Episode 73: Rethinking Tropical Drinks With Garret Richard and Ben Schaffer 

Tropical drinks have a timeless quality, but that doesn’t mean the recipes and techniques for making them need to be stuck in the past. Brooklyn bartender Garret Richard (Sunken Harbor Club) and author Ben Schaffer (The Rum Reader) bring today’s cutting-edge bar knowledge to the world of tropical drinks in their new book, Tropical Standard: Cocktail Techniques & Reinvented Recipes. In this episode, we talk with Garret and Ben about the enduring appeal of tropical drinks; how modern bar knowledge can be brought to bear on the category; and how such a contemporary approach can refresh the tropical drinks canon. Follow Tropical Standard on Instagram at @tropicalstandardbook.  

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PAUL CLARKE 

Welcome back to Radio Imbibe from Imbibe magazine. I’m Paul Clarke, Imbibe’s editor in chief. And when we’re talking about cocktail history and we look at the long, continuing arc of cocktail evolution, there are all kinds of milestones we like to reference along the way, flagged in part by some of the bartenders and writers chronicling their respective moments on the cocktail timeline. There’s Jerry Thomas with his Bartenders’ Guide in 1862. Then Harry Johnson, Cocktail Bill Boothby, George Kappeler, and William Schmidt tracking the course of cocktail development in the 1890s. We have Tom Bullock’s snapshot of the drinks world just prior to Prohibition, and Harry McElhone, Harry Craddock, and Robert Vermiere tracking the developments overseas during America’s long drought. And then of course, we have figures like Charles H. Baker, Ted Saucier, and Trader Vic mapping out the new world of cocktails coming into existence in the years after World War II. Looking over these milestones, we can see how changes in the drinks world seem to happen incrementally. And then there’s the occasional big leap forward in terms of recipe development and bartender technique. The past 15 years have been something of a moon launch moment in the drinks world. Not only have we been experiencing a renaissance or revolution in the popularity of cocktails and the kinds of creativity going into them, we’ve also seen significant strides taking place when it comes to the tools and methodology being used to create some of these strengths. Garret Richard and Ben Schaffer have had a front-row seat for some of these exciting developments. Garret as a bartender at places including Slowly Shirley, ZZ’s Clam Bar, and Existing Conditions, where he worked with the team including Dave Arnold and Don Lee, and more recently at the Sunken Harbor Club in Brooklyn. And Ben, as a writer, with works including The Dead Rabbit Drinks Manual, which he co-wrote with Sean Muldoon and Jack McGarry, and currently as the editor and publisher of the Rum Reader. Together, Garret and Ben have now co-authored Tropical Standard: Cocktail Techniques and Reinvented Recipes, a book coming out in May that combines some of the influences and experiences of the craft cocktail revival, along with an enthusiasm and expertise with classic tropical drinks, and applies cutting-edge bar techniques to reimagine the present and future of exotic cocktails. For this episode, we’re chatting with Garret and Ben to dig into some of the details in Tropical Standard and to talk about a new way of thinking about tropical drinks.  

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PAUL CLARKE 

Garret, Ben, welcome to Radio Imbibe. 

GARRET RICHARD

Thank you so much for having us. I’m Garret Richard. 

BEN SCHAFFER

Hi, I’m Ben Schaffer and I’m happy to be here, excited to talk about tropical drinks. 

PAUL CLARKE 

I’m glad you guys could take the time for this because your new book, Tropical Standard, is coming out in May and you know, tropical drinks have such a long and distinctive history within the larger history of cocktails and bar culture. As you started your own explorations of tropical drinks while also working within the contemporary cocktail renaissance, Garret, at bars like Prime Meats, Existing Conditions, and Slowly Shirley, and now at the Sunken Harbor Club. Did you see this tropical realm and the techniques and methods that are used as being somehow out of step or lagging behind what was going on? 

