July 14th is Bastille Day, but don't worry, there's still cake, so don't lose your head. In this episode, we'll be talking all about Bastille Day, what it commemorates, and how the United States even had an influence on it happening. Ingrid Folkers, cocktail bartender at Raleigh, North Carolina's own Whiskey Kitchen, will be stopping by a little later to talk with us about how she approaches cocktail creation, her favorite history rumors, and how being a bartender has a lot in common with being a pastry chef. But first, a word from our sponsor. Upgrade your cocktail game with Remedy Cocktail Company's handcrafted bitters. Order online at RemedyCocktailCompany.com and choose from over 20 flavors. Elevate your drink experience today. Ah, Bastille Day. Le 14th of July, or the 14th of July. A date that resonates through the cobblestone streets of France, much like the United States, 4th of July. Now you might be inclined to think of this as just another national holiday, where the French get to show off their impressive firework skills, and open a few more bottles of wine than usual. But there's a reason they're lighting those fireworks, and it's not just to create Instagrammable silhouettes of the Eiffel Tower. It takes us back to a turbulent revolutionary period in France's history, the French Revolution, and it wasn't just a case of a royal with a fondness for cake and an obliviousness to the struggles of her people. Let's wind the clocks back to the late 18th century. France, despite the glitter and glamour of Versailles, was economically on its knees. A combination of costly wars, including the American War of Independence, where France had generously helped out the rebels, and the extravagant spending habits of Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, had left the country's coffers nearly empty. Now, picture the stark contrast. The monarchy and the nobility living a life of opulence, enjoying the finest French cuisine, while the third estate, a massive 98% of the population, were grappling with steep bread prices and a harsh winter. And the clergy? They were somewhat caught in the middle, praying for divine intervention to lift the country out of its troubles, and simultaneously trying to maintain their privileges. Some sided with the nobility, while others sympathized with the impoverished commoners, leading to a religious faction that wasn't as united as you might expect. To tackle this dire economic crisis, King Louis XVI did something unprecedented. He called for a meeting of the estates general in 1789, something that hadn't happened for 175 years. Now, this wasn't just any meeting. It was an assembly that included representatives from all three estates. But here's where the equal representation fell flat. Each estate, despite the vast differences in their population, had only one vote. This meant that the first and second estates could, and often did, join forces to outvote the third estate, even though the latter represented the vast majority of the French populace. You can probably guess that this didn't sit well with the third estate. So they did what anyone would do when they're not invited to the party. They threw their own. The third estate, together with a few sympathetic members of the clergy, broke off and formed the National Assembly. They took a bold step, making a solemn pledge to draft a constitution that would put a leash on the monarchy's power. You can imagine that King Louis XVI didn't take too kindly to these political upstarts trying to curtail his authority. As rumors swept through the capital that the king was planning to suppress this rebellious national assembly, Paris became a simmering cauldron of tension. It boiled over on the morning of July 14th, 1789, when a large crowd amassed outside the Bastille, a prison that was a looming symbol of royal tyranny. They were there not only to free a handful of prisoners, but to seize the much needed arms and gunpowder stored within its walls. Now, let's delve a little into the key players in the storming of the Bastille and the subsequent French Revolution. King Louis XVI obviously was a major figure. Often indecisive and seen as weak, he failed to grasp the severity of France's economic crisis and the rising tide of revolutionary sentiment. His Austrian-born queen, Marie Antoinette, was also a significant figure. Unpopular with the French due to her perceived extravagance and her failure to produce a male heir for a considerable time, she further stoked public unrest. The governor of the Bastille, Bernard René Delaunay, was a key figure on that fateful day. When the crowd demanded the release of the prisoners and the surrender of the fortress's armory, Delaunay ordered his men to open fire, inciting the storming of the Bastille. On the revolutionary side, there were notable figures such as George Danton, a leading figure in the early stages of the revolution, Maximilien Robespierre, one of the best known and influential figures of the French Revolution, and Jean-Paul Marat, a radical journalist and politician who was a vigorous defender of the Saint-Culats, the working-class radicals of Paris. The Bastille, when