Chorney-Booth: Calgary cocktail bars use creativity and science to blend imaginative new drinks

Calgary Herald

24-04-2025

Tomato and basil, strawberry and mushroom, orange and sesame. It sounds like a grocery list for a dinner party-worthy salad, but these are all flavour combinations going into drinks at a local cocktail bar.
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There was a time, not so long ago, when a drink at a bar typically meant a draught beer, a glass of house wine, or maybe a highball. Most bartenders could whip up a classic like a Gimlet or a Manhattan on request, but it felt a little old-fashioned (or worse, pretentious) to order one. After the modern cocktail resurrection took hold in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, we began to see a new generation of bartenders (or 'mixologists' as we called them at the time) emerge at bars like Proof and the dearly departed Milk Tiger, testing their creative mettle and experimenting with ingredients and techniques to formulate new cocktails.
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These days, local bartenders are pushing things even further, using techniques like infusion, custom-made bitters, fat-washes (a scientific process to impart the flavour of anything from duck fat to brown butter to a spirit), and elements of molecular gastronomy to create sippable works of art. One local bar setting the standard for these new drinks is Shelter, a cool little lounge in Victoria Park that recently released a unique cocktail menu based on the theory of active aroma compounds for some weird and wonderful flavour pairings.
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Active aroma compounds are essentially molecules found in food (or beverages) that create a specific taste or smell and are often described as the 'building blocks of flavour.' When broken down, bartenders can identify which compounds work in harmony and pair ingredients with complementary flavours, even if common sense says they shouldn't go together. Shelter's menu started when head bartender Paulina Arteaga Vazquez worked for months on a carrot cocktail and eventually got it right when she realized the aroma compounds in carrot matched well with those in crème de violette liqueur.
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'Paulina likes to follow cocktail trends and looks for different things to try out,' says Shelter's bar manager Ryan San Diego. 'She started explaining the science behind the active aroma compounds and how they work in cocktails. Our other bartenders all got hooked on it.'
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That carrot and violette cocktail — which also includes mezcal, shiso sochu, hazelnut, and various other ingredients — set the bar for a full menu of drinks created by the entire Shelter bar team. Other showstoppers include a savoury brandy and leche de tigre (i.e. the marinade used to cure ceviche), banana and juniper, and the aforementioned strawberry and mushroom and tomato and basil cocktails. The drinks all have simple names, but are impressively complicated, and took considerable time to develop.
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While Shelter is bold about touting the science behind its new cocktails, it's far from the only bar in the city using kitchen science to create premium sips. Tiffanie Hensel, the general manager at Milpa and one of Calgary's great bartenders, has also built a reputation for creating deliciously complicated cocktails. Since Milpa is primarily a restaurant, Hensel takes cues from the kitchen to develop interesting flavour profiles and encourages her bartenders to use culinary scraps as ingredients or garnishes in their cocktails.