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The Fino Colada from Toronto’s Cafe Cancan includes lactart to up its acidity.Nicki Leigh McKean

For at least a decade, the vast majority of craft cocktail bartenders have garnished their back bars with abundant cornucopias of fresh fruit, largely citrus.

To many barflies, that's a tell – one that indicates the bar uses fresh, high-quality, natural ingredients, a practice that is practically the prime directive of the craft revolution – which is why it's news that a number of prominent bartenders at several Canadian destinations have started putting the fruit away. Instead, they are opting to micro-dose cocktails with acid, as in lactic, malic, tartaric and phosphate.

Victoria's recently opened Foxtrot Tango Whisky Bar is about to launch a champagne acid cocktail and, reportedly, is already going through five litres of calcium hydroxide (lime acid) per week. In Vancouver, neither the Fairmont Pacific Rim nor the Mackenzie Room could make their signature house-made cordials without a range of different acids, ranging from acid phosphate to malic acid. It's taking off in Toronto, too, where acids are used in drinks at Café Cancan, Byblos, Grey Tiger and anywhere Robin Kaufman works, since he's a total convert.

"If you make a cordial out of lime zests and acids and control the process perfectly – weight, time, temperature – you can achieve perfect consistency every time," says Kaufman, who has just retired from Byblos to work at Alo. "But where it really starts to get interesting is that the mouthfeel changes, too, so you can get this hybrid drink between a shaken and a stirred cocktail."

The lime shortage of 2014, a result of unusually cold and dry conditions and alleged organized crime issues, increased prices and brought the back-end politics of bar cost-ratios out into the open, forcing bartenders to explore other options. It quickly became clear that verjus, vinegars and powdered acids were more than just stand-in players and could, in fact, be regular cast members. It also opened up a whole new toolbox for bartenders looking to make new flavours. Kaufman praises the taste of acids, but they also have the advantage of efficiency; not having to shake a cocktail means faster service. They're also friendly from a space perspective, long-lasting (acids have preservative qualities) and are consistently easy to purchase.

"People want spirit-based cocktails, but it's hard for people to find new stirred original that's better than stirred classics," says Kaufman. "But it's not hard to find exciting refreshing cordials that can be mixed into stirred cocktails, ones that people want to drink every day."

While it's hard to imagine that a jar of white malic acid on the bar will have the same romance as an overflowing bowl of fruit, it's hard to argue with the results because they're delicious.

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