waters of specialty cocktail ingredients.
Figuring out which additives can be legally mixed and which cannot be mixed in a cocktail is more difficult than finding laws. The FDA and the Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) set federal guidelines for food and alcoholic ingredients, respectively, but these are guidelines only. Retail enforcement is handled by state, county and / or city regulators. This is why you can get a CBD latte from seemingly any café in Portland or Los Angeles, but not one in Brooklyn . Bartenders, who have questions about the legality of the ingredients have at their disposal three databases that are supported at the federal level: a substance added to food (FDA), the substance recognized as safe (FDA) and substances with a limited content of the ingredients (TTB), – but they are not easy to navigate and can be confusing to look for results.
This is where the help comes CocktailSafe.org . Beverage author Camper English and his advisor Avery Glasser launched the site in December 2018 with the intention of providing a “well-researched one-stop shop for cocktail safety information.” Basically, it is a database of information on the safety issues of common – and uncommon – cocktail ingredients and technologies, as well as related US laws and regulations. (Other regions not yet covered, but will come in the future, starting in Europe.) The site is geared towards professional bartenders, but it is a great resource for anyone looking for convenient and trustworthy research assistance.
I spoke English via email to understand what people need to know before mixing or soaking cocktails with handmade ingredients. First, he says vintage recipes should be approached with caution:
“While the old 1800s cocktail books are a great source of drink recipes, their bitter and infusion recipes quite often contain ingredients that have since been banned as dietary supplements in the US due to health concerns. Ingredients such as calamus, sassafras and cinchona bark are now banned or restricted for consumption. “
Homemade tonic, for example, is usually made from raw cinchona bark rather than industrially refined quinine salts, which sounds cool but kind of wrong. For cinchona bark, it is not necessary to label the quinine concentration on the label, so if you do not have a mass spectrometer it is impossible to know how much you are using. As a result, homemade tonic often contains not only unsafe levels of quinine, but other hazardous compounds that are deliberately removed from commercial products.
English has also emphasized the importance of basic food safety, for example by double checking whether ingredients are “herbal type” such as dried herbs or essential oils, food grade. This may seem pretty obvious, but take juniper berries for example: only some varieties are actually edible , while others range from “too bitter to enjoy” to “downright toxic.” His rule of thumb? “If they don’t say directly [that they are food grade], they probably aren’t.” Finally, keep in mind that best food safety practices still apply to infusions and infusions – or, as the English put it, “Yes, alcohol can be used as a preservative and disinfectant. No, that doesn’t mean you can leave a pork chop infused with vermouth on the counter. “
If you start thinking about giving up cocktails for good, don’t. We’re not in the midst of a cocktail poisoning epidemic. “CocktailSafe is basically a professional guide, not a consumer warning list,” English reminds me. “If you want to see some really dangerous cocktails, YouTube is full of videos of people accidentally setting themselves on fire.”