BEN SCHAFFER

You know if I could answer that first, I know Garret has a lot of thoughts on that. But you know, for me, I feel that you could make a pretty strong argument that the first craft cocktail revival in the US was Donn Beach and Trader Vic in the ‘30s and ‘40s. You know, they were inspired by the 19th-century bar manuals as well as practices they observed in Jamaica and Cuba. And then, you know, 50 years later, when Dale DeGroff and company began to revive craft cocktails, there was pretty soon thereafter a parallel revival of tropical drinks by researchers like Jeff Berry. But I think that those revivals remained more or less still in parallel. The purpose of this book is really to bring them back together. To show the cross-pollination from classic cocktails and tropical cocktails. And the tropical revival has really been about recreating drinks as they were in the ‘30s, ’40s, ‘50s. But to some extent that’s an impossible task, right? Because ingredients have changed. You know a lot of rums are no longer available. They’ve been reformulated. Citrus is different now for a different kind of audience. So to go back to that original intention of those drinks, you’re forced to reinterpret them, which is where I think Garret’s brilliance really lies. He’s excellent at finding those intents through the evidence and through his own palate. When you go through that process, you realize that today’s cutting-edge techniques like those of Dave Arnold and Don Lee, acid adjusting, sugar adjusting, etcetera, those are exactly the kind of things that Donn Beach would have been would have been doing, you know, or would be doing today if he were around. He was always pushing the envelope. So bringing those kinds of new techniques in with the tropical cocktails in with the classic cocktail revival, I think that’s actually something that has great historical validity, that we’re trying to tie together things that shouldn’t have ever been apart to begin with. 

PAUL CLARKE 

So you kind of see this as a continuation, in a way, of the story that they had started almost a century ago and that if these kinds of tools and techniques and opportunities have been available to them, they would have been tapping into them in all likelihood. 

GARRET RICHARD

Absolutely. And I think the focus of Tropical Standard really is technique oriented. We’ve seen other books on the market that are rum-focused, cocktail-focused, history-focused in the context of tropical cocktails. But you know this whole project was built so that people can pick it up and learn the ins and outs of flash blending, how to properly make a frozen cocktail, how to use, you know, some of these newer techniques to create ingredients that have more integrity. And I think some of the lessons that we give, you know, they’re all instilled in every single cocktail. So every single drink that you make in the book has something to teach you and we build upon that throughout the entire book. So that by the end there’s, you know, a whole chapter of tributes to some of the bars of the past and you know, current bars like Tiki-Ti, and you’re able to then recreate their cocktails using all the techniques you learned in the book. Kind of a fun last chapter, but the intention is that you’re going to learn something every time you, you know, tackle one of these new cocktails. 

PAUL CLARKE 

And then I’m going to get into some of those details as we go through. But one thing you know to back up for kind of a wide-angle view for a moment. In the very first phases of Tropical Standard, you lay out the richness of the food crops and the flavors that come from the tropics. Things like sugar cane and citrus obviously translate over to the bar, but also through the wide range of tropical fruits and spices and peppers and coffee, chocolate. These flavors have always been a part of the drinks world from punches through the early cocktails, as you noted. Well, long before we ever talked about tiki. In today’s culinary world, with the kinds of things we have available to us, do we have a unique and somewhat fresh opportunity to revisit and renew our appreciation of these flavors as they’re used in drinks? 

GARRET RICHARD

The palate is definitely the largest it’s ever been, you know, thanks to just modern grocery and Amazon. And you know, if I want to get mace tomorrow, I can have mace delivered to my house, right? 

PAUL CLARKE 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don’t have to wait for a sailing ship to make its way from halfway around the world. 

