Wrench Great

Wrench Great

When is a Wrench Like a Martini?

Not so long ago, we were looking at the 2007 IDEA Award winners and we stumbled over this product. The "Revolutionized Wrench" (also known as the X-Beam wrench. This "wrench with a twist" in no way alters the function of basic use of a wrench. Instead, it makes some very simple changes to civilize the classic, straight wrench more by having the grip perpendicular to the outer handle, making it possible to use the wrench continuously without unduly stressing the wrist. Simple and beautiful, and only a little bit different from an ordinary wrench.

A martini, in its way, also removes some of the stress and unpleasantness from strong drink by making some very slight minor modifications -- but not such a great modification that you can't tell a high-end vodka or gin from generic rotgut. Martinis and their whiskey brethren, Manhattans, are not drinks designed to hide the taste of booze, but to presenting good liquor in its most pleasant light. A classic martini is composed of two to three  parts gin to one part of less (sometimes much less) dry vermouth. The ingredients are poured over ice, stirred, and strained "up" (i.e., without ice) into a martini glass or wide-mouthed champagne goblet and garnished with a green olive or a lemon twist. That's it. The addition of a small to miniscule to all-but nonexistent, or sometimes actually nonexistent, amount of white vermouth and the coldness and slight amounts of water left by the ice, plus the seemingly insignificant presence of an olive or lemon peel in the drink combine to create a much more drinkable beverage that a simple shot. Like our wrench, it's a few slight changes that make a big difference.

But within that change, there are many possible variations and much argument about all aspects of this beverage -- and it's a subject that does occasionally come up at my industrial design firm. Are vodka martinis (James Bond's favorite) acceptable? Are they even martinis? (Some insist they are not.) But mixologists and drinkers agree that incredibly modest alterations in the recipe can yield drastic differences, just as the addition of a 90 degree variance on the Revolutionized Wrench seems minor to someone whose rarely used a wrench but makes a big difference to a regular user.

The issue of very slight changes making a vast difference gets particularly interesting when one makes the drink extremely "dry" (i.e., not much vermouth). Some bartenders pour in vermouth, only to dump it out. Jokes...at least we think they are jokes, abound in which the bartenders simply shows a bottle of vermouth to a bottle of gin, or allows a ray of light to pass through both bottles.

This last joke, and a possibly offensive sexual metaphor, was made by Luis Bunuel, the great surrealist director and onetime cohort of Salvador Dali, known for his often controversial films and, less famously, for his passion for cocktails. His Bunuel Martini is a study in slight changes having a massive effect. This drink calls for refrigerator pre-chilled ingredients and fixings (including the glasses and cocktail shaker), extremely cold ice (strict Bunuelians used a thermometer). Then, a "splash" of vermouth (Noilly Pratt dry; always) is placed over the ice along with a half a demitasse spoon of Angostura bitters. This very small amount of vermouth and miniscule amount of bitters is then shaken and strained out, so that only an imperceptible coating of slightly bitter vermouth is left. Then, the pre-chilled gin is added, stirred and poured out, using an olive for a garnish. We thought this drink was a pretty silly excuse to drink straight gin, when we first read about it, but, then we took the trouble to try it.

Strangely enough, we found this drink to be pretty fabulous -- possibly the single best way to make a gin martini. But then,  trying to duplicate the magic of the first drink, we did it again -- only we hastily put in probably the equivalent of a whole demitasse spoon of bitters. Since those spoons are tiny to begin and since we were going to be dumping it out anyway, this should not have made much difference, but it did. Bitters were, in fact, about all we tasted. Sadly, we dumped our drinks on that attempt.

The moral is, of course, that it really is the small changes that make the difference in a design -- and a cocktail might not be as hard to engineer as a revolutionary wrench, but small changes in designs do make a difference.

In our own case, Nectar struggled a bit to come up with right formulation for a product that was actually designed to help create the right formulation of two ingredients -- but in this case, for salad, not an alcoholic beverage. The Elemental Kitchen Oil and Vinegar Dispenser. If you could have seen our deliberations over the tiny differences in variations on a squeeze pump, it's possible you'd think we were fussing over very little...until you tried to use one of the discarded designs, and had to cope with an product that was just slightly off and therefore with a salad that tasted overly oily or overly vinegarry. Fortunately, we kept working on it and making those slight adjustments, and we finally got it right.

This design thing, it's a game of inches.

About the Author

Bob Westal represents Nectar, an award winning product development consultancy and industrial design firm helping clients create products that connect to their users and expand their markets. For more information, please visit us at http://www.nectardesign.com

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