A mixologist named Kendra Hada had offered to walk me through her latest concoction, a $16 trifecta of citrus called Sunday Brunch. Ah, brunch, the meal of the gods, with its endless array of eggs and rising breads, plus the excuse to drink alcohol before noon. I'd heard the carbonated cocktail was almost as good as the midmorning meal itself, with gin and elderflower liqueur as well as orange, lemon and lime juices.

So it's basically an elevated lemonade, I thought to myself, imagining how much more fun my best friend's toddler's birthday party would have been if we'd served this instead of the basic version. Beyond the presence of alcohol, however, Hada's beverage had another crucial difference.

"Everything in my cocktail," Hada said shortly after I arrived, "wouldn't be possible without a centrifuge."

As she spoke, she pointed at three mammoth pails of clear liquid balancing on the dark wood table in front of us. She was prepping for a charity event where she'd serve dozens of Sunday Brunch cocktails and had spent hours squeezing lemons, then clarifying the juices with a centrifuge.

The orange juice smelled like the moment you cut into a fresh piece of the fruit. The lime-like zest flew up my nose. The lemon smelled and tasted like a Warheads candy.

Molecular gastronomy chefs have been using centrifuges to clarify juices, create flavored oils and make the clearest consommé in the world for years. For those of us who haven't heard the word since high school chemistry class, a centrifuge simply spins liquids at high speeds, separating the various components in them by density. So whole milk, for example, can be spun into super-dense cream on one side and low-fat thin milk on the other.

British chef Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck is one of the most well-known proponents of the device. Celebrity chefs like Wylie Dufresne of now-shuttered molecular gastronomy restaurant wd~50 rely on the centrifuge as well. Nathan Myhrvold's thick cookbook Modernist Cuisine practically bursts with recipes requiring it, like pea butter, which the internet loves to recreate.

Mad-scientist mixologists are having their fun with it, too. The mastermind behind Existing Conditions, food scientist Dave Arnold, has a reputation for using the centrifuge in complicated drinks. Noting the machines' prohibitive price tags (upward of $8,000 each), he created his own version in 2016 called the Spinzall, which retails for $799.

Now he's trained a new generation of mixologists, like Hada, on these techniques.

Unlike Hada, I had not been trained in how to make, well, anything more complicated than a rum and coke. So I quietly installed myself at a nearby table to watch her work on the clarified orange and lime juices, as well as a lemon cordial.

Around us, a few other mixologists ran back and forth from the bar area toward the back of the building, carting humongous containers of ice, the plastic scraping across the ground as their shoulders hunched from the weight.