finally stormed, contained just seven prisoners, but was seen as a symbol of the monarchy's absolute power. Its fall was the spark that lit the powder keg of revolution, and it sent ripples through the country that the Third Estate, the common people of France, could defy the king and win. The aftermath of the storming of the Bastille led to significant political changes, to say the least. The king was compelled to recognize the National Assembly, which set about fulfilling their earlier pledge to create a constitution. Feudalism was scrapped, the church was forced to reform, and the declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen, a fundamental document in human rights, was adopted. Louis XVI's fate was sealed as the revolution took hold. His attempt to escape ended in his capture and eventual trial for high treason, leading to his execution in 1793 and marking the start of the radical phase of the revolution. It's interesting to note that when the Bastille was stormed, only seven prisoners were freed. And while this may not sound like a lot, the symbolic significance of this act was enormous. In fact, the Bastille wasn't even stormed for the prisoners, per se. The real treasure was the stash of cannons, as well as gunpowder that the mob needed for their muskets. Also, the Marquis de Sade, a famous French aristocrat and erotic novelist, was one of the inmates of the Bastille. But by a stroke of irony, he was transferred out just 10 days before the siege. Imagine the look on his face when he found out. Okay, back to the serious stuff. The reign of terror ensued, a period marked by political paranoia and a campaign of mass executions. France was officially declared a republic in 1792, but the revolution itself didn't calm down until around 1799. It led to a series of further changes, not the least of which was the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. Fast forward a few years. The 14th of July became an official national holiday in 1880. This was part of a larger project by the French Third Republic to create and enforce a national identity. And what could be better than a day celebrating the overthrow of the old regime? And that, folks, brings us to the present day. Bastille Day, or as the French say, La Fête Nationale, is marked with great pomp and fanfare. Paris sees a grand military parade marching down the historic Champs-Élysées, the oldest and largest regularly scheduled military parade in Europe. And the celebration continues with lavish feasts, dances, and parties that go on until the wee hours. All of France embraces the spirit of unity and freedom, echoing the values that were hard fought by the ancestors of this beautiful country. So there you have it, folks, the story of Bastille Day. It's not just a day on the calendar, but a reminder of the power that lies in the unity of people demanding change. Let's turn our focus back to the present, to our cocktail challenge. For this episode's challenge, our contestants will be seeing which of them can create the perfect cocktail to the spirit of liberty, equality, and fraternity given to the world by the storming of the Bastille and the French Revolution. So stick around after the break when we sit down with our guest, Ingrid Folkers of Raleigh, North Carolina's Whiskey Kitchen. A little later, we'll see how she fares when she has to go head to head with our AI contender. Will it be victory or the proverbial guillotine? Stick around to find out. I want to take a moment and say thank you for listening so far. I'd love it if you'd connect with the podcast on social media. We're Drinking With Robots on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. Oh, and threads now, I suppose. We definitely appreciate your likes and follows. Make sure to hit the subscribe button on whatever platform you're listening to our podcast on so you don't miss any episodes. Also, check out DrinkingWithRobots.com while you're at it. All right, we're here with Ingrid Folkers. She is resident cocktail bartender at Raleigh's own Whiskey Kitchen. Ingrid, thanks for being here. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. So as we talked about in the first part of the show, today's topic is Bastille Day, a holiday that's not really indigenous to America. But I found out in doing some research, we played a major role in the events that led to it. You know, having to dig back to 10th grade history. I don't know how much you had in your mind. I had to do a lot of research to get back to where I knew what it was all about. I did as well, yeah. One of the things I kind of thought was interesting was I was reading up on it and there was a discussion about the French involvement in the American Revolution and subsequent economic woes because of that that led to a lot of the conditions that prompted the French Revolution. And I kind of couldn't help but think, well, thanks for helping out, folks. Yeah, exactly. One of the things that I thought and found out I was very incorrect about was kind of the timing. I thought, oh, Bastille. That's where they like stormed the thing and then something about Marie Antoinette and let them eat