Sustainability in Beverage Programs
Sustainability in Beverage Programs: A Conversation with Connor, The Rosecomb
Sustainability is something that is very important to us here at Spec. I got to sit down with Connor Welsh, bar manager at The Rosecomb bar in Chattanooga, TN. We discuss why the concept of sustainability is important, why it makes sense for the hospitality industry, and a few ways to implement sustainability.
Dave: Give a little intro for yourself and a little bit about the Rosecomb bar.
Connor: My name is Connor Welsh, I moved to Chattanooga 3 years ago after college, planned on working in the fitness world. That’s what I went to school for. But after seeing an ad for Rosecomb, they had been open for only a couple weeks, I decided to check that out. I interviewed with the owners, Ryan and Chloe, and immediately from our first conversation there was a lot of good vibes from them and they felt good vibes from me. I started as an AM barback, so doing mostly prep work.
It felt like a huge risk, it was a pay cut, and also a cut in responsibility. But I felt so good about Ryan and Chloe, and what they were doing at Rosecomb, and what the mission of it was, it was only a matter of time that I would become more involved in what was going on over there. Fast forward to today, I’m now the bar manager over there.
Dave: Can you elaborate on the mission of Rosecomb and what Ryan and Chloe are all about a little bit?
Connor: The first thing that stood out to me is that Ryan and Chloe both really wanted to establish a great work culture there. They had both been in the industry for a very long time – decades between them, and worked at a lot of places where there were abusive managers, horrible hours, being overworked, being mistreated, being yelled at. They were really big on making work a fun place, full of laughter and encouragement.
Another thing that stood out is how they wanted to be the best, to pursue excellence. Not only in the work culture, but in the actual craft of the food, the cocktails, the space, the music, the vibe. They didn’t really want to sacrifice excellence for saving money, or making any compromises there, not that we didn’t spare any expenses, but pursuing excellence and performing our craft at the highest level was always a big goal of ours. We wanted to be the cleanest bar in town, serve the best cocktails in town, the most sustainable bar in town, the most fun and safe, and well compensating bar in town. We wanted to be at the top of everything. Not from some selfish perspective, but if this is going to be your career, why not pursue being the best at what you do.
Dave: So you mentioned wanting to be the most sustainable bar in town. Can you go into why that’s important to you and Ryan and Chloe?
Connor: So I think anyone who works in the industry knows how much waste there can be. I’ll define waste as products that are made or grown that end up going completely unused and go to a landfill, or products that are made and used that are only partially used. Then there is other kinds of waste such as labor that can go to waste. Compared to other bars in town or even in the country, as far as our number of tickets to number of staff working, it’s very low. At most we have 10 people working in the building at once (that’s back of house, front of house, management, etc.) There’s only 20 people working at Rosecomb total. We don’t want people standing around, just wasting our money, so we try and operate as efficiently as possible.
As far as why, well one - not being wasteful and in turn being more sustainable, is actually more cost effective for bars and restaurants. There are certain situations where it’s not, where you may need to buy different products that aren’t less wasteful, or work harder to buy certain produce that’s not in season, but for the most part being sustainable is actually more profitable for the bar itself. And two, we actually believe that being responsible and taking care of the earth as best as we can is really our duty. I think it’s a pretty selfish standpoint not to think about that, because the effects of being wasteful are not really going to be felt by me or my generation, but will be felt by future generations, and so I think it’s important to keep that in mind in the ways that we do things.
Dave: So I know you have some very practical ways of implementing that concept of “not being wasteful” on the product level. I know you’ve mentioned intentionality behind creating products, garnishes, general re-use, etc.
Connor: Well for us a lot of this revolves around this concept of “circular cocktails”. A lot of this comes from the planning phase of the cocktail. Thinking about how it’s built, and trying to re-use ingredients in the lifecycle of the cocktail. What I mean by that is let’s say you have a cocktail that has a syrup in it, and that syrup is infused with cucumber and basil. What you can do with the garnish for that cocktail is use cucumber and basil, and that cucumber can be the freshest cucumber in house. Obviously once the garnish goes into the drink and that drink goes to the customer, you can’t take that back and re-use that. Which is a secondary point of using edible garnishes. But let’s say at the end of the night you have extra garnishes that are un-used (un-served), you can freeze them, and when you’re making the syrup for this cocktail, the next day you can take those frozen un-used garnishes, and use those for the syrup instead. You can also use that for the butt of a cucumber, or the stem of basil, etc. Because the presentation of these ingredients doesn’t matter for the syrup, you can use more of the produce.
