The ‘freezing realm.’ It sounds like a fairy tale kingdom. A place from a movie like Frozen, where magical powers can lead to unexpected adventures. Iain McPherson, owner of award-winning Edinburgh cocktail bars Panda & Sons, Hoot The Redeemer, and Nauticus, sees his craft with the same joy and wonder.
“You know when you see someone eating gelato and you see that look of joy on their faces? I see that same expression when people drink our cocktails,” Iain McPherson muses. “Everyone automatically associates cold with darkness and sadness, and warmth with positivity. But I think freezing techniques are bringing joy and warmth to people. That’s my magical power,” he adds with a smile.
A Fairy Tale of Frozen Cocktails
There’s a cartoonish joy to watching Iain pootle around in dungarees in the Brain Melting Society lab. Seeing him slide trays of candy into a freeze dryer. When he pulls them out they’ve ballooned like Claus Oldenberg sculptures.
The thickeners and stabilizers in the sweets, he explains in the voiceover in which he’s clearly trying to downplay his utter joy at the whole process, interrupt the blast freezers work, blowing them up to donut size with the crunchy texture of meringues and turning them into ready-made garnishes.
“Bob The Builder is my dungaree-wearing idol because he fixes problems and he builds things and he creates things,” Iain nods approvingly.
Iain has been dubbed the Willy Wonka of cocktails. But, he points out, the workaday reality isn’t very Gene Wilder (who played Willy in the original Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory movie, with his top hat and cane in hand, industrious, adoring Umpa-Lumpas crowding around.) “I take out the bins, empty the ice machine, unblock the toilets.”
From Barback to Bartender’s Bartender
Part of that is knowing his place. Iain started as a humble barback, and he appreciates the grind of that entry-level position. “And I don’t want to get in the team’s way,” he adds modestly. “They’re so fast that I think if I go behind the bar I’ll just stress them out if I start making drinks.”
He’s happy enough working on techniques then, from time to time, hitting the road and spreading the message. “I’m pretty much focused on being an educator and an innovator these days, and being a brand ambassador for Panda & Sons.”
There’s lots to keep him occupied. His travels, warm hospitality when guests come to Edinburgh and the game-changing cocktails his team serve there have earned him such peer plaudits that he has just been named The World’s 50 Best Bars’ Altos Bartender’s Bartender 2024.
Because, beyond the techniques Iain still likes to have a good time. “I love chugging drinks,” he confesses. “I think one of the best guest shifts was at Argo, Four Seasons Hong Kong’s multi-award winning bar, for their birthday earlier this year. We had 700 people through in 2 hours. Insane. We created a new thing with Fredrico which we called an umbrella luge. We got an upside down umbrella full of booze and then we sprayed it everywhere. There’s definitely a new party piece – the umbrella luge.”
And then there’s Iain’s adventures in the tundra of possibilities the frozen realm offers.
Exploring the Frozen Frontier
We probably know more about the moon than the depths of the ocean. And we carry libraries in our pockets, yet the secrets of ice and frost in mixology are still waiting to be unlocked, “When you think about it,” Iain McPherson, owner of the award-winning Edinburgh cocktails bars: Panda & Sons, Hoot The Redeemer and Nauticus, considers, “we have the sum of human knowledge a tap away through Google and ChatGP, yet we know so little about, for example, Antarctica.”
Iain’s fascination with freezing techniques has led him to develop a suite of approaches that sound almost scientific: switching, sous pression, freeze drying, and cryo concentration.
“Kitchens have had eons to perfect their craft,” Iain observes. “We’re just beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible when we embrace the cold. Each icy technique we discover feels like planting a flag on new territory.”
Switched On
It’s developed into a suite of approaches: switching, sous pression, freeze-drying, and cryo-concentration, that sound like activities Dr. Frankenstein enjoy.
Take one of Iain’s key innovations, ‘switching’. He explains: “It’s basically a method of freeze-concentration. You want to find what the freezing point is. For 40% alcohol it’s minus 27°C. There will be some alcohol getting frozen, but it’s mostly water. So we take that out, and we’re left with a ‘gap’. We generally switch it with other non-alcoholic stuff, like coconut.”
This technique allows McPherson to add flavor and texture to cocktails without diluting the alcohol content, as demonstrated in his Coconut Daiquiri.
If he could create a bartender by switching parts of other bartenders in, what would he make, we wonder. “I’ve actually gone proper Frankenstein on this one. There’s parts of many different ones. I’d take the fun of Ignacio ‘Nacho’ Jimenez from Super Bueno, and boss entertainment of Masa Urushido from Katana Kitten, the flavor curiosity of Hampus from Röda Huset, the efficiency of Tayer + Elementary’s Monica Berg, and my own curious mind!”
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