GARRET RICHARD

Exactly. But, I think in having that availability and also having just, you know, not only the availability of ingredients but availability of information, it’s almost more important to have context and history to filter all that, because then it’s just a giant library of, you know, flavors or giant library of references and there’s no there’s nothing to grab on to. So I think that reevaluation that you’re talking about is very important to Tropical Standard and you know it goes to some of the most basic elements. We reevaluate things like, you know, does passion fruit need to be a syrup or should we treat it like an acid, you know? Because if you look at the structure of passion fruit, it’s about half as acidic as lime or lemon. And the way our infrastructure for passion fruit is set up now, we can either get it fresh, if you have money, or you can get it flash frozen and it doesn’t necessarily need to be preserved in the syrup the way they did in the 1950s, which was probably to lengthen it out, because, you know, how many shipments of passion fruit were you getting back? Then so these reevaluations of some of these, you know, core flavors like passion fruit, pineapple, lime are important because I think it coaxes the intent of some of these cocktails out more. A good example of that is the Rangoon Gimlet, which, you know, it’s very simple kind of build that we’ve seen in Jeff Berry’s books. It’s, you know, just a gin gimlet with some extra Angostura. But through our research, we found that it’s actually very close to a Charles H. Baker drink called the Bin & Jitters. And we kind of morph those two drinks together and reevaluate the importance of lime cordial and why that works and then teach the reader how to make a proper lime cordial that, you know, a la, what Rose’s was 100 years ago. So yeah, I definitely agree with that. 

PAUL CLARKE 

Well, you know, you touched on a good point. And let’s just jump into some of those details. Sweeteners, as you note, have always played a huge role in tropical drinks in terms of widening the focus and expanding the universe of available flavors. And when you look at things like passion fruit nectar, like you’re talking about, or basic grenadine, and even if something as commonplace as that, how did you see a need to kind of reconsider and reapproach things like their Brix and their acidity and their balance and their body and make them more useful and flavorful in contemporary drinks? 

BEN SCHAFFER

The whole concept of what we call sugar adjusting, is just to have a consistent Brix level in the syrups. So I think what the whole concept of that is to make sure that you’re working with uniform products. So when you put a certain amount in, it’s the same sweetness as when you put in a different syrup with a different flavor. I think that’s something that’s pretty basic. It’s pretty easy to do. It does require you know, a scale and a very simple calculation. But even that simple thing alone is pretty uh, I would say it’s a pretty huge sea change because you now have complete control over what something does. You’re not stuck in that constant one-upsmanship of I’ve added a little more sweetener and now it’s too sweet. So I add a little more acid. Now you know, it’s always a seesaw if you have that completely measured, then it’s already, you already know what you’re getting. 

GARRET RICHARD

And to jump in. There’s a couple of things with Brix adjusting that I think were important to get across in the book. One is from a practical standpoint. If you have blood oranges in the grocery store and you want to use them in cocktails, if you juice them, you know you’ve got a couple of days of that blood orange juice and that’s it. But if you know how to properly turn that juice into a syrup, you know you can hang out with that blood orange for about a month. And being able to create a syrup that you know is the same sweetness as simple syrup, and it’s an easy pick up and play, versus if you had, you know if you were completely in the dark, it’s like, oh, well, maybe I can only use it for these one or two drinks. But you know, having this blood orange syrup that you know is as sweet as simple, you can make your Collins with it. You can make sour, you know. There’s all sorts of applications. And really I think the sugar-adjusting stuff is important. Because I’ve worked with so many different bartenders that make tropical drinks and it was very frustrating taking a recipe that you knew worked and then going to their bar and it not working. And largely that’s because of the syrups being of different strength and different caliber. And when you have that uniformity that Ben was talking about, you then can make sure that the structure is in place. Like a good example is if you make a Bee’s Knees, three-ingredient cocktail, and the honey syrup is incorrect. You can really account for that because it’s only three ingredients. When you have a, you know, tropical drink that’s like nine or 10 ingredients, it’s very hard to then find out who’s not pulling their weight. So the more things that you have in place that are uniform and sound where you’re like, I know that this syrup is this strength. I know that this juice is this. Then you can have the structure that you need, and it’s much easier to modify that. And you’re not just grasping at straws. 

