Densing: The New Cocktail Technique Coming from Edinburgh Brought to Nectar

One of the things I enjoy most about being part of Edinburgh's bar scene is that the people doing the most interesting work in it are not far away. They are on the same streets, at the same events, in some cases a ten-minute walk from Broughton Street.

Iain McPherson is the founder of Panda and Sons on Queen Street, which we have written about before as one of the best cocktail bars in the world. He has spent over a decade building a reputation for techniques that push what a cocktail can actually be: Switching, which uses sub-zero temperatures to fundamentally alter flavour, and Sous Pression, which applies pressure to unlock aromatic compounds that conventional mixing cannot reach. These are not marketing concepts. They are genuine innovations that other bartenders around the world have adopted and built on.

In April 2026, McPherson unveiled something new. He called it Densing, and the moment we read about it, we went straight to work.

What Densing actually is

Densing is, at its core, a new approach to integrating fat into liquid. The challenge with fat in cocktails has always been stability. Traditional fat-washing, which involves infusing a spirit with something like butter or olive oil and then freezing it to separate and remove the fat, does transfer flavour from the fat into the spirit. But the process takes time, wastes material, and the results can be inconsistent. More importantly, the fat itself is removed at the end. You get the flavour but not the texture.

Densing changes that. The technique uses a vacuum blender to create a stable emulsion between fat and liquid, in a way that does not separate. The inspiration came from ice cream homogenisation, the industrial process that keeps cream mixed consistently throughout a product rather than rising to the surface. McPherson adapted that logic for bar use.

The process works by bringing both the fat and the liquid to the same temperature, generally between 40 and 60 degrees Celsius, where the fat is at its most fluid. Both go into the vacuum blender together, and a single 90-second cycle creates an integration that holds. McPherson has tested batches that have remained stable for over two months without separation. The whole process takes roughly ten minutes of preparation rather than the overnight cycle that conventional fat-washing requires.

The result is a liquid that carries the fat permanently within it rather than simply being flavoured by it. At higher fat concentrations, around 2.5 percent by weight, the drink behaves like a full fat-wash: rich, textured, with a consistent mouthfeel from the first sip to the last. At lower concentrations of 0.5 percent or less, the fat integrates as aroma rather than texture, adding subtle complexity without changing the weight of the drink significantly.

The aesthetic effect is one of the most interesting things about it. Clear spirits, when densed with certain oils, will louche: they turn slightly milky or opalescent in the glass when combined with other ingredients. The visual tells you something is different before you even taste it. Then you taste it and the appearance makes complete sense.

Why this matters for cocktail making

McPherson's observation when he introduced Densing was pointed and worth taking seriously. He noted that the cocktail world has become somewhat obsessed with clarity: clear, clean, light, visually precise. Clarification techniques have produced beautiful drinks. But visual clarity and flavour richness are not the same thing, and in the pursuit of one, the industry has sometimes sacrificed the other.

Densing asks a different question: what if cloudy is not a flaw but a feature? What if the texture and consistency that fat provides is the thing the drink actually needs, and the visual consequence of that is worth embracing rather than engineered away?

This is a meaningful shift in thinking for a craft cocktail bar. The techniques that have defined the last decade of serious cocktail making, clarification, filtration, centrifugation, have all been in the service of removing things from drinks: removing colour, removing cloudiness, removing anything that might suggest imprecision. Densing is a technique that adds something back, deliberately and permanently, and argues that the addition makes the drink better.

McPherson has released Densing open-source, which is consistent with how he has approached his previous techniques. The idea is that it gets taken, adapted, and pushed in directions he has not thought of yet. That generosity is part of what makes Edinburgh's bar scene worth paying attention to.

What we found when we started experimenting

We did not wait long before trying it ourselves. The technique requires a vacuum blender, which we had to order, and the process is straightforward enough that the barrier to experimentation is low. What takes time is understanding what the technique actually does to different combinations and developing an instinct for when to use it and when not to.

Our starting point was applying the same principle McPherson described: heating both the spirit and the fat to the same temperature, then vacuum blending them together. We have been working with olive oil, coconut oil, and peanut butter as the fat sources, each of which brings a completely different character to the finished liquid.

What we have found is that the texture change is real and immediate. The liquid becomes denser in a way that is felt rather than seen, particularly on the finish. Where a conventional cocktail might resolve cleanly and quickly, a densed cocktail lingers. The flavour extends. There is a smoothness to the mouthfeel that you notice most clearly in the final seconds of each sip, where the drink continues to deliver rather than simply ending.

The fat source matters enormously. Olive oil brings a savouriness and a roundness that suits spirit-forward drinks, particularly anything in the tequila or mezcal category. Coconut oil brings sweetness and a tropical quality that integrates beautifully with lighter, more aromatic spirits. Peanut butter brings a nuttiness and a richness that is the most dramatic of the three, the one where the densing effect is most immediately obvious to someone who does not know what they are tasting.

We have also been playing with a fat-wash approach alongside the densing process, where the butter character comes through slightly more than in a pure densing approach. The fat-wash builds the initial flavour transfer into the spirit, and the densing stabilises and intensifies it. The two techniques working together produce a different result to either one alone.

The visual effect with clear spirits is the detail I find most compelling from a guest experience perspective. When a clear spirit is densed with certain oils and then combined with other ingredients in the glass, it louches: it turns milky or hazy in a way that looks completely deliberate and completely unusual. People look at it differently. They ask what is happening. The explanation, that the drink contains a permanently integrated fat that is refracting the light, is the kind of answer that makes someone more interested in what they are about to taste rather than less.

Where this is going at Nectar

We are bringing Densing to the next cocktail menu. We are not going to tell you specifically which drinks will feature it before the menu launches, partly because we are still refining and partly because the discovery is part of the experience. What we can say is that the technique suits the direction we have been moving in with the cocktail programme since we opened: using process to add genuine depth rather than using it to create spectacle for its own sake.

The from concept to craft philosophy at Nectar has always been about finding techniques that change what a drink can be rather than simply making it more impressive to look at. Infusion does that. Clarification does that in a different direction. Densing does it in a way that neither of those techniques can: it changes the fundamental texture of the liquid and extends the experience of drinking it beyond what conventional mixing allows.

McPherson was right about one thing above everything else. The industry has spent years making drinks that look incredible. There is a version of the next chapter in cocktail making that asks instead whether a drink can feel incredible, and whether the texture and weight and consistency of what is in the glass can carry as much meaning as the flavour or the appearance.

We think that question is worth exploring. We have already started.

If you want to be among the first to try Densing at Nectar, book a table when the new menu launches. We will announce it on Instagram first at @nectarbar.edi

Opening hours Tuesday to Thursday: 5pm to 11pm Friday: 5pm to 1am Saturday: 12pm to 1am Sunday: 12pm to 11pm Monday: Closed

Nectar Bar, 73 Broughton Street, Edinburgh EH1 3RJ