cake and then they cut off her head. And I was like, whoa, I just compressed a lot of time. Yeah. I didn't know that the Bastille was, while it was a prison, it only had like seven inmates in when it was stormed, but it was an armory. Yeah, I knew it was an armory. I knew that they had gotten weapons from elsewhere and they're like, oh, they needed ammunition or something to kind of complete their revolution. Right. I was looking at it just earlier and I was curious, how many soldiers did they have versus how many French peasants? And it was something along the lines of 119 soldiers to like 700 peasants. It's way outnumbered. Oh, yeah. But then looking at the Wikipedia article that I was referencing, it had the casualties listed and it was kind of, as you would almost imagine, a couple of losses on the French monarchy side and then a lot of French peasant loss. And I was just like, oh. Yeah. One of the things I found interesting too, talking about things I didn't know, was I actually learned from you the origin of the coop. Yes. Oh, it's one of my favorite little fun facts that I get to share on the regular. Please, enlighten us. Behind the bar. It is rumored that the coop glass is modeled after Marie Antoinette's left breast, and that is why it has that bulbous shape to it. I find that amazing. If it's not true, it is probably the best origin story I have heard of anything in the bar. I'm pretty sure it's not true. I think it has been debunked, but it's such a fun story. It's fun to talk about anyway. Oh, absolutely. That's like what's rumored. So it's not actually, I don't think it's actually true. Yeah. It's a fun fact to share. Oh, absolutely. Or fun rumor to share, I should say. So speaking of Marie Antoinette, one of the things that I feel like over my entire life, you always hear the famous quote from Marie Antoinette, let them eat cake. Right. But that wasn't the case either. Yeah, that wasn't true either. So yeah, that's one of those things as well. That's like a fun story to tell, but isn't actually true. It makes for a good line in a history book, but is it actually true? And can you prove it? Or perhaps she said that in passing and it got blown up or she said something similar to it and it got blown out of proportions. But I think it has been officially debunked that she did not say let them eat cake. Yeah. I couldn't imagine anyone kind of realistically, even French monarchs, I couldn't imagine being that callous necessarily. Or oblivious. Right. Yeah. Red was a bare basics. Oh, yeah. And if they don't have that, they don't have other options. No, no, absolutely. So it is amazing when you think historically the role and it's gonna sound so nerdy, but the role of grain in both economics and political regimes, because here we have something as simple as grain. If we go back to Roman times, you know, the classic thing of how Roman emperors would kind of calm the masses when they started to get a little crazy was bread and circus. Right. Make sure they had bread to eat and give them a little bit of entertainment. They're set. I love that you brought up how important grain has been in the history of humanity, because one of my favorite books is the history of drunkenness by Forsyth is the last name. I forget his first name. But he makes a point that the oldest remains of a building had traces of malt in it. And so you could extrapolate from that, that we switch from a hunter gatherer society to an agricultural society because of the invention of beer. Oh, 100%. Yeah. There's another great book kind of along the same lines. I think it's the world in five glasses. Oh, yeah. Um, so that one, you know, where it details kind of the history of beer. I mean, in that segment, it was a, a way to not lose the grain that you had either in excess or that had been exposed to precipitation or moisture. And that was amazing to me, kind of to your point of, you know, the earliest things we can find, you know, were grain storehouses that then had, if not beer, something that would become beer very soon. Yeah, absolutely. So kind of in the same idea, there's a book called Bourbon Empire and Reed Mittenbuehler, who wrote that talks about, you know, bourbon couldn't exist until, you know, Europeans made it to the new world and found, you know, corn. And it wasn't long after we found corn that we started figuring out how to, you know, make spirits from it. And so speaking of bourbon, you know, your time at Whiskey Kitchen, you guys have kind of a lot of bourbon and a lot of whiskey in general on the shelves. Being there, have you been able to explore new things bourbon-wise and whiskey-wise that you maybe weren't familiar with? I had a pretty good base understanding of whiskey and bourbon and... No, you're not from North Carolina. You're originally from Iowa, as you said. Yep. And you had been an award-winning bartender in Iowa, not to toot your horn for you, but... Yeah. Yeah. I won the Iowa Restaurant Association's 2018 bartender competition, and then they invited me back as a judge for the 2019 competition. And then 2020 happened, and we'll just forget about that. Yeah. Yeah. Fast forward a couple of