When fine-tuning the flavor of dishes and drinks, I’ve always turned to the usual bench of taste and aroma boosters: salt and pepper, lemon juice, herbs and spices, this or that condiment. One ingredient that never, ever came to mind was water.

Then a few months ago, the London bartender Tony Conigliaro told me that weak cocktails can be more aromatic than stronger drinks. More recently, a barista showed me that I could make tastier coffee by brewing it with less ground coffee and more water. It’s no secret that the alcohol in drinks can get in the way of our enjoying their flavors.


Diluting drinks
can improve
aroma and taste.


Fans and judges of Scotch whiskeys often sample their flavor by “nosing” them, or sniffing the aroma that gathers in the glass. Nosers have long known that diluting the spirit with roughly the same amount of water reduces the alcohol burn. And at the same time, strangely, amplifies the aromas.

How can water reduce one sensation and amplify another? Aroma molecules are more chemically similar to alcohol molecules than they are to water, so they tend to cling to alcohol, and are quicker to evaporate out of a drink when there’s less alcohol to cling to. Audrey Saunders of the Pegu Club in New York told me that realizing this led her to develop a series of what she calls “inverted drinks,” in which spirits play a supporting role to vermouth or other low-alcohol ingredients. Her Madeira Martinez combines one part gin (40 percent alcohol) and two parts Madeira (20 percent) for a drink that starts at around 30 percent alcohol before ice dilutes it further. The goal is to highlight the flavors of the weaker ingredient. High-alcohol wines, those that exceed about 14 percent alcohol, are often described as “hot” and unbalanced. Alcohol’s irritating effects account for the heat.

And chemists have found that high alcohol levels accentuate a wine’s bitterness, reduce its apparent acidity and diminish the release of aroma molecules. Alcohol particularly holds down fruity and floral aromas. Wine dilution has been practiced since the days of ancient Greece, so I tried it on a California zinfandel with 14.9 percent alcohol.

I poured a partial glass of the wine and added about a quarter of its volume in water, to get it down to 12 percent. A glass of the full-strength wine tasted hot, dense, jammy and a little sulfurous, while the diluted version was lighter but still full of flavor, tarter, more fruity than jammy, and less sulfurous. It was no substitute for a true 12 percent wine, made from grapes harvested with less fermentable sugar and a different balance of flavors . But the watered-down wine was surprisingly pleasant, and maybe more suited to summer evenings .

There’s even a place for more water in coffee. I learned this from James Hoffmann, a 2007 winner of the World Barista Championship. Mr. Hoffmann is the proprietor of Square Mile Coffee, a roasting company in London . He offered me a taste of several coffees , all roasted lightly to avoid losing their distinctive qualities in the intense but more generic flavors of a dark roast. Each cup was less concentrated than I’m used to , yet delicious and distinctive.

Mr. Hoffmann explained that industry standards for brewed coffee strength vary greatly, from around 1.25 percent extracted coffee solids in the United States to something approaching 2 percent in Brazil and in specialty coffeehouses. He aims for 1.5 percent, and gets it consistently with the help of a precision water boiler and a digital scale on which he does the brewing, pouring water to the gram. A tablespoon of water more or less can shift the extracted solids by a perceptible amount.

It also matters how the coffee solids are extracted. Mr. Hoffmann said that concentrated brews are often made palatable by using a lot of coffee and reducing the brewing time or the temperature to extract only the easy-going portion of its flavor materials.

The result is intense but one-dimensional. More fully extracting a smaller amount of gently roasted, highquality coffee, as a number of newwave brewing advocates are doing, brings out its full range of tastes and aromas. “When I drink coffee I’m looking for clarity, by which I mean distinguishable, characterful, interesting flavors,” Mr. Hoffmann said. The lightness of his brews did seem to highlight their different aromas, which changed but remained enjoyable even as the remains cooled .

“No other liquid I know evolves as much as you drink it,” he said. So I’m making my coffee with more water now, and getting many more cups from a bag of beans.


HAROLD MCGEE/ESSAY