A Science Fair for Cocktail Lovers Is Coming to Philly

Botanist and bar consultant, Danny Childs, will be hosting Field Study, a cocktail-focused science fair, on June 4th. / Photograph by Katie Childs

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Danny Childs is a barman who no longer spends much time behind the stick. He’s a consultant. An organizer. He’s like Liam Neeson’s character from that movie Taken: He has a very particular set of skills that he’s acquired over a long career. He’s an ethnobotanist. He won a James Beard Award for his cocktail book, Slow Drinks, and founded a company by the same name. He knows, it sometimes seems, everyone who has ever dropped a garnish into a highball. And if you’re serious about your drinking (in an academic way, not the other way), you’ve probably already worked your way through cocktail lists that he’s had a hand in designing.

And now, Childs has two new projects. The first, one of the coolest drinks-focused events I’ve heard about in quite some time. The second, a bar (and restaurant) of his own. The event is called “Field Study,” and it’s taking place on Thursday, June 4th, at Philadelphia Distilling. The bar is called “Field Day” and it’s getting ready to open soon in Northern Liberties. We’re going to talk about both.

First, Field Study — a “one-day, immersive experience bringing together farmers, producers, chefs, and beverage leaders through a mix of interactive daytime programming and an evening pop-up,” according to a press release sent to Philly Mag. But it’s really more like a giant, nerdy science fair for bartenders, producers, farmers, and slow drinks devotees.

“This one kinda came together organically,” Childs told me when I got him on the phone to talk about his project. He’d helped organize the beverage content for a Slow Food conference last year in Sacramento, and thought having something similar in Philly would be nice. He knew that many of the country’s best (and most interesting) personalities within the drinks space would be gathering in early June for a bar convention in Brooklyn, and figured some of them might be interested in a short detour. And since, like I said, he knows pretty much all of them (by their first names), he started making some phone calls. This began in late February or early March, he said. Within weeks, he had confirmations from crews from De Vie in Paris, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Dead Rabbit in NYC, Kentucky’s Heaven Hill, and The Life of Reilly in Jersey City. He called farmers and distillers, a coffee place, and got his pals from Almanac, La Jefa, and Vernick Fish to come, too. Then he found a space big enough to hold everyone (the big room at Philadelphia Distilling) and decided to make a whole day of it, with tasting stations and live demos, lunch, a Q&A panel — with Donovan Ingram from Blue Hill, Alex Francis from De Vie, Neha from Dead Rabbit and himself — and finally a pop-up event that night.

“I wanted everyone to show how they work,” Childs explained. “How they use hyper-local and hyper-seasonal ingredients, where they come from. Like De Vie, they literally have a cave under their restaurant and they use it for this old French process …”

And then he went on to talk for a while about mistelle, which is a way of fortifying lightly fermented fruit juices with distilled spirits which both captures the flavor of delicate ingredients (cherries in his example) and turns them into beverages which speak to a particular moment in time.

“Like wine,” Childs says. “It’s all about that year — a good year, a bad year — or that season.”

The De Vie crew will be showing off the process at Philadelphia Distilling on June 4th. La Jefa will be walking people through their tepache program (making a traditional Mexican fermented beverage out of pineapple cores, cinnamon and piloncillo). There’ll be farmers explaining their farm-to-glass philosophies. And it all sounds like a really excellent time for anyone who’s curious about the science behind preservation, fermentation, cocktail gardens, and other Slow Food/Slow Drinks topics.

The event runs from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. with pop-up details soon to be announced. Tickets for Field Study are $100, and proceeds go to the Slow Food Bartenders Alliance. You can get yours right here.

Purple Pea Gimlet / Photograph by Katie Childs

And after that? Childs and his wife Katie will be focusing on the opening of Field Day — their new slow drinks-focused bar and restaurant at 923 North 2nd Street in NoLibs.

“This will be our first,” Childs told me. The first bar that’s actually theirs after years of working for (and with) other people. The consulting business will still be a part of what they do, but Field Day will act as a hub for their work — both as a showplace for their Slow Drinks creations and as a laboratory for their research. And no, that’s not a metaphor.

“No, there’s a really big lab space above the bar,” Childs said. An area dedicated to their experiments with fermentation and preservation, for recipe testing and the exploration of ingredients. He told me that he doesn’t really get to be behind the bar anymore. So much of his work now is with development and research. He spends far more time behind a computer than he does behind a bar.

But that’s okay with him. “I’m more like a coach now, less like a quarterback,” he explained. And his perfect day — or the perfect day he’s envisioning once Field Day is up and running — is getting to his office in the morning, doing some work with Slow Drinks, spending the middle of his day testing recipes for Field Day, checking in on the pantry and the gardens, and then getting home at a reasonable hour.

“We’re all getting older,” he told me. He’s no longer all that interested in standing a shift behind the long oak until 2 a.m.

Elderflower Liqueur / Photograph by Katie Childs

In the kitchen, he’ll have Melissa McGrath from Sweet Amalia as a consulting partner. And the food menu will have the same focus as the drinks menu: It’ll all be about capturing a moment, a season, a place. So from the kitchen, scratch soft pretzels, pickled eggs and Pennsylvania Dutch-style sandwiches. And from the bar, cocktails which “dive into the various growing regions in the area — the Pine Barrens, the Shore, Pennsylvania Dutch, the Poconos.”

Mostly, he wants it to be an approachable place, good for the neighbors, good for families. And his guiding principle in the kitchen and behind the bar is the same as it has always been in all of his Slow Drinks work: “Working with the stuff that’s fresh and preparing for when they’re not.”

Field Day has been in the works now for more than a year, but Childs thinks the big day is coming soon. He told me he’s shooting for a late summer or early fall opening. But if you’re looking for an early taste of what’s been on his mind during the run-up, definitely check out Field Study. For a particular kind of person with a particular set of interests, it sounds like it’s going to be a very good time.