years. Right. But I was bar manager of a whiskey bar called Whiskey Road in Cedar Falls, Iowa, that had about 250 to 300 whiskeys on the shelf. A lot smaller selection than Whiskey Kitchen, because they boast over 500 bottles. But that is really where I learned a lot about whiskey, a lot about all the other spirits, and really where I found my creative passion of creating cocktails, because I was in charge of our menu that we changed seasonally. So I got to experiment a lot, but it also meant that I didn't really have a mentor. So a lot of my learning is self-taught. I was going to say, so to that point of having a mentor, that's always wonderful. But what kind of resources did you find to be the most useful for you as you were kind of learning on your own and self-guided? So books, 100%. The books that we just mentioned, all of them are on my shelf at home. The Meehan Bartending Guide is one of my favorites, as well as the first Death & Co. book as well. Those two really were my staples of if I was trying to teach a new bartender, or if I was just trying to master a different part of bartending, I would always go towards those books first. And then I also would look for online classes like the Stave & Thief Society. I'm a bourbon steward of that. They have two different levels. The first one is their basic bourbon steward. And then they also have a second level, which I'm going to be getting this year, which is executive bourbon steward. So different classes like that. Also, our smarts was another one that I sought out and did. Yeah, that's Pernod Ricard sponsored, I think. And I will say, I've gone through that one as well. And I think they do a really great job at kind of giving you some, I won't even call it introductory, because there's some good meat in there, but a good beginning basis of kind of the principles of cocktail crafting of spirits and understanding them, how they're made, kind of giving you a rundown of kind of everything that's there. Then obviously you're going to supplement with other stuff, but I think that one is really good. Yeah. That and just having a really good relationship with a lot of the reps that I worked with as bar manager, they taught me a lot about their specific brands and just a lot about whiskey in general. And I just kind of dove deep and learned as much as I could and as fast as I could. That's awesome. And whiskey is one of those things, I mentioned bourbon earlier, which is very much specific to America. But whiskey as a spirit type is amazing because you've got European whiskey, you know, Irish scotch, you know, the Japanese are, you know, they absolutely love whiskey. I love to always point out that one of the largest consumer markets for whiskey is India. And people look at me, you know, like I've lost my mind. And I'm like, no, it is incredibly popular. They have a large variety there. Yeah. It's not just the largest consuming, it's the largest producing as well. Oh yeah. They produce a ton of whiskey, but they consume it, they don't export it. But that is a fun fact. So I noticed doing a little bit of research into you, it seems like there's a kind of a love of Canadian whiskey as well. I did a Canadian whiskey certification course recently. I wouldn't say it's my favorite category, because the bourbon is where my heart is. But I don't hate Canadian whiskey like a lot of bourbon consumers do. I think there's a lot of good stuff out there. They just haven't been exposed to it. I was gonna say, I feel like the critiques that I've heard from a lot of bourbon fans, the blended component is usually where they kind of go, ugh. Yeah. But I feel like that's a lack of understanding. It is, yeah. Because it's rare that you get a large bourbon brand that's not blending their barrels, blending for a specific taste, things like that. Yeah. I think when Americans are talking about how they don't like the blending of Canadian whiskey, it goes back to, for the American market, Canadian whiskey is able to include 9.09% of a neutral green spirit, which is where the lower quality, in quotes, comes from. But just because it's allowed doesn't mean all of them are doing it. Sure. And it is important to note that that's only for Canadian whiskey sold in the United States. And it's because of some long forgotten tax reason. But there are so many great Canadian whiskeys that you can find in the United States that don't do any of that additive of neutral green spirit. And it is worth pointing out that in the United States, if it's just called whiskey, it can include up to 49% of neutral green spirit. Now to be considered a bourbon or a rye, that's different. But if it just has the label whiskey, it can also include that neutral green spirit as well. And a lot more than Canadian whiskey can. So do you want to kind of give us a little bit of what your mindset is when you go into cocktail creation or looking at creating a cocktail menu for, you know, your program? Yeah, absolutely. Cocktail creation for a competition is a lot more of a freely creative process. When I'm designing cocktails for a menu, I have certain constraints on price points. Also, I want to make sure that all