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Memory Priming and Mnemonics – Learning to Learn – LISTS, We’re Memorizing Lists!

Drink Recipes are Essentially LISTS!



Broken down to their most basic elements, drink recipes are comprised of four factors: 

Exact Varying Quantities (of each)
Ingredient in a list (put into specific)
Glassware (made according to)
How Prepared.

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So while the majority of what makes the drink “the drink” is the list of ingredients, we have to modify the list in order to add the proper processes required to make the drink properly. That goes for almost anything to do with alcohol though, whether brewing, distilling, or making wine, etc.

Do the steps wrong at the wrong temperatures, for the wrong amounts of time and everything goes straight to hell.

For our purposes, one of the modifications to the list is the glassware.

When you’re working hard and fast and it’s crowded and loud the first thing to do when you get an order for several drinks is to grab the right glassware.  That’s why we not only learn individual drink ingredient lists, but why we learn lists of drinks by category and not necessarily always by main liquor ingredients. Otherwise when we learned to tend bar we’d be learning Vodka drinks, Scotch drinks, Rum drinks etc.


Our lists are broken down into drinking vessel (glassware) as a rough indicator of category

NOTE: Drink Category and type of glass are not the same. There are more categories of drinks than there are kinds of glassware in most bars today.


So while there are such categories as: 

“Daisies,”
“Flips,”
“Cobblers,”
“Shrubs,”
“Blazers,”
“Cups,”
“Toddies,”
“Slings,”
“Juleps,”
“Negus’,”
“Sours,”
“Fixes,”
“Fizzes,”
“Collins’,”
“Nogs,”
“Cocktails,” and 
“Punches” (I’ve left out more than a few)…
 
Today we mostly start out learning bartending by learning the glassware each category goes into first, and then the groupings of common ingredients, common formulaic proportions (ex.: rocks type: 1 1/2 oz. main liquor, 1/2 oz. of sweet liqueur), and the method of making the drink (shake & strain, build in glass, blend, etc.).   

Today our basic categories of drink (all of them glassware focused) are:

Martini & Manhattan
Highballs
Classic Cocktails (Sours, Margaritas, Daiquiris)
Fruit Juice based Drinks
Frozen Drinks
Cream Drinks
Cognacs, Brandies, Liqueurs
Coffee Drinks
Rocks
Tropical and Tall Drinks (essentially “large glass”)
Wines
Beers
Shooters


NOTE HERE: CLICK THE PLUS SIGN FOR MY METHOD
The method I use is known as SPEED BARTENDING – there’s no shaking every drink and straining over fresh ice. Many (but not all) of the ones that need shaking get the short shake. The ones that are full-on shaken and strained into cocktail (martini) glasses are shaken and strained into chilled glassware. This is for clubs. If you’re experienced and disagree with what I say here that’s fine. The two partners I had in NYC in my club days didn’t learn speed bartending and I never tried to teach them. I rang up twice as many drinks as either one of them. Your pick.
Now that your customer has given you their drink order you grab all of your different glasses and ice the ones up that need ice, and ice up your “up” cocktail glasses and spray some club soda into them1. You set them all up on the spill mat with all of the glasses requiring Vodka right next to each other (rims touching), all of the glasses requiring Whiskey right next to each other (rims touching), etc., etc. until you’ve got all seven, eight, nine (whatever the number) glasses ready.  


Mnemonics, Priming, and Associating to Improve Memory


Whether you’re a brand new bartender or have plenty of experience you can improve your memory skills using numerous memory techniques called mnemonics (tools you can use to remind yourself of drink recipes and other information). Some mnemonic techniques include loci2(also referred to as “station” by Dr. Anthony Metivier and his followers), peg, and the story and link systems.


Mnemonics can remind you by associating a letter or number to information. For example, if you’re trying to remember the ingredients in a Jolly Rancher, use the first letter of each ingredient as a cue. By using the word SPAM, you can remember each of the ingredients: Sour Mix, Pineapple Juice, Apple Pucker, and Midori. “SPAM” is an Acronym. 


Similar to the Acronym system above, today’s bartending schools teach simple formulaic drinks using Acrostics, also using the first letter of each ingredient (For instance a B-52 Shooter is “Kills Bad Guys” which stands for “Kahlua, Bailey’s, Grand Marnier”). Those Acrostics are used for simple formulaic drink ingredient lists for drinks such as shooters because they’re easy “one part A, one par B, and one part C” drink recipes. When I say “easy” I don’t mean to say that these are easy for everyone. They’re relatively easier to remember using Acronyms and/or Acrostics. That’s because of association and something called Priming, as well as something called Chunking. Jolly Rancher “SPAM” (Sour, Pineapple, Apple Pucker, Midori) is an example of Chunking. You take a bunch of information and “Chunk” it into one word, and B-52 “Kills Bad Guys” (Kahlua, Bailey’s, Grand Marnier) is more of an association with a sentence that makes sense (The B-52 airplane kills the bad guys). 



