About ten years ago, I was writing some stories for Popular Science. There was an editorial change or layoffs or something like that and one article I wrote never went up on the website, even though I’d been paid for it. This can be a real bummer for a writer because you’ve interviewed people who’ve lent their time to you.  

Anyway, that article now appears on the website, with a publication date of 2021 (as opposed to 2016ish when I wrote it). I only discovered it last week as I was looking for other work I’d done for the site.

I took a press trip to Vegas at the time the new arena was opening, and wrote a story about the technology that allows them to serve “fresh” cocktails to thousands of people at a time. I learned about HPP technology and got to see one of the liquor rooms where they have racks of bottles connected to tubes that run down to the liquor guns on lower floors. Here’s the resulting story.

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Squeezing Juice At 6,000 Atmospheres Of Pressure Makes Fast, Fresh Cocktails On Tap

At the new T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, they’re eliminating your need to track down that one bartender way in back who you know makes good drinks. Nearly every hot dog station and drink stand in the 20,000-person arena serves strong cocktails made with fresh cold-pressed juice, poured through an enormous custom-designed draft system.

At arena scale, cocktail are typically made in a rush with heat-pasteurized mixers squirted from the soda “gun,” or sometimes poured from kegs containing pre-mixed fast-spoiling fresh ingredients, but this new system, created by a company called RIPE Bar Juice tidily straddles the line between fast and fresh. At a facility in New Haven, Connecticut, freshly-squeezed juices, agave syrup sweetener, and other ingredients are mixed, put into 5-gallon bags, and sent through a high-pressure processing (HPP) machine that looks sort of like a flume ride into an MRI.

 read the full story here.