At Agency – the hybrid cocktail lounge in the Dubbel Dutch Hotel – one menu item stands out, the adventure-in-a-glass they call Dealer’s Choice. You, in essence, design your own drink from a list of attributes, spirit and fruit preferences, etc.; the bartender makes it real – with or without alcohol.
Ryan Castelaz, who co-created this outpost of creative sipping and its sister concept Discourse Coffee Workshop, lives in the nuanced world of flavor. For two years, as his business was getting off the ground, he worked alongside the scientists at global flavoring maker Kerry.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
That experience of chemically mimicking the taste of, for instance, fresh-picked fruit didn’t change his passion for natural ingredients, but it was a path to a different way of thinking about how we perceive flavor – something he continues to explore as his company grows.
What is flavor, and is it synonymous with taste?
I think there’s oftentimes a conflation of the words flavor and taste, and they really aren’t the same thing. Flavor is a perception. Taste is absolutely an element of that, as is presentation, as is aromatics, as is environment. Is it noisy or quiet, or warm or cold? All of these things affect our perception of a thing’s flavor.
As someone who comes from a farm-to-table ethos, did the lab at Kerry ever seem mad-science-y?
[Laughs.] What was so cool about my job is I could say, “Hey, this – let’s use a blueberry as an example – this blueberry tastes a little bit too ripe. They could go back into the lab and modify the biochemical composition of that flavor to create a greener tasting blueberry – essentially back-track three weeks in the ripeness cycle. The next day, I’d have a less ripe blueberry flavor on my desk.
That’s wild!
Yeah, and what kind of blew my mind is our tongue knows no difference between a blueberry flavor and a blueberry. The only difference is the textural experience of the fibrous presentation of a blueberry.
Sounds like Willy Wonka. How do you apply that to Discourse and Agency?
I think it created a deeper understanding of where I want to progress in the future. I want to create a line of ready-to-drink coffee and tea sodas pretty significantly informed by my background in product formulation. It also opened my mind up to the acceptance and use of natural flavors [substances derived from natural sources like plants]. We use them quite a bit at Agency for the creation of aromatic waters and candies that we use throughout our menu–that’s been a really, really cool subset to be able to explore.
When you’re designing a drink, what’s your approach to building flavor?
I call them primary, secondary and tertiary flavors – the idea of stacking and reordering flavors based on their intensity. I think that rule of three is really useful [though] I have a reputation for being a bit of a maximalist [laughs]. The formula that I’ve found works really well for our in-house lattes is four [elements] – syrup, bitters, powder [of fruit or botanicals], salt.
Does that maximalist approach apply to the way you personally like to drink?
I drink my coffee black – right now I’ve been into 5-ounce Americanos. But I’m a big cocktail guy, the weirder, the better.
Do you have a favorite cocktail?
I think it’s always kind of in flux, and is hyper dependent on my mood and the weather and the day I’ve been having. That’s part of what is so beautiful about drink. It meets you where you are emotionally.