Dave: How does the idea of presentation and “edible garnishes” factor into this as well?
Connor: Yeah. So I’m actually talking about a real cocktail on our menu, it’s called the Frida Juanita. We actually garnish that drink with cucumber. We thought about cucumber and basil, but at the end of the day basil isn’t edible as a garnish. Yes it’s functional, it adds to the smell experience, but it can’t exactly be consumed as is, which in my mind is a point off for sustainability. As far as garnishes go, there is a lot of of dogma involved, but for me the question is: is the garnish functional outside of aesthetics. Like do we want to just reach people on instagram because the garnish is pretty? An example would be a cocktail umbrella. It doens’t smell like anything, if anything it probably smells like wood. It’s really only for looks. And it’s not to say I or my team have never used cocktail umbrellas as garnishes, but it really needs to be intentional. The times that we have used them, like right now we have a cocktail called Marsha and the Hot Peaches, which is a reference to the drag theatre company in New York City. A popular photo of Marsha was her with an umbrella, and the Rosecomb team thought the cocktail umbrella as a garnish would be a cool way to raise awareness of Marsha’s story and the history behind that, and so from that perspective we decided it would be worth it. Again, the important thing is intentionality. If it’s not going to be edible, or functional, with smells or whatever, in any way, then maybe more thought should be given. Both from a sustainability point of view, but also from a cost point of view. Because it’s obviously cheaper not to garnish.
One last point: no garnish, when done intentionally, on a drink is still a form of garnish. It’s perfectly acceptable to present a cocktail with nothing fancy on the glass, you know, without a lemon swath, or a dried grapefruit wedge or whatever, as long as it’s done intentionally and the customer is aware of the decision behind it, then no garnish could be a sexy sustainable garnish. It just really depends on what the intention behind it is. I think that should be more normalized, and not be considered lazy or anything like that.
Dave: Yeah, I love that concept of intentionality, it applies to almost everything in life. And especially in cocktail programs, the ones that seem to be more elevated always carry a deeper vibe of intentionality. Going back to the idea of circular cocktails, what else do you do at Rosecomb?
Connor: So another thing we do is Super Juice. The person I heard about this from is Nick from a bar called Expobar. Basically Super Juice is an alternative to plain lemon juice, lime juice, and orange juice. It turns out that super juice is actually better than those normal juices in a few ways.
First of all it tastes better. The reason for that is because to make super juice, you’re basically extracting all the flavor from the piece of the fruit. You’re using the oils from the peels, you have some of the bitterness and body from the pith, and you have the acidity from the actual juice. Whereas the normal juice only is just the plain juice. So super juice is a better representation of what the actual citrus tastes like.
Another reason it’s better is that it lasts longer than normal juice. We have gone 4-5 days before we can tell a difference in taste in a cocktail with normal juice, with super juice, I've gone 3-4 weeks (at home) before being able to tell a taste difference.
It’s also cheaper to make. Also, you get a way better yield – you can make a lot more with a lot less actual produce. This is really what makes it score points on the sustainability.
As far as how it’s made, my version actually uses the bitterness and body of the pith in the recipe, whereas I guess the traditional recipe only uses the peels and the juice. So my recipe has an extra step. It’s basically Nick’s recipe with an extra step.
So limes and lemons specifically have different makeups of acids inside them. Lemons contains primarily citric acid, and limes contains citric acid as well as malic acid. There’s also a third acid, but it actually contributes to the juice spoiling faster, so that acid is excluded in this process.
You take any leftover wedges, peel those and set those aside in a container. For lemons, add 1:1 weight of the peels to citric acid. Shake it up, set aside for 2 hours. For limes, it’s the weight of the peels with 66% citric acid and 33% malic acid combo. The ratio is based on what the makeup of the raw juice would be. So the acids are going to basically pull the oils out of the peels, and you’ll actually see the peels start to brown. It’s the same thing as when you express a lemon or lime peel into a cocktail and get all those nice flavors from that.
To get the amount of water to use, multiply the weight of the peels you used and multiply by 16.67. Then you put the fruit pieces after you’ve squeezed the juice out into that water for 30 minutes. Strain all that out. Take the acid and peel mixture, throw into a blender and blend until it’s as fine as possible. Then combine the peel mixture, the water, and the fresh juice. At the end, you basically have a mixture of water and acid which very closely matches the content of the actual juice.
