Life Without a Centrifuge 4/5/2025

I know, I know, sounds like some sort of first world travesty. A gen Z crisis for sure if I ever heard one. I live without a centrifuge! The horror. The horror. But hey, surviving without a centrifuge is easier than you think. Two necessary, easy to procure items–coffee filters and agar agar–will improve your cocktail performance. Thats really all. Well, also plenty of patience. If your’e like me, the glitz and glamour is long behind you and you’re stuck behind the stick where the executives give the world to other places within the group but over at Rustic they can’t even fork out a little coin for some measly coasters. Yeah, I’m not bitter. Anyway, the cost of a decent centrifuge can be anywhere from $1,200 to $6,000.

I take pride in the fact that all those fancy bartenders out there would have a hard time over at Rustic Canyon without their technology…Or maybe they wouldn’t and I would feel ashamed. But hey, I want to have big dreams, vast delusions of grandeur that the others would come over here and wither in the face of this archaism.

Anyway, we do use some tech. It would be hard to cope without a Vitamix and an immersion circulator, a scale and a whipping stick.

Let’s get to the point of this post because I’ve only got an hour or so before the baby wakes up. I was speaking to my carbonation mentor, Melodist K, this morning via text and mentioned agar agar clarification and told him I would put a post up about it. I have had this one in the chamber for a minute and figured I should probably do a post for April. At any rate, this recipe is straight out of Dave Arnold’s ground breaking cocktail tome, Liquid Intelligence, but in this particular instance, there are no photos, so hey, I actually remembered to take some photos of the process for once. Lots.

Why the hell would you ever need to clarify juice?

To be fancy
For use in carbonated cocktails, duh.

There’s a number of Carbonation Commandments you just cannot break. One of the big ones is that everything must be clarified as much as humanly possible. You want your CO2 to dissolve into your liquid and microscopic chunks of stuff get in the way. Yes, the cool dudes with centrifuges get all the chicks this way, but us old school guys can do it too. It’s not instantaneous, you will have to wait a day. Plan ahead.

Because this takes awhile, it is the first thing I do when I come in for my afternoon prep on Tuesday when I get to work. I do this before I do anything and it takes a whole five minutes.

Here’s the hardware you will need:

Four Quart Measuring Cup

Digital Scale

Chinois

Clean Apron

Whisk

Two Quart Pot

Half Half Hotel Pan

You will also need:

Day Old Lime Juice (Fresh works just as well)

Agar Agar Powder

Let’s get started here.

Weigh your old lime juice.

Take about a quarter of that lime juice

Weigh yourself some agar agar. The hard and fast rule is 1000 grams juice to 2 grams of agar. Yeah, it seems like a small amount because it is.

Heat the lime juice and whisk in your agar

Bring to a boil, shut it down, and then let it sit in the hot pot for a couple of minutes.

Incorporate into the other, cold lime juice.

Whisk it up, buttercup.

Pour the whole shebang into your half half hotel pan.

Ah yes, the glistening, sour behemoth!

Place into your freezer. We are very lucky to have a good one. Thank you, Koji Kid. Forever eternal over here, buddy.

It usually takes all of service to freeze over. In the meantime, set yourself up a chinois into your rinsed out four quart cup and strap a clean apron into it however way you want as long as it can strain.