the cocktails fit together kind of like a puzzle, kind of filling in the gaps of what the general population might want. So you want to use a diverse range of spirits and have at least something for everyone in terms of some people like sour cocktails, some people like sweet cocktails, and some people like spirit forward cocktails. So you kind of want to make sure you have something for everyone. In terms of creating a cocktail for a competition, you get a lot more free range of using higher quality products. You can be a lot more creative with produce like hard to find produce or hard to find some spirits or liqueurs. You have a lot more creativity there. A lot of competitions cap you at the number of ingredients. So oftentimes I find myself when doing a competition doing syrup or a shrub or something that has multiple flavor components into it so that I can use that as one ingredient as opposed to adding all the ingredients kind of separately, which you could do. In terms of making a cohesive menu, usually I just wait for inspiration to strike in terms of the different categories. If I have a spirit forward cocktail that I know I want to put on the menu, I'll make sure to slot that in. If I have a sour style cocktail that I know I want to use or an ingredient I want to use in it, I'll make sure to fit that in. And then it's more about filling in the gaps really of making a cohesive menu. And then I imagine when doing a menu creation, all the things that you get to explore and enjoy about cocktail creation for competition, you kind of have to do the opposite, right? You're looking at price points, you're looking at number of touches, you know, all of those as a very specific guideline, right? Absolutely. First and foremost in my mind, it's about being actionable behind a busy bar on a Saturday night. If I can't get that drink out within two or three minutes, it's not going on the menu, just end of story, because it's more about the customer experience. And there are some bars out there where you walk in and you expect to wait several minutes up to five, 10 minutes for your one cocktail. In my experience, I've worked in more high volume, fast paced environments that we like to keep drink ticket times to two to three minutes maximum. And if you can get it done in 30 seconds, let's do it in 30 seconds. To that point and talking about creating cocktails for competitions, I think it was last year, Netflix had Drink Masters, which was a cocktail competition. And I'm just going to be honest, I didn't watch it. But from people talking to me about it, my understanding is like in some of these, you had like upwards of 90 minutes to create a cocktail. Now, while that may be necessary, if you're trying to quickly produce a shrub to make it work or a syrup to kind of be in there, even then, no one gets 90 minutes in most competitions that I've seen. You know, you've got to have everything ready and you're doing your cocktail in just a couple of minutes at most. And so that I felt like gave this really disingenuous view of what it's like to be part of a cocktail competition first off. Well, I would say yes and no, because all the cocktail competitions I've been a part of, you get the prompt ahead of time. You have weeks or so to flush out your ideas, to work on your ingredients that you're going to use and come up with a final spec. And then, yeah, you have only a few minutes to present it to the judges. I did watch Drink Masters and I actually enjoyed it. I know it got mixed reviews from the bartender community, but I personally thought it was entertaining. But they got the prompt and then 90 minutes later, they had to present the drink. So it felt almost more condensed. You know, at least having not seen it, I didn't know that it was literally like 90 real minutes that they had to produce something. So that's maybe slightly different. It's like one of those cooking shows, you know, they're like, we'll tell you what you're doing when you get there. And then, hey, make us X, Y, Z. You have 90 minutes and then they have to produce it. They modeled it more after a cooking show than a real life cocktail competition. Okay. So that's a little bit different than that. I think it works better for television. Have you used AI in any of your cocktail creations or do you find yourself using things like the internet as more than just looking up like, oh, what is this? Or, you know, those kind of things. I have only used AI to help with naming cocktails so far because that's something I'm terrible at. And I don't think I've picked one off the list that it's given me yet, but it's great for like brainstorming. It gets my wheels turning and I'm like, oh, I don't want to name it that, but that gives me this idea. You know, it kind of just gets the ball rolling for those ideas. In terms of using the internet, my Instagram feed is all bartenders, all doing amazing things. And yeah, part about bartending is learning from each other, stealing from each other. And so I would say that's probably the most that I do in terms of like internet searches for coming up with a cocktail or if I'm looking for, I can admit this, if I'm