Important to realize it’s not going to taste exactly the same as fresh squeezed juice, but it’s not supposed to. It’s supposed to taste better and more flavorful. There are times we’ve had to adjust our cocktail recipes by like ⅛ ounce to really dial in the flavor, but it’s pretty minor.
Also the concept really only applies to citrus: limes, lemons, oranges, grapefruits (although I haven't found yet the actual acid makeup of grapefruit). We do lime juice, lemon juice, and an acid-adjusted orange juice. Orange is a little tricky because the acid make up is a lot different, it’s sweeter. So the orange super juice has the same flavor as regular orange juice but it’s more acidic more like lemon or lime juice. In cocktails this is nice because we can actually then use orange super juice to make a whiskey sour for example.
So for example, making lime juice, let’s say you have a bunch of extra lime wedges at the end of a night, you freeze those and then you can use those in your super juice recipe. The peels, juice, all of it. So you are basically not wasting anything, down to a single lime wedge.
I’ve made 6 liters of super juice from 10 limes and a bunch of leftover lime wedges that would otherwise have been thrown away. Usually with 10 limes I would maybe get ½ liter with normal juice.
Dave: So do you think your guests notice a difference in taste and quality with the super juice?
Connor: So we’ve had other bar owners come in, and we tell them what we’re doing, and we’ll do a blind taste test as comparison, and 100% of the time they prefer the super juice cocktail. Probably a normal person wouldn’t be able to tell a huge difference, like I don’t think anyone would like exclaim “this is the best daiquiri of all time”. But I think it’s a good thing that it kind of goes unnoticed, but at the same time I also believe we make some of the best cocktails around, and I do think super juice contributes to that on at least some level.
Dave: Any other concepts of sustainability you want to mention?
Connor: One more thing is general re-use. We try and avoid buying any sort of bottles for containers. We get into the habit of re-using bottles for our juices and syrups. I think a lot of bars are in the habit of doing that.
We also save a ton of caps and corks from bottles. So we never have to find a way to seal bottles. Any bottles we don’t use we obviously recycle. We make a really big effort to buy the thinnest quart containers possible, obviously you have to balance thin-ness and durability, but we do make an effort.
Another random example is any rugs that customers see that get dirty or worn out, instead of throwing them away we just move them to an area that only staff sees.
Really it’s about thinking really hard before you throw something away.
I think most of this can be summed up in just being intentional in what you’re doing. Intentionality goes a long way in trying to be more sustainable, and at the end of the day you can be more cost-effective, more profitable by implementing that simple concept.
Here are Connor’s recipes for Lime Super Juice and Lemon Super Juice:
LIME SUPER JUICE:
Juice of 1 lime
Peel of 1 lime
Citric acid: 0.66 x weight of peels
Malic acid: 0.33 x weight of peels
Water: 16.66 x weight of peels
Using a fine-grade peeler, peel citrus. Set aside peeled citrus.
Place peels in a sealable container and record its weight in grams (save this number for later).
Multiply the weight of the peels by 0.66 to find out how much citric acid to add, and multiply by 0.33 for malic acid.
Seal container and shake to evenly coat the peels with acid.
Set aside for 2 hours.
Juice the peeled citrus. Set aside the spent hulls.
Measure out 16.66 grams of water x weight of the peels and place in a sealable container. Soak spent hulls in water for 1 hour.
Once 2 hours have passed, blend the acid-peel mixture until peels are chopped up and the acid is incorporated.
Using a nut milk bag, strain out the solids and discard. Combine infused water, fresh juice, and acid-peel mixture in a large container. Finely strain and bottle the liquid in it's respective serving bottle. Label, date, and store in the walk-in.
LEMON SUPER JUICE:
Juice of 1 lemon
Peel of 1 lemon
Citric acid: same as weight of peels
Water: 16.66 x weight of the peels
Using a fine-grade peeler, peel citrus. Set aside peeled citrus.
Place peels in a sealable container and record its weight in grams (save this number for later).
Add equal parts in weight citric acid to peels.
Seal container and shake to evenly coat the peels with acid.
Set aside for 2 hours.
Juice the peeled citrus. Set aside the spent hulls.
Measure out 16.66 grams of water x weight of the peels and place in a sealable container. Soak spent hulls in water for 1 hour.
Once 2 hours have passed, blend the acid-peel mixture until peels are chopped up and the acid is incorporated.
Using a nut milk bag, strain out the solids and discard. Combine infused water, fresh juice, and acid-peel mixture in a large container. Finely strain and bottle the liquid in its respective serving bottle. Label, date, and store in the walk-in.
For further reading about Super Juice, see this article about Expo Bar here: