On the international cocktail circuit, Eben Freeman is a massive celebrity. He is A + list. He is Madonna. He's the future of cocktails, the future, perhaps, of alcohol in general. He's a leading light among the very modern mixology set; the handful of men who are busily reinventing notions on what it is to drink and get drunk. Freeman's thoughts, his theories, his methods and his cocktails are creating big, boozy waves in the US, and increasingly, in the UK. He's got fans and celebrity fans (The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Jean-Georges Vongerichten), he's got knockers and he's been profiled in Vanity Fair on two separate occasions. When Freeman flew to London to demonstrate his Mojito of the Future last week, he performed to a sell-out crowd of breathless and adoring bar staff.
But what, exactly, is it that he does?
'People want to classify it as molecular mixology,' Freeman says. His voice is a monotone, New York accented; he calls his drinks 'beverages' in a very strict manner, and effortlessly drops expressions like 'calcite baths' and the 'obvious issues with using chlorophyll'.
'But I don't think that's accurate. Molecular gastronomy really involves science, in the approach to the work, and that is not what I do at all. I prefer to refer to it as progressive cocktailing. I am not a scientist; I am a cocktail geek.'
He is standing in the kitchen of Tailor, the New York restaurant that he runs with long-term collaborator Sam Mason, a pastry chef of great renown, whose work in the field of progressive cake making complements and inspires Freeman's own endeavours. 'Oh,' says Freeman. 'Sam is quite the rock star.' Freeman is dripping precisely calibrated pipette-loads of a gelatinous mint purée into a mini-vat of liquid nitrogen as he speaks; the gas is frothing furiously and theatrically in response. Liquid nitrogen escapes onto the chrome work surface every so often, where it beads up and scoots giddily towards the table edges.
The liquid-nitrogen-treated mint balls are a vital ingredient in Freeman's Mojito of the Future. Early this year, Bacardi commissioned him to redesign the classic cocktail as a promotional exercise. It took Freeman a little over a week of concentrated playing and thinking, planning and experimenting, to produce his dream 'beverage'. He hands me the finished product; it fits into a large shot glass and exudes a sleek and minimal kind of freakiness - very unlike a classic mojito, which is messy, overloaded with escaping bunches of fresh mint and unrefined sugar and crushed ice and other things that tend to get stuck up your nose. Freeman's mojito is also bizarrely gelatinous. He combined the Bacardi, the sugar and the carbonated water with Xanthan gum, so that the base liquid of the drink is viscous, and the bubbles from the carbon are suspended within it, somewhat spookily. Into that mixture, Freeman introduces the mint beads, along with an equal number of lime beads; they, too, dangle eerily in the cocktail. It looks space-agey, the kind of thing you'd drink at the Torchwood office party perhaps.
'The idea,' says Freeman, 'is that you only smell and taste the rum at first, and then you crush the mint and lime balls against the roof of your mouth, with your tongue, and the flavour will explode! I'm not happy with the lime balls though,' he says, 'they're denser than the mint, so they tend to fall deeper into the beverage, which is not ideal.' He frowns at the drink intensely. 'You must excuse my obsessive compulsiveness,' he says. And then, with some glee: 'Would you like to come down into the dungeon and see my carbonating room? I can carbonate just about anything, you know! I can make flavoured water out of anything in the world, really.'
Eben Freeman has been working with his beverages for a little over 15 years. His original passion was for wine; he worked in a wine shop while trying to support himself through an acting course at New York University, 'and I ended up befriending someone who was running a restaurant without a liquor licence. He asked me to design a wine list, and we would run the bottles down the road to his restaurant, to his customers. He closed the restaurant eventually, due to the fact that he couldn't make money without a liquor licence, of course! But I stayed in the restaurant business.' Freeman ditched acting and began managing a small West Indian restaurant; one evening, his head barman didn't turn up for a shift, and Freeman stepped behind the bar for the first time.
Did he realise he'd found his métier in the course of that one evening?
'Ha! That and honestly, that one night, I made more money than in six days as a manager. As well as being able to flirt and go out with all the waitresses after work. Sex and money: the lure for most bartenders. Ha ha!'