PAUL CLARKE 

And talking about sweeteners, you also touch upon the question of granulated sugar versus syrups in some applications. And I thought this is pretty interesting because you know using simple syrup for a lot of people has just become kind of the de facto way to go with cocktails, whether it’s an old-fashioned or a sour or tropical drink. But you make the case in some applications that granulated is better, is a better choice. Why would that be? And when does this make sense? What kinds of applications? 

GARRET RICHARD

I think the daiquiri really is the best example of how sugar versus syrup can impact a cocktail and the short of it is that in the daiquiri you’re adding about 1/2 ounce of extra water if you use simple syrup versus sugar. And we discuss in Tropical Standard, you know, for some rums that’s appropriate to have that extra half ounce of water. Like Smith & Cross, you probably want the extra dilution. But something that’s a little bit more delicate and is 40%, which is the majority of white rums in the market, you may want to take that half ounce of water out because you get a much more crisp cocktail. You can taste the spirit more. And I think there’s also a textural difference in sugar versus syrup. Ben, do you want to talk a little bit about that with the daiquiri panels you’ve seen and how we talk about that and Tropical Standard? 

BEN SCHAFFER

I mean, I think the daiquiri, as you said, the daiquiri is the classic example. Historically, it was made with granulated sugar, as you’ve pointed out. We think of syrup as adding sweetener, but it’s also adding dilution, right? So unless that’s your intention, putting sugar in without water is is the more concentrated way to do it. So I don’t know if people have ever had daiquiris where they’ve made them with just some sugar in the tin. Certainly it’s easy to do. Try it. We talk about, you know, ways to approach it. Obviously is not an original idea with us. This is an original idea you know from 120 or more years ago. But I think the concept is if the syrup isn’t imparting any additional flavor and you’ve got a very simple drink, like a daiquiri, where has few ingredients and you know, as Audrey Saunders famously has said, you know, nowhere to hide in a in a daiquiri, letting the sugar play its own role in not being part of a syrup, I think makes sense. Garret has many, many applications where a syrup is needed because it’s imparting flavor in addition to just being sweet. I think in a lot of bars and perhaps at home, we like to use syrup because it’s convenient, you know, because we’re using syrup for other things, so we might as well use it in this drink. But I think there’s certain drinks and, you know, maybe classics like the mojito or as such, a lot of people would consider the mojito to be a drink that needed granulated sugar. Some people would consider that to be the daiquiri. There’s always going to be different ways to do it. The thing that we learned on the Rum Reader daiquiri dossier panels that we’ve been doing for the last few years is, at least in my opinion, it’s great to have daiquiris and cocktails that taste different from one another. There’s no such thing for me as the right way to do it. There’s just different ways to do it. And individual people can actually like more than one of those ways, right? You don’t have to always do it the same way. So again, in this book, of course, it’s about recipes. Of course, it’s about stories and history. But each of these recipes is talking about a technique, and those are techniques you can apply to other drinks. So when you start to think about granulated sugar, you can start to think about how to use that in other drinks you might create, and that’s really, you know, the journey we’re trying to go on with this. 

PAUL CLARKE 

And ice has also become a significant part of the cocktail conversation in recent years. We recently had Camper English on the podcast to talk about his experimentations in directional freezing and the pursuit of clear ice. But when we’re talking about tropical drinks, we’re talking about a vibrant array of ice applications, whether it’s simple shaken or stirred drinks through to swizzling and blending, and different approaches to blending as, Garret, you mentioned a little bit earlier. As you were digging through your own experiments and looking at, you know, kind of the ideal applications, how significant a role did ice come to play in finding ultimate success in some cocktails? And what kinds of things do you present in the book regarding the necessity of thinking about your approach to ice? 

