Jeff Gordinier visits Alex Ott, a former bartender from Germany who has gone on to bigger and better-smelling things in the cool-hunting area.

For him, sorcery begins at home. Beneath a mounted surfboard in his apartment is the nook where Mr. Ott, who studied organic chemistry during his younger years at the Braunschweig University of Technology, likes to tinker.

It’s like a dorm-room version of a laboratory, complete with a microscope, a bouquet of pipettes and a spice rack crowded with essential oils “worth about $2 million,” he claimed. He even has a gas mask. “When you work with some oils, they’re very strong,” he said. “They’ll burn your nostrils.”

Mr. Ott’s curiosity about the mood-altering potential of various aromas and ingredients led to an immersion in “Meaningful Scents Around the World,” a dense 2006 book by Roman Kaiser that explores the chemical properties of unusual scents and flavors, from “watermelon snow” algae in the Swiss Alps to pine resin in Italy to Cordyceps sinensis, the prized “caterpillar fungus” of China. “I was hooked,” said Mr. Ott, who became so obsessed with bark extracts and botanicals that he now owns a signed copy of the tome. “It explained everything about volatile molecules, your brain, your olfactory bulb, memories. The juices and herbs and spices that I choose come from the studies that I’ve done.

“There are people who do research and read books, and then there are people who just do cosmopolitans and sling drinks, and they know nothing about these things. They’re more entertainers. Bartenders should never be people who come up with cocktails, because they have no education.”

How quaint, that somebody interesting doesn’t live in Brooklyn.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 16th, 2011 at 8:00 pm.