Freeman made the transition to bar work in the mid-Nineties, just as New York's deluxe cocktail scene exploded. He was naturally excited by the flavours of cocktails, by the opportunities 'to work with those flavours, like a chef', and so that, combined with burgeoning public demand, made cocktails an obvious focus for him. He worked through the Sea Breeze phase of 1996, the Cosmo fad of '97. He perfected the classics when demand for martinis erupted, and he froze endless daiquiris, when that became the drink of the moment (for six months or so in '98, since you ask).
In 1999, he got a job at Jean-Louis Palladin's new restaurant; it was there that he met Sam Mason ('chef feeds bartender, bartender gets chef drunk; that's how Sam and I met'), and also Palladin's sous-chef Wylie Dufresne, a pioneer molecular gastronomer-in-the-making. In 2003, Dufresne opened WD50 in downtown Manhattan - a Fat Duck for the New York scene and Freeman began experimenting in earnest with the twisted techniques of the molecular world.
He's done some hilarious things with his beverages in the course of the six years or so that he's made progressive cocktails his business. In the flesh, Eben Freeman might not be obviously mischievous, or especially witty, but his drinks truly are. He's evolved a fat-washing technique: he'll fry up a quantity of anything from brown butter to bacon fat, he'll mix that with a spirit, refrigerate it overnight, and then scrape the floating fat off the following morning. The base drink will become infused with the flavour: 'Bacon fat,' he says, 'goes especially well with bourbon.' He's sliced up Heinz sticky toffee pudding and made eggnog from it 'for a bunch of Brits'. He's strained cedar shavings into bourbon: 'And it's fascinating, because that flavour represents different things to different people. I give it to one person, they drink it and they say: "This reminds me of my grandmother's underwear drawer!" I give it to another person, and they say: "Wow, this reminds me of a hamster cage! ..." so the association goes sideways, like that. I had some Japanese people in, and they drank it and said: "Oh, sauna!"'
He gets Proustian on the subject. 'Making a more profound experience out of the simple act of drinking,' he says. 'That's my aim.'
Freeman wants to blur the line between food and drink. He's made a range of solid cocktails, Turkish Delight-consistency wobbly masses, booze-infused cereals, and: 'I got a lot of press for my vodka and cranberry caviar,' he says. He's smoked Coke - he took the raw syrup of the drink and smoked it over cherrywood chips. He mixes this with Jack Daniel's for his signature drink, Waylon. 'It's useful,' he says, 'it's like a gateway progressive cocktail. It's an easy way in for people.' Although, he adds, he hasn't had to spend much time coaxing his customer base into experimenting with the more challenging elements of his menus.
'There's a real one-upmanship among them. They'll be like, to each other: "I had this one. Oh, you didn't have one yet? Really? You don't even know what it is? Really?" They study the ingredients at home on the internet! Or I'll see a group of girls coming in to the bar, and I'll say: "Oh, here comes three Cosmopolitans and a vodka tonic"; and then they order a really obscure drink!'
There's a genuine passion fuelling Freeman's geekishness, and there's also a strong sense of the greater significance of booze. He believes that cocktails like his are a strike against globalisation, because they're so individual 'in this world of Starbucks and Gap', and because their flavours resonate so differently with different customers.
He's concerned that we're on the brink of a neo-prohibitionist phase. 'Right now, all you see in the media is Britney Spears and people like this, who are out drinking and getting drunk. And what's going on out there, is our gross fascination with the destruction of these people's public lives, and a lot of that message is that the use of alcohol is a bad thing, and being drunk is a bad thing. There's a lot of shame attached to alcohol again. Guilt and shame. I'm worried that this might become part of a wider movement. Although actually, I really benefit. Moderation equals wiser choices in what you're drinking. More length of experience. More enjoyment. That's why cocktails and what I do is in a golden age. But of course there are people who come here and have nine of my cocktails. It's not like binge drinking is dead!'
Eben Freeman isn't working the bar at Tailor when we return to try his creations. He usually works four nights a week. He despairs of mixologists who get to the top of their cocktail game, and then stop making drinks in favour of managing and consulting, because how, he says, will anything progress under those circumstances? But on this particular night, he's at home watching the Superbowl with his son.