GARRET RICHARD

It had a lot of impact on the success and failures of certain cocktails. And you know, before we started work on Tropical Standard, I was working on Existing Conditions. So we were using block ice for shaking and I was also doing some time at Raines Law Room as well. And was able to get exposed to some of the Sasha Petraske style of thinking on ice. And I think it made thinking about what ice and when and why helps certain drinks stand out more than, you know, maybe they would have just in their default setting. The Western Sour, which is an old Steve Crane cocktail, we really reformulated, you know, using an acid-adjusted grape for juice, bourbon, and falernum into like a sour that would look very similar to something served at Attaboy, you know, on a big rock, slow dilution. And you know, originally in Steve Crane’s day obviously wouldn’t be on a on a it wouldn’t be served like that would most likely be on shell ice in a rocks glass or, you know, some form of crushed ice. But you know, at the beginning of the book, we talk about the multiple styles of ice and, you know, what you’re going to need. And just to give your listeners context, you know, most of these drinks were worked on in my apartment during the pandemic. So it’s not, we’re not asking for anyone to do anything unreasonable in terms of, you know, getting a chest freezer or whatnot but we tasted a lot of the drinks together. Ben, did you feel like there were certain drinks where, like, ice was more important than others? Because I feel like there was definitely some where we were very shocked by, like how different they were. 

BEN SCHAFFER

Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, I think again in a way it’s similar to what I said about syrups and how I see it and how they’re used is that certain bars, they’re set up, they have certain ice and then they use the that ice and all of the drinks, regardless of whether maybe a different ice might work better. It’s just an issue of convenience, space. It makes sense. But I think in this book, without making it too complicated, we’ve tried to have a range of different ice as appropriate. So, as Garret was saying, you know, some things have to be in a big rock. Some things have crushed or pebble ice. There’s also shaved ice for making ice molds, which is a whole other exciting category into itself. These are all things that mere mortals can do. I’m not an expert bartender, you know, as Garret is. And I understand them. So I think everyone can, but I think that sometimes people think of tropical drinks as being something that happens with crushed ice or up and it doesn’t have to be that way. One of the major things that we believe in is that tropical drinks are a big tent. As long as you’re celebrating tropical produce and the history of tropical populations, there’s a whole lot that you can interpret that with. So you know, you could have an Old Fashioned that’s tropical. You can have a, you know, a savory drink that’s tropical. It doesn’t have to be rum and fruit juice on crushed all the time. Not that there aren’t some amazing drinks of that description, but I think Garret has really played with tweaking each of those elements to get the most out of it. 

GARRET RICHARD

And to follow up, so I’ve taken a lot of the ice techniques from the book, and that’s been the foundation for how we build drinks at Sunken Harbor Club. And I’ve had a lot of people come up to me at Sunken, a lot of guests that have thanked me for using crushed ice properly because I think a lot of cocktail bars will pack an entire glass full of crushed ice and, you know, tell their guests to drink it quickly because it’s going to turn into water in 5 minutes. And in Tropical Standard, we treat crushed ice like an ingredient. So any cocktail that has it, there’s a measured amount and there’s a measured amount that goes in the glass and you know whether it’s in a blender or in a tin that’s going to get flash blended, there’s, there’s always a set amount, so that that’s dialed in and, you know, we’re not just putting the mountain of crushed ice on top of a drink. Because really, a mountain of crushed ice is like appropriate for maybe a small handful of cocktails like the Mint Julep and, you know, maybe the Zombie. But you know, a delicate pineapple honey drink like the Penang Punch should not have, you know, 16 to 20 ounces of crushed ice on top of it. 

PAUL CLARKE 

And you know, you brought up a really good example, a couple of moments ago when you’re talking about you kind of almost like a tropical approach to drinks like the Old Fashioned. And I think, you know the stirred or savory drinks or something, we don’t necessarily think of when we’re talking about tropical drinks. But you go there in the book, you dive into these. What kinds of challenges do stirred drinks present when keeping that tropical vibe in mind and what kind of opportunities exist to enjoy this and explore it? 

