What made you leave Noma and launch into the drinks industry?

We’d been doing so much hard work on research and innovation in flavour, creating these sense memories that we were sharing with 40 lucky people every night. And I started to think about how I could democratise it in a way that made it available to many more people…

But it’s still a leap from food to drink, isn’t it?

In my head, it wasn’t such a big leap. It’s the difference between going from being a painter to being a sculptor, right? For me, the medium is flavour; I now just have a slightly different set of tools to work with. My business partner Mark Emil Hermansen and I sat in my kitchen discussing how to capture and share flavour, to bottle a sensory experience and it became obvious – literally bottle it. And alcohol is a great carrier for volatile compounds, which produce aroma and flavour. So I said, ‘Why don’t we start a distillery?’ And he went, ‘OK.’

In contemporary cuisine, there seems to be two schools of thought – either source great local, seasonal ingredients, and don’t mess with them too much; or confound expectations by transforming flavours, textures etc, and create an experience. Where are you on that spectrum?

At Noma, one of the things that we tried to do was recreate the perfect experience. Probably the best possible strawberry that you’ve ever had in your life was picked and eaten in a moment in a sun-drenched field. Even if that strawberry is harvested and immediately brought to your restaurant, it’s been in a truck for two hours, sits on a bench in the kitchen for a few more. God forbid someone puts it in the fridge! So, some manipulation is required to somehow shift the flavours back to that perfect moment of picking it off the bush. We have the same ethos at Empirical – we have conversations with farmers to create a better system, perhaps harvest earlier, or choose from one side of a field over another. Then, in our R&D lab, we manipulate an ingredient – whether by trying different ways of smoking it or various maceration options.

I’ve heard a phrase associated with what you did at Nordic Food Labs – “exploring the limits of edibility”. Are you now exploring the limits of drinkability?

Yes, we used to present a talk on delineating the edible and inedible. Since Noma set certain limitations (such as using only Scandinavian ingredients, therefore no citrus fruit), we had to find solutions (could gooseberries or pine needles provide that acidity?). But exploring uncommon ingredients allows that kind of juxtaposition of novel and familiar.

It seems logical that you moved into alcohol then. Fermentation is basically food going off but in a tasty way!

One hundred per cent. I always think of fermentation as a collaboration with microbes, and that’s what makes it exciting, and gives you a lot of room to play with. If you can push the parameters of where the microbes are happiest, you can create a lot of flavour nuance. That’s why, at Empirical, we’re very keen on doing things from scratch and working with a lot of different fermentation techniques. The transformations and creation of volatile compounds produced by this incredibly complex micro-organism that’s been evolving for billions of years is virtually impossible to achieve by just mixing a couple of different molecules yourself.

Looking at your most recent releases, Soka (€40, 500ml) is made from sorghum, but isn’t the same as traditional baijiu, while Symphony 6 (€50, 500ml) has botanicals like a gin but without juniper. Are you trying to smash the idea of spirit categories?

To me, drinks categories are arbitrary – and I mean arbitrary not in the random sense, but as an act of will, decided by people who would make money from the definition. People outside our industry would be surprised if you told them that whisky and gin can be made from the same ingredient, but one has a flavour of juniper and the other is put into a barrel. These limitations are outmoded. It was the same in food 30 years ago: did you cook French food, Nordic food, modern British? It was liberating to move on from those distinctions and evolve. The same applies to drink. For the customer too. If you are forced to define yourself as a whisky person, you might miss out on a smoky mezcal you’d like.

So what is different about Soka as a sorghum spirit?

It didn’t start with the base ingredient; it was about exploring a technique. We sometimes do that – a deep dive into every possibility of, for example, fat washing, using every possible animal or vegetable fat. I had asked our head of R&D to ferment anything with sugar in it. Sorghum cane grows in the US and is used for molasses, bioethanol and animal feed. When distilled, it carries lovely grassy hay notes. But I happened to taste the raw juice and our plans went completely sideways. It has these green apple and melon notes, with sorrel and fresh-cut grass. So, then we embarked on a series of fermentations, distillations and blendings to create a spirit which, again, captured the moment of encountering that flavour profile.

And Symphony 6… what moment is that trying to capture?

Well, that is supposed to capture an imaginary moment – a memory of twilight in a sunny place, perhaps California, years ago, when you were young and in love… an idealised, possibly false memory, as if in a movie or a song. The actual composition came from experiments with botanicals that are more associated with perfume than with drinks. We were looking at different ways of achieving citrus elements without the fruit. I’d used citrus leaves before in cooking, and we discovered that combining them with coffee leaves gave us this interplay between light and dark – that twilight space and this kicked off the rest of the creative process. We folded in more aromatic botanicals inspired by the perfume industry: blackcurrant buds, vetiver, ambrette seeds. And finally, we used a distillation with fig leaves to provide a bridge between the high citrus notes and earthy coffee leaves.

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