I am somewhat relieved, because I am wondering if Freeman's approach can possibly be worth it. The preparation involved in something like the Mojito of the Future, for example, is exhaustive; and the finished drink is exciting, but kind of weird, and extremely - well, brief. And yes, it's creative, and yes, it's evolving the culinary movement, but equally, isn't it a bit gratuitous? And a little bit - gimmicky? It's not as if cocktails aren't extremely fine creations already. Why mess with them?
Actually, it's Freeman's gateway drink - the Smoked Coke - that turns me. I am a huge fan of Coke, particularly in its Diet form, but am purist about it. I won't do Cherry, or the new one with added vitamins. But Freeman's Coke is unexpectedly fabulous. It's rich and extraordinary, the smoking has given it dimensions and depths plain Coke simply doesn't have. It counters the sweetness. I even get my own Proustian sensory trigger experience; Smoked Coke is an accumulated series of childhood Bonfire Nights reduced into drink form. Freeman would like that, surely; Bonfire Night is such a uniquely English affair. After that: I very much enjoy his Agua Verde - a progressive Bloody Mary, which is green, and features tequila, which I generally loathe, so that's interesting. And after that it all gets a bit blurry and indistinct, as is so often the way with cocktail tasting sessions. It leads, ultimately, to an interesting and challenging - and perhaps even progressive - hangover. But the Smoked Coke made it worth it.
Molecular masters of the universe
Tony Conigliaro
Who: Star of the MM scene in the UK, Conigliaro refined his techniques with Heston Blumenthal, and is now plying punters at the Shochu Lounge in Roka, London, with his science-informed concoctions.
Signature drink: The Prairie Oyster, Conigliaro's re-working of a Bloody Mary.
Do say: 'Cooking the fruit in alcohol in a sous-vide at exactly 52 degrees results in a much cleaner taste.'
Don't say: 'What's a sous-vide?'
Eben Klemm
Who: Two New York-based MMs called Eben? What are the chances? 37-year-old Klemm studied Molecular Biology at Cornell University, managed a research lab in Boston, before transferring the same scientific principles to the cocktail scene, and developing drinks and concepts for a series of hotels, restaurants and bars in Manhattan (among them: Dos Caminos, Fiamma and Vento).
Signature drink: The 3D martini, dry, deconstructed and dirty, made with Ketel One vodka, vermouth and a blue-cheese olive lollipop.
Do say: 'Can I get a dollop of bitters-spiked maraschino purée with my leather-infused bourbon Manhattan, please? Nice.'
Don't say: 'Two New York-based Molecular Mixologists called Eben! What are the chances?'
Philip Duff
Who: Global trainer for the Bols cocktail academy; the 35-year-old Irishman trained under Hervé This, father of molecular gastronomy. He's made cocktails for Pierce Brosnan, Norman Schwarzkopf, and the Edge. So there.
Signature drink: St Lucy Bracer, featuring Mount Gay Eclipse Rum and a butterscotch liqueur.
Do say: 'You can have a drink made right, or you can have it made quick. Pick one, 'cos you can't have both.'
Don't say: 'Chocolate martini please!' (Duff doesn't believe in them.)
Jason Crawley
Who: Sydney-based MM who rules the scene through the entire Southern Hemisphere.
Signature drink: Supercool Gin and Tonic (made with liquid nitrogen. Somehow).
Do say: 'Would you mind using sodium alginate and a bath of calcium chloride to transform my otherwise pedestrian beverage, please?'
Don't say: 'I'll just have a packet of crisps, ta.'
You won't try this at home
You probably shouldn't, anyway. But here, Eben Freeman describes how to make his Mojito of the Future: 'The mint is puréed, strained and made into balls by adding gelatin to the minty water, and dripping this mixture into liquid nitrogen so it sets into beads. The lime juice is sweetened and put through the same process. The Bacardi rum is diluted with water, sweetened, thickened with a small amount of Xanthan gum and carbonated.'
· Watch a video of Freeman mixing it up and tell us what you think, on the food blog
· Tailor, 525 Broome St, New York, 001 212 3345182