Priming – Remembering “Related” Things and Lost Information.



Thus, with Acrostics and the story you’re associating with the drink ingredients turned into a sentence, a process known as priming is used to help you remember. When you’re priming memories, you remember some related things (in this case that the B-52 kills the bad guys) in hopes of remembering the “lost” information, which is the ingredients. Another example of priming would be if you forget where you put your car keys, so you retrace your steps. You try to remember where you were and what you were doing, “priming out” the memory of where you left your keys by going over what’s familiar that you CAN remember and seeing if that jogs your memory.


Part of the secret formula of the B-52 Acrostic is that “B-52s kill bad guys” so the drink name is the cue for easy association and recall. This is a known form of memory priming. Simply put, I can prime your memory to remember the word banana if I give you the word “yellow” first. 


You can structure information all sorts of ways to help you remember it. If you organize the information by serializing, chunking, or even rhyming it, you can remember it.


These relatively simple “one and done” Mnemonic Acrostics are great for simple lists, but not great for fraction of an ounce quantity, glassware, mixing method, or garnish. The reason schools and most individuals have Acrostics for shooters like the  B-52 are because almost all shooters are 1 part, 1 part, 1 part drinks, all shaken and strained into shooter glasses, and almost none of them have any garnish.



Learning More Than Just Shooters:



We (all bartenders and schools using “simple” Acrostics and Acronyms) and start learning to be more elaborate in our encoding for all cocktails we can’t simply “remember” easily and long term with our natural memory without consciously trying.



The main thing we’re doing now with these “Ingredient Lists” (drinks) is getting into more Elaborative Encoding than merely using the most simple related story imagery Acrostics as in “Kills Bad Guys” for the B-52, or “Just Pay Cash” for the Red Headed Slut, or Keep Bouncing Around for an Orgasm.


What we’re doing here with Acrostics and Acronyms is to “chunk” information into larger chunks so we can later recall chunks of chunks (multiple drinks in a chunk, multiple ingredients in a drink – chunks of chunks). There’s more to it than that though. As long as we’re associating a chunk of information encoded within a word, or a sentence, we can elaborate and expand that story a bit to include other clues as to how much of each ingredient, exactly what glass, and exactly what garnish. That’s where my images, the images I’ve created for you to use to remember fractions of ounces of ingredients comes in. These will be VERY helpful to you in recalling later with absolute certainty just how much of each ingredient you should be pouring to make a drink to proper specification “according to the recipe”. 


I’ve written a follow up post to this called BARTENDING AND DRINK MEMORIZATION which covers a more advanced drink, with a lot of varying ingredient measurements, the Singapore Sling. You’ll be able to see how I take the images I’ve created for measurements and applied them along with an Acronym to create a complete drink memorization mnemonic covering both the ingredients and the amounts.



Footnotes 👇
  1. USING CLUB SODA TO CHILL A COCKTAIL GLASS: You’re going to use club soda in an iced up cocktail glass to chill the glass more quickly. Here’s the science: Warm water rises, cold water sinks. Ice is expanded water in solid form, lower in density (weighing less) than water so it floats on top of the warm layer. As the bubbles of soda expand they rise up to the top and push club soda ahead of them forming a mini current, pulling bubbles up. As this happens the warmer soda water is chilled by the ice and is driven to the sides of the glass, where it falls down and cools the wall of the glass. This “up through the center/force sideways/slide down the edges of the glass movement quickly chills the entire glass more swiftly than water and ice just sitting there. The club soda creates a physical action powered by the expanding CO2 gas.[]
  2. LOCI, or “Stations”: Some people call the Memory Palace the “method of loci,” because “loci” is the Latin plural for “location” as found in the anonymous book
    Rhetorica ad Herrenium, amongst other ancient texts dealing with Ars
    Memorativa (the art of memory). The basic concept that has lasted
    throughout history is this: Memory Palaces contains a number of “loci” or locations and that the person memorizes material by creating associative imagery and leaving it at various locations within the Memory Palace.



    Just as Simonides of Ceos could tell the authorities where various victims had been standing when the building collapsed, we can “find” information we’ve memorized by looking for it at the place we left it in our Memory Palaces.



    Since ancient times, different terms have been used to describe this
    process, including “the Roman Room method” and “the journey method.”



    Although the technique has never gone away, it has recently been
    revitalized on a larger scale in contemporary culture through Thomas
    Harris’s fiction about the serial killer Hannibal Lecter (from Silence of the Lambs, amongst other films and novels) and various memory
    championships around the world. Sherlock Holmes has used a Memory
    Palace on television as has the character Patrick Jane in The Mentalist.[]
Footnotes 👆
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