GARRET RICHARD

I think it’s one of our favorite chapters for sure. And we broke it down into sort of the three families: the Old Fashioned, the Martini/Manhattan, and the Negroni. That’s I think everyone can get their heads around that. The challenges are, I mean, I’ve had bartenders come up to me, they’ve told me there’s no such thing as a stirred tropical drink. You know, that it’s all just the one of sour, two of sweet thing. I think that’s wrong because there are classics like the El Presidente. The, you know, the Ti’ Punch is sort of a stirred cocktail if you think about it. But I think for us it was taking the kind of library of ingredients and seeing how we can reinterpret things like the Old Fashioned and the Martini. You know what a great example is we talked with Audrey Saunders about upside-down cocktails and things that use either vermouth forward or liqueur forward. And in the book I have a cocktail called the Our Man in Havana, which is sort of an upside down El Presidente, where Byrrh, the, you know, quinquina from France, is the star. And you know the rum is the accent. And you know the other modifiers in that are curacao and orgeat. So any tiki person can sort of put that in their head like, oh, there’s little accents of the Mai Tai in here. But you know, we have this, like, very flavorful vermouth as well, you know. So it’s I think that genre is going to expand very quickly in the next couple of years because having run Sunken Harbor for about a year and a half, some of the like out of the top five selling drinks in my bar many times two out of the five are stirred and people want that. And, you know, to just say, well, we can make it a rum Old Fashioned, I think cutting people short? There’s so many avenues that go down we have, you know, this beautiful Negroni in the book called the Tijuana Taxi that uses banana and mezcal. And I think it’s a very exciting chapter.

BEN SCHAFFER

Absolutely! Well, I think again similar to my kind of intro, I think that in the midcentury in the mid-20th century that was the kind of zenith of tropical drinks popularity in the US. It was also a huge popularity for things like Martinis and Old Fashioneds, but they were not typically consumed in the same venues. Right? You weren’t having a Martini at Trader Vic’s with your Cantonese cuisine, but why not? You know, why can’t we bring those things together? So it’s a little bit again that cross-pollination. These are things that have been in parallel, but why don’t they? They could obviously get together and again, it speaks to Garret’s true innovation and inventiveness with coming up with some of these drinks in that style that very much is about the craft cocktail revival meeting the tropical drink revival. 

PAUL CLARKE 

And you know, Garret, you’d mentioned that you came up with a lot of these while, you know, working from home during pandemic. You’re a professional bartender. You’ve worked in a number of bars. For people playing along at home, are these approaches in the book approachable? I mean, what do people need to keep in mind when digging into some of the recipes and techniques in this book and doing so at home? 

GARRET RICHARD

I wanted it to be as approachable as it can be without dumbing it down, because I think you know, having worked at Existing Conditions that I saw a lot of people that made Dave’s stuff and you know Dave Arnold’s stuff out of Liquid Intelligence is not easy. Yeah, and he didn’t make it easy, but a lot of the techniques that we’re talking about, I think, will become more ubiquitous overtime. And there are already people trying to attempt some of these things, you know, whether it’s through YouTube videos or what, you know, reading an article in a magazine. But there are a lot of myths behind it. There’s a lot of myths behind what acid adjusting was, how to use a refractometer, how to make a good frozen cocktail. And it was important to me to highlight those techniques early so that then people can evaluate them for what they are and clear the air for some of those things. And I think especially with the acid adjusting we kind of threw the lure out a little early before the book came out and did a video with Educated Barfly where we talked about the Hawaiian Mai Tai and we demonstrated how to make acid-adjusted pineapple juice on his channel. And you know the way the Internet is, a lot of people immediately started doing it and realized it’s not that hard. It’s just the gram scale and ordering some citric acid and malic acid off of Amazon. I was starting to get messages on Instagram and like hey, I did your acid-adjusted pineapple and now I’m using it in this cocktail. I’m using it in this and you know it clicked. And I think you know there’s going to be stuff in here that is intentionally challenging, like the Don’s mix that’s in here is directly from Existing Conditions. And I would say that’s the hard mode. There is a range of difficulty, but I think for the most part the idea is that we’re trying to move the bar forward and I think there’s a hunger for that. I get so many questions behind the bar at Sunken Harbor of like how to do this? How to do that? And I’m hoping that this addresses most of them. 

