Cocktailing with Cameron Bogue, Part One

Last week I went out drinking with Cameron Bogue, Smirnoff's cocktail consultant. As I understand it, Cameron's job is to travel the country, find out what people are drinking in different cities, talk to bartenders, and then create some new recipes based on what he learns. Yes, it does seem to be a very sweet job, especially the travelling and drinking part. But no, it doesn't appear to be an easy one.

Throughout the course of the night whenever we'd encounter a bartender doing something unusual, homemade, or hard-to-achieve, it would often turn out that Cameron had successfully tried it already. He's got a steam distillation device at home so he can make his own orange flower water. His experiments in molecular mixology for the company resulted in him creating a sushi platter of material made from booze, including the wasabi and ginger. (I'll post a picture later- it was amazing.)

And when he creates recipes, not only do the quantities of alcohol in each drink have to conform to strict company standards, he has to have the names and recipes approved by a legal team before they're released to the public. (He said they had problems working with Kumquat because it was hard to find names that didn't sound dirty.) You can find the last installment of his cocktail trend report here (big pdf file), and hopefully the next one will have pictures of the sushi.

In my next post, I'll talk about what we drank and what's going on in SF.