looking for a cool garnish, I'll go to Instagram hashtag garnish game and just scroll through and be like, what's everyone doing? What's the cool new thing? One of the Instagram accounts that we follow is Potable Perfectionist and she has really beautiful cocktails. It's really fun. But she makes me feel so inadequate when it comes to garnish games sometimes. And she's great at what she does. And her feed lately has been less on how to do some of these garnishes and stuff like that. But for a period, she really focused in on just some, and it's all stuff you can pull off in a bar. You know what I mean? That's so important. She's doing it at home, but you can pull off what she's doing in a bar without things going sideways. Right. I was like, sorry guys, I'm going to take a full five minutes to make this one garnish for this cocktail. Right. Yeah. That's not going to. Meanwhile, you look over and the bartender's just in the weeds. Just tickets flying off the printer and sweat dripping down their brow. That's real pretty over there. Thanks a lot. So talking about cocktail competitions, you know, that's why we're here. As we talked about in the first part of the show before the break, the theme is Bastille Day. We are doing a cocktail prompt. It's effectively craft a cocktail that embodies the spirit of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. And that's as close as I get to speak in French. Yeah. You know, these guiding principles of the French Revolution, right? The essence of freedom, equality and fraternity. And so also look at like French flavors and things of that nature. Pretty open ended there. So for the AI cocktail, this is what they came up with. Their spec is an ounce and a half of Armagnac. They said, preferably a well-aged vintage. We did happen to have some of that. Half an ounce of green chartreuse. I am tired of green chartreuse cocktails as I am now working through my backup bottle of green chartreuse. Oh, no. Yes. So a half an ounce of creme de cassis, half an ounce of fresh lemon juice, a quarter ounce of rich, simple, a dash of aromatic bitters, a dash of orange bitters, optionally an egg white and then fresh blackberries for garnish served in a coop to our discussion of Marie Antoinette earlier. And it's, you know, it's a kind of a standard formulation as far as, you know, it's a dry shake and then come behind and do a secondary shake. So that's what the AI brought to this competition. By the way, the AI called theirs the, and I'm going to apologize in advance to anyone who's listening who can actually speak French because I do not, le joie de la liberté. That's about as good as I got there. Would you like to take a few moments and tell us about yours? Well, my cocktail is called the Fortress Falls. I like it already because I don't have to speak French. Exactly. Going back to how I create a cocktail, I started this cocktail with a visualization of how I wanted it to look. I knew I wanted it to be bright red to symbolize the bloodshed and the loss and the taking of the fortress. And I knew I wanted it to be in a coop, as we mentioned several times, for that historic reason. I also wanted to take a lot of inspiration from French pastry chefs, because when I think of French cuisine, I think of croissants and different French pastries, tarts and all those beautiful, fresh pastries sitting in the window in Paris. And I've always said throughout my career that I take a lot of inspiration from pastry chefs. I think there's a lot of crossover between creating a cocktail and creating a pastry. I think they use a lot of the same flavors and a lot of the same techniques can be transferred. And so that's really where I went with this cocktail. It also seems like they have to kind of balance that sweetness with other flavors so that it's not cloying or anything of that nature. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So that's my starting point. So I'll just go into the spec. I did one and a half ounces of butter washed rum. I used Brugal and Yejo rum. Three fourths of an ounce of amaretto used Oak City amaretto since we are in Raleigh. Three fourths of an ounce Lillet Blanc. Half an ounce of cherry rosé syrup and a fourth of an ounce of fresh lemon juice. Now for the cherry rosé syrup, I knew I wanted to use a very dry rosé so it didn't add too much sweetness since I already wanted to make sure I had the amaretto and the rum would be slightly sweet as well. I didn't want too much sweet on sweet because I didn't want to add too much citrus. So I decided to use a very dry French rosé fitting with the theme. And for the technique of making the cherry rosé syrup, I deep hitted and chopped the cherries and then macerated them with the sugar. Let the sugar soak up all that good cherry flavor for about half an hour. Heat it up the rosé just below simmering and then combine it all together because I knew I didn't want to heat the rosé up to a point where it would actually cook the cherries. So I needed a way for that cherry flavor to get pulled out. So I used the sugar maceration technique to do that, which again is a very pastry-esque thing to do. And I will say thank