#3. Balance, The Basics
#3. Balance, The Basics. I’m going to break down what balance is, what it means from a drink construction perspective and how we can get the absolute most out of balance to improve drinks.
I am often asked how I achieve a high level of balance throughout my drinks, this comes up a lot with beginner baristas. Balance can be very hard to control but when a drink is evenly balanced I find it almost always appeals to a wide and diverse group of customers. Here are some of my thoughts on balance and ways of getting tastier drinks.
Why do we need balance? Balance makes a drink more palatable to a diverse group of people.
What is balance? Have you ever had a glass of squeezed lemon juice? Of course not, its gross, too sour and too acidic. If anyone likes this at all (I doubt it) it’s a small group of people because I’ve never met one! But, when we add a little water and sugar we create Lemonade! One of the most universally popular drinks. What happened? We balanced out the acidity with sugar and then dulled back the intensity with the addition of water. The drink still celebrates the flavors of the lemon but its become more enjoyable with the addition of these two extra ingredients. Its no longer an acid bomb but a harmonious blend of acidity, sweetness and bitterness- its balanced!
The problem: Unlike taste, Balance is NOT subjective, a drink is either balanced or it is not. I think a young barista can get away with not truly understanding tasting notes well into their careers. On the other hand baristas are often confronted with handling and using balance from almost the first day on the job. Balance confronts us from the onset! Often if it gets off on the wrong foot what should have been a bar workers best friend becomes a problem, a war that they wage every working day.
In coffee: Three taste elements make up the drink. These three elements are our bitterness (bottom), sweetness (middle) and acidity (high end). We also have 3 tactile elements but balance largely deals with our taste elements so ill come back to our tactile in a later post.
Bitterness: Despite having a bad rep most culinary concepts have an element of bitterness, I characterize it as the heavy, sour flavor perceived by the back of your mouth. Higher amounts will be perceived as giving the drink more weight. It is also the element that contributes most to the finish of the drink as we have developed bitterness receptors in the back of our mouths. It is believed we are highly attuned to detecting it because bitter flavors were linked to detecting poisons early in our hunter gatherer phase.
Sweetness: Occupies the mid range, it is of course the most sought after and loved of the three. Generally it will be most apparent when the liquid is physically in your mouth. Often this will be called the mouthfeel, a tactile description that directly relates to sweetness but it is not the same. While sweetness is the most popular too much of a good thing can ruin a drink (objectively). Coke for example has little balance as it is maximum sweetness with little interplay between bitterness and acidity.
Acidity: Occupies our high end, it is bright and can often feel very, very sharp (lemon juice) it often becomes automatized easily. Especially in the case of citrus acidity, this means that it is often our first impression of a beverage.
But how do we get them to work together harmoniously I hear you ask.
To truly understand how these elements provide balance together consider music, for a song to be complex and engaging it needs to have a melody, a harmony and a bass, rarely does a song have a single instrument. Just like with espresso and cocktails a song can feel boring and repetitive without interplay between the three elements. That’s what we strive for with balance in our drinks.
The absolute basic core of cocktail construction is the three components, but they are defined by their taste profile and the interplay they have together.
The base: The lowest taste element. It often has the most weight on your palette, (because its bitter). This is the key alcoholic ingredient in a cocktail and while a lot of cocktails have a secondary alcohol the second is usually selected because it further builds on the base ingredient. Mostly this ingredient will be the highest quantity physically in a drink. Comparing this to the above three taste components of our coffee rubric this base will occupy the bitterness and often a little of the mid range sweetness.
The body: This is the drink element that responds and reacts to our base. It is usually called a modifier because it complements the base spirit. This ingredient is crucial in making harmony and balance in a cocktail because it has to occupy the mid range of a beverage. That’s means it is often sweeter than the base but less dominant. It gives the drink harmony while really celebrating and boosting the base as the central taste component.
The perfume (additional responding ingredient, I find the term perfume a little confusing): This element is often the highest notes, it can either physically sit on-top of the drink (a lemon twist) or sit on-top of all the other flavors. It often (but not always) provides the introduction to the beverage with high initial aromatics as you bring the vessel up to your nose.
So to recap: in coffee we have bitterness, sweetness and acidity creating balance together. In cocktails: we have a body, modifier and perfume.
I like to describe these elements to baristas using cocktail examples because the cocktail industry creates balance by identifying the three areas and its easy to show the separation of them because they are also different ingredients. Espresso on the other hand has all those elements together and relies on changing our espresso recipe to create a level of equality across all three: it’s a little more abstract.
An example I always come to back to is the Cocktail classic Daiquiri,
The only way to get daiquiri right is to keep it balanced,
The way to balance it is with the perfect blend of the ingredients.
There is only 3!
But this drink is easy to get wrong. Daiquiri is one of those rare drinks that although it has variations really cannot be improved, it’s an iconic flavor profile.
Balanced is achieved with the interplay of bitterness in the white rum base (1 ounce), responding to the sugar sweetness in the simple syrup (1/2 ounce). Its these two elements that make up the base and the body, the bitterness and the sweetness. They are our foundation and the rum is our centerpiece. The perfume is created with (1 ounce) lemon/lime juice. This is the acidity and provides a high overriding note. In this way it keeps the white rum and the sugar syrup vibrant.
In balance component terms: We have three elements to represent our acidity, sweetness and bitterness, with a little interplay across the middle with sweetness being occupied by both the residual flavors in the white rum (the very reason its white not aged) and a little sweetness in the lemon/lime.
This drink is balance incarnate, try to change it! To increase the rum for example would bring too much body, to use more sugar would dampen the bite of the citrus. But it’s not only in the selection of ingredients that matters it’s the quantities of ingredients 1 part body to ½ sweetness to 1 part perfume. The sweetness has a lesser amount because the body itself is partially sweet, the perfume is equal in amount because it is not as powerful as the white rum, making it equal in intensity to the white rum.
Controlling balance is about portions and ingredients. In espresso we have ingredients in a way (acidity, sweetness and bitterness) but they are all displayed in the espresso shot itself. We create balance by controlling the shots run time and modulating the amount of each of these we allow to shine through, being careful not to allow one to become dominant over the others.
But more on time, yield and using them to create balance in espresso in another blog. For now go and find a good cocktail bar and drink a daiquiri.
Like I said at the start balance is not subjective but enjoying it is, either way this drink is sure to open up your eyes to the possibilities of balance in the same way it did for me.
Keep brewing, Cal.