Showing how to light up a orange peel to a couple of fellow bartending girls. You probably are wondering why would anybody want to light up a orange peel (it is actually the oils that shoot out of the peel when you squeeze it). Well, many – like my wife – do not like the taste of their gins emasculated by the fruity taste of fruit-infused gins. But they like the aroma of a fruit – like orange in their drink.

So, basically, you are trying to create a sense of taking in orange gin without messing the taste of the gin. As you know, what our brain perceives as the “taste” of food is only a small part in what the tongue senses and a big part of what the nose senses. The solution is to let the customer inhale the orange fumes but drink the gin in its native form. And you do that by making a normal gin and tonic (Hendricks and Fever Tree is what I would recommend) and then light up an orange peel on top of the drink before you serve it. [The technique will require some practice though. And I learnt it from the venerable mixologist Bensan Varghese from Mumbai]