you very much and I'm going to share this with the listeners. Thanks for the heads up on putting on gloves when you're doing this. Saved me from I think your fate, which was... Stained fingernails. Stained fingernails. So I know it's not traditional or very French to use rum in a cocktail. I bet when you first saw that you're like, what? Well, it's interesting because there is a tie-in. I think had it been maybe a rum agricole. I would have kind of gone, oh, I see where that's at. But at the same time, I wasn't going to hold it against you by any means. Gotcha. But I am not the judge. Right. I know. Well, the judge is another story. I just knew I wanted that butteriness and that little bit of sweetness that an aged rum can really give. And then butter washing it gives it that beautiful mouthfeel and that pastry-esque vibe that I was kind of aiming for. Now, I will say, you know, once the judge was finished with sampling, you know, both cocktails, I did try them. And I will say I really enjoyed that butteriness does come through. And so that was a really nice touch on this cocktail and definitely does reinforce that kind of pastry concept that you conveyed. I thought, you know, it did do a great job of that. So now with all that said, this is the this is the fun part. Oh, boy. Where we kind of run you through the scoring. So before I do that, I just want to say, you know, it's been interesting watching the scores come back episode after episode. Because I think outside of the first two, they've been they've been fairly close. Sometimes we're only, you know, a couple of points one way or the other, and it gets it gets kind of tight here. So I'm going to run through. And, you know, as always, we have three big buckets of points. We have our taste, which is worth 50 points because obviously we're drinking these, not looking to just treat them as art. Presentation, though, is important. So that's 30 points. And then originality is 20 points. As Mover and Shaker says, everything's a riff on a riff. And somehow I came up with an original. Nonetheless, 20 points available there. All right. For the AI, taste, 42 points. For presentation, 24. Originality, 19. For your cocktail, taste, 42 points. Presentation, 25 points. Originality, 19 points. So you have won. So congratulations by one point. One point is all I need. I was going to say, it's good enough for a win. Good enough for a win. There you go. I do, you know, I always like reading the judge's kind of commentary and notes. So for the AI side, the judge did comment that that cocktail was lightly sweet and creamy. You know, obviously that egg white lending to that. They felt that it was well balanced with herbal and citrus complexity. Overall, it was a pleasant experience that they would order more than one of for yours. This is interesting to our conversation about like pastry and kind of balancing and things like that. They did comment that yours was just slightly sweet and they might have looked for just a little bit more of something to kind of counter that. Okay. But they liked that it was still bright and complex. It was smooth, had a very delicate flavor that they appreciated. And it was quote unquote, perfectly pleasant. Oh. So you did a wonderful job. Lovely. I want to thank you for, you know, the cocktail. And like I said, congratulations, you have ended the temporary reign of victory of the AI. So thank you very much for that. We're back on, you know, human victory. Heck yeah. All right. So you're familiar with our podcast. You've listened to, you know, some number of episodes. You know what's coming. It's everybody's favorite part. It's don't get me started. So just a reminder to our listeners, I'm going to give Ingrid a topic. She has to completely rail against this topic for 30 seconds. I want to be clear. Ingrid's views expressed here are not the views of drinking with robots. They're not the views of her employer. They're probably not even the views of Ingrid herself. Ingrid, don't get me started on Hawkeye fans. Oh, don't get me started on Hawkeye fans. They are the worst type of fan. They show up to tailgate at five in the morning, are rowdy and unruly, truly unruly. They will destroy the parking lot. They will destroy the entire town. If they lose, they'll also destroy the entire town. If they win. So I'm not really sure what the goal there is, but they are just the most diehard and truly unhinged fans of at least their football fans, their basketball fans as well. All right. So I just have to ask being from Iowa, who do you root for? I'm a Hawkeye's fan. That had to hurt a little bit. Yeah. Well, Ingrid, I have to say thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it greatly. You know, if folks want to follow your cocktail creation and cocktail competition and what you're doing at Whiskey Kitchen, they can find you where? I'm on Instagram at bartender inga. That's bartender inga. Awesome. And then as always, you can find drinking with robots on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. We're drinking with robots on all of those. As always, drink well, be well. We look forward to talking to you on our next episode