Do Cocktails Produce Chemical Reactions?

...or do the ingredients just taste good together?

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Do most cocktails produce a chemical reaction, or do the ingredients simply taste good together?

Cocktails can indeed produce chemical reactions, but those most often occur in your liver, or perhaps between you and your drinking companion (wink, wink)—not in a high-ball glass.

When most of us think of chemical reactions, we picture something like baking soda and vinegar. Something impressive, volcanic. The reactions that occur in cocktails are more subtle—so subtle, in fact, that many scientists wouldn't even consider them true chemical reactions, but rather "material changes." One example: the dissolution of sugar in a cocktail. "Getting down to the nitty-gritty, chemical reactions are 'when bonds are broken and formed,' " says Darcy Gentleman, Ph.D., of the American Chemical Society. "When you take something like sugar and dissolve that in water, there are new bonds created between the water and the sugar and some of the sugar-to-sugar bonds break. So by strict definition, you could say that's a reaction. But whether dissolving is a chemical reaction is a debate."

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Similarly, combining acids and bases in a cocktail could cause a chemical reaction. Clam juice, for instance, will slightly neutralize the more acidic tomato juice in a Caesar, says Gentleman. Likewise, says Dave Arnold, owner of Booker and Dax food research lab, ingredients such as egg whites and milk can react with alcohol to improve flavor. "With egg whites, the proteins tend to bind with polyphenols and reduce astringency," he says. "If you look at a whiskey sour—which has egg whites if you're making it right—the egg white is there to soften the whiskey that would otherwise be too oaky. I'd consider that a chemical reaction." We consider it a welcome improvement, reaction or not.


This story appears in the May 2017 PM.

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