BEN SCHAFFER

Well, you know, Dave Arnold is a legendary innovator. None of this would be possible without Liquid Intelligence, his book, Existing Conditions, his bar where Garret worked, we interviewed him extensively for this book. He wrote the forward for us. A lot of this is based on his work, but we really have tried to make it accessible, you know, acid adjusting is explained in, you know, few paragraphs, sugar adjusting is explained in about 3 pages, which is probably our most complicated thing. And again, it’s just you just have to do the work. None of it is incredibly laborious or incredibly intellectually complicated. You just have to do it. There’s a little bit of prep involved. As Garret says, you have to measure things. You know, all acid adjusting means is putting a little more citric acid or malic acid into juice. So you use powdered acid, then you weigh it, depending on the amount of juice and you’re and you add them together, it’s just another ingredient. Very simple to do. Sugar adjusting, you have to do a little bit more measurement, but you know it’s these are things that anyone can achieve. And I think we really put a lot of effort in to try to explain them as succinctly as possible as successfully as possible. Nothing in this book takes you. You don’t have to be, Dave Arnold, a man of his genius in order to achieve these things. 

PAUL CLARKE 

Any closing thoughts as we head toward the end here? 

GARRET RICHARD

Well, I think one other thing, which is kind of a fun little section of the book is we talk quite a bit about cordials, which I think is an often overlooked category. The real term we use is preserved citrus because that means a couple of different things in the book. We talk about oleo saccharum and how to make a syrup out of that. The traditional cordial, which you know would be sort of our version of what Rose’s is and a more integral Rose’s. And I think when preserving citrus you start to coax different flavors out of citrus that you wouldn’t get from just, you know, squeezing a lemon and then adding sugar to it. Oxidation happens. You’re getting more oils from the citrus. And as a home bartender and as a, you know, as someone who’s behind the stick, I think, you know, creating these preserve citrus, you know, ingredients you can really have a more sustainable bar. You can lengthen some of these ingredients out a little bit more like if if you have a quart of lemon that you know is not going to be acceptable for cocktails, you can then turn it into something else that then can be used in delicious drinks. And you know that’s another thing that I think you see a lot of on the Internet is people trying to figure out, OK, how do I not waste as much, you know, ingredients and there’s, you know, terms like super juice and all this other stuff that’s thrown out. And I think the preserving citrus chapter, we’re really good about giving people, not just like waste products to to then use. It’s really ingredients that stand on their own and make some of these cocktails, like our Blue Hawaii cocktail in the book would not work without a preserved citrus in it. 

PAUL CLARKE 

Well, Ben, Garret, I’m loving the book, Tropical Standard. Congratulations on its release. And thanks so much for taking the time to talk through it with us. 

GARRET RICHARD

Yeah. Thank you so much. 

BEN SCHAFFER

Thanks so much, Paul. 

[music] 

PAUL CLARKE 

Head to tropicalstandard.com to pre-order a copy of the book and to find out more about this instrumental work from Garret Richard and Ben Schaffer. We’ve got a link to that website and to Tropical Standard’s Instagram feed in our episode notes. And that’s it for this episode. Subscribe to Radio Imbibe to keep up with all of our future episodes. You can find plenty more articles, recipes, and our full back catalog of podcast episodes on our website, imbibemagazine.com. We’ve got your social media needs covered on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest, and if you’re not already a subscriber to the print and or digital issues of Imbibe, then here’s your opportunity to change that. Just follow the link on this episode’s notes and we’ll be happy to help you. I’m Paul Clarke. This is Radio Imbibe. Catch you next time.