Brief: Design a mocktail! (Professors Will Nickley and Sebastien Proulx)
Location: The Ohio State University
Date: January 19 - 26, 2023 (1 week)
Constraints: Each team was assigned a specific glass to use, a specific ingredient to incorporate, and a specific culture to take inspiration from.
Collaboration: Group project with 4th Year Theresa Pham and 2nd Year Sharon Longdong (Industrial Design)
Drink Description:
Join us on a refreshing journey through the Amazon Rainforest! Explore the flavors of açaí, guarana, pineapple, mango, and other Amazonian fruits with added touches of your favorite local berries. Shaken with lime juice, blueberry lavender syrup, mint, and cayenne pepper, and topped with a splash of strawberry kombucha, this drink is sure to take you to the rainforest and back. Na Amazônia!, which translates to “Into the Amazon” from Portuguese, is topped with a mango flower garnish and a salt and cayenne rim. Experience the fruits of the Amazon Rainforest, all without leaving your seat!
Introduction:
For OSU's 2023 Industrial Design Charrette, the theme this year was Mocktails! Every team, which consisted of one 2nd year, one 3rd year, and one 4th year Industrial Design student, was tasked with designing a mocktail based on our assigned constraints. We found ourselves with a 8 oz martini glass. Our required ingredient was to use a fungus, and our cultural mixer was Brazil!
Our charrette kicked off with a drink/mixology demonstration from Ty Phillips-Bond, Beverage Director at Watershed Distillery.
Research:
To start, we spent a day researching different ways to incorporate a fungus into our drink, an ingredient that we were initially confused and concerned with.
We also reached out to Dominique Flaksberg, a grad student from Brazil. Dominique was kind enough to invite us into her home and talk us through some of her favorite Brazilian ingredients. We learned about her favorite teas, cacao and cacao nibs, bee pollen, her favorite drinks, and more! She also introduced us to guarana, a berry that grows in the Amazon rainforest. We got to sample a drink made from guarana and fell in love.
We also got to meet Dominique's cats, which was very helpful with our design process.
We spent the weekend brainstorming recipes and compiling research. Still struggling with how to incorporate a fungus into our drink, I reached out to a connection from one of my previous internships, Chef Aldana Iturri. She is a Recipe Development Chef at Hestan Cue. In talking to Aldana, she recommended using kombucha as our fungus, since it is a fermented drink and had a bit of carbonation to it. It was perfect!
The theme of our drink began to make itself clear during experimentation. We tried out several mixology methods and had little success. One such example was taking one of Dominique's Brazilian teas and adding condensed milk to it. While the concoction is one of Dominique's favorite recipes, we simply could not get the ratios right.
We decided to go with more of a fruity drink when I was walking through a local grocery store and came across an açaí and guarana berry smoothie bowl mix, two fruits local to the Amazon. With these two ingredients now readily available, we then developed a drink themed after the fruits of the Amazon!
We experimented with a bunch of different fruits, syrups, kombucha flavors, and juices. By the end of our multiple taste test sessions, our more successful concoctions included strawberry kombucha, pineapple mango juice, blueberry lavender syrup, and lime juice, with splashes of lemon juice, mint, and cayenne.
To design our garnish, Theresa created a mango rose and decorated a wooden skewer with a few of the fruits included in our drink. We also added a cayenne, sea salt, and pink salt rim for an extra kick of spice!
We named our drink Na Amazonia!, which translates to "In the Amazon" or "Into the Amazon" in Portuguese, according to Dominique. While we went through tons of different name ideas, we felt this encompassed our theme of the fruits of the Amazon rainforest the most.
Photoshoot:
One of our final deliverables was to submit our drink for a photoshoot, where we also received a small critique from our professors with ways to improve our drink before the final review.
Mocktail Party!
Our charrette sponsor, Priority Designs, hosted a mocktail party for all 16 teams, where we each brought a pitcher of our drink to serve in small shot glasses to our peers, our professors, and a panel of judges that awarded various superlatives to our drinks. We won Best Cultural Mixer!
Deliverable: How the Mocktail fits the Libbey Vina Martini Glass
The Libbey Vina Martini Glass integrates and elevates our drink via many different aspects! The top of the martini glass is wide, which makes room for the aromas of Na Amazônia! to shine before and as you are drinking. Additionally, its large rim makes space for a variety of different garnishes– a cayenne and salt half rim, a 5” skewer full of fruit, a lemon wedge, and a mint sprig. One important aspect of a martini glass is its long stem, which drinkers use to hold the glass, controlling the temperature of the drink by not handling the cup directly. With this, our drink is able to stay cold without ice and can be enjoyed without being diluted.
Recipe (ingredients and steps):
Tools List:
Cocktail Shaker
Blender
Strainer
5” skewer (for garnish)
Ingredient List:
- Açaí Blend:
- 1 Sambazon Açaí Superfruit Pack
- 1/2 Banana
- ½ Cup Pineapple
- ¾ Cup Pineapple Mango Juice
- 20 ml Lime Juice
- 10 ml Blueberry Lavender Syrup
- Cayenne Pepