American Pie: The Ouzo Effect
…What fascinated me most about the scientists I have known in academia is their carefully chosen specialties. I say “carefully chosen” because the smart ones appear to select a field of study that involves either spending time in rather pleasant places, or researching phenomena that can only be described as sensuous, and sometimes both…
John Merchant considers the unusual and pleasurably mind-bending research being carried out by Dutch scientists into the “Ouzo Effect’’.
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During the course of my adult life I have spent a significant amount of time in the company of scientists, or in their milieu. This wasn’t contrived on my part, but simply a factor of my employment, or sometimes the accidental circumstance of my leisure pursuits. For a number of years I worked for a company whose products were used in research, so my work regularly took me into universities and laboratories.
At another time in my life I joined a yacht club whose membership came, in large part, from the faculty at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York State. Cornell boasts some notable scientists, not least among them astrophysicist, the late Carl Sagan, probably best known for his TV documentary series Cosmos; and Dr. Steven Squyres, currently the scientific Principal Investigator for the Mars Rover Project. I was never in the presence of either gentleman; my cohort was much less eminent, though not less interesting.
What fascinated me most about the scientists I have known in academia is their carefully chosen specialties. I say “carefully chosen” because the smart ones appear to select a field of study that involves either spending time in rather pleasant places, or researching phenomena that can only be described as sensuous, and sometimes both.
Some examples from my acquaintance are an archeologist who specializes in the investigation of ancient shipwrecks in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean; a biologist who has made a lifetime study of a species of butterfly found mainly in the agreeable hill country of Darjeeling, India; where, just by chance, his mother happened to live; and a geologist whose specialty involves regular trips to Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. Yet another, a physicist at Cornel, finds it necessary to visit particle accelerators in California, Italy and Germany on a regular basis.
But it was just this week that I became aware of a specialty that beats all. A group of scientists at Wageningen University in the Netherlands have been studying the “Ouzo Effect,” and reported their findings in the February 19 issue of “Langmuir,” a scientific publication covering surface and colloid chemistry. Leave it to the Dutch. Ostensibly, they are researching the cloudy emulsions produced by anise-flavored liquors such as Ouzo, and have discovered new molecular insights into their formation. I just bet they have. Friday afternoons in their lab is the place to be if you’re in Wageningen!
OK, so I’m poking fun, but the really, really serious purpose of this challenging assignment is to find ways to improve the design of better commercial emulsions used in making pharmaceuticals, food products, cosmetics and other materials. As some of us know, although transparent when bottled, Ouzo, Pastis, Pernod and other popular anise-flavored alcoholic beverages form milky-white emulsions when diluted with water prior to drinking; a phenomenon commonly known, the Wageningen group says, as the "Ouzo Effect."
These emulsions occur spontaneously and are stable for weeks and even months, a feature that is apparently attractive to industry, not to mention to generations of Europeans who have spent centuries studying the effect as they digested whatever they had for dinner at their neighborhood bistro. These scientists, however, claim to be less interested in the digestif properties and are unclear as to how these mixtures form and stabilize. Sampling a few more bottles of the best should make the splanation perficly, obviously shimple my frens.
But excuse my pixilated digression. The study states that Dr. Erik van der Linden and colleagues “measured the stability of various emulsions prepared from commercial Pernod, and compared the results to theoretical predictions. The scientists found that their experimental observations were often opposite the predicted behavior of the emulsions in the presence of various concentrations of oil, water, and alcohol components. ‘More knowledge of the parameters that determine the stability of these emulsions, besides interfacial tension, solubility, and density difference, might lead to better control of the emulsification process,’ they said.”
My own experience of sampling these digestifs is that eventually my interfacial tension relaxes; I become indubitably soluble, totally emulsified and far less dense. Somewhere in the middle of all that I experience the clarity of vision necessary to penetrate the most complex scientific phenomena, but by the morning my insights have clouded, just like the Pernod.
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