Ten Years Later, the Spinzall Keeps Spinning

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To someone who’s never bartended, Josh Seaburg’s Spinzall tattoo might easily be mistaken for a food processor. But to Seaburg, the tattoo, which has the words “All I Do Is Spin” emblazoned in block letters across his right calf, is a testament not only to his love of bartending but also his affection for Dave Arnold’s groundbreaking desktop centrifuge, which he’s owned since its inception. “Instead of bringing in a photo of it for my tattoo artist, I brought the actual Spinzall into the shop,” he says.

Seaburg manages two cocktail bars in Norfolk, Virginia, and was among the earliest adopters of the Spinzall. As the tattoo suggests, he remains a persistent evangelist for the device’s utility behind the bar, having originally purchased one through Arnold’s Kickstarter campaign, which launched 10 years ago this month, for the promotional price of $699. (Upon official release, the Spinzall retailed for $999.) “I’d already been following Dave’s Cooking Issues blog and listening to his podcast for years,” says Seaburg, “so by the time the Spinzall hit my bar, I was already pretty well-versed in all of the ins and outs of clarification.” 

Over the past decade, trends in the bar industry have come and gone, but the Spinzall has remained a stalwart in the prep kitchens of top bars around the world. More so than perhaps any other bar-centric innovation, it continues to influence how a generation of modern bartenders approaches making cocktails.

Long before Arnold opened his first bar Booker and Dax in 2012, he’d already been experimenting with commercial-grade centrifuges. As the director of culinary technology at the French Culinary Institute in New York City in the early 2000s, Arnold spent thousands of hours testing equipment, including rotary evaporators and immersion circulators, to gauge their utility for chefs. At the time, he was obsessed with clarifying lime juice to perfect the Gin & Tonic.

“Back then, there were a handful of chefs using centrifuges in Spain, but no one was really using them here in the U.S,” he says. “So, when Unilever donated a super-speed centrifuge the size of a washing machine to the institute, lime juice was one of the first things I tested on it.” To force-carbonate the combined ingredients in a proper G&T, he had determined that the lime juice needed to be crystal clear. But popular clarification techniques at the time, such as using agar agar or the freeze-thaw method, weren’t effective with lime juice, which has a low pH and oxidizes quickly.

Arnold eventually perfected a method for clarifying lime juice in a centrifuge using enzymes and wine fining agents, which he wrote about at length in his seminal 2014 book Liquid Intelligence. But the technology wasn’t readily available to most bars because commercial centrifuges were prohibitively expensive—laboratory-grade models could cost upwards of $60,000.

“I realized that if you build a bar program around something that you can only afford to have one of and it breaks, you’re toast,” says Arnold. “So, I thought, what the bar community needed was something small and cheap enough that they could have several of them. They needed to be portable, safe and able to deliver the same results as a $10,000 bench-top machine, without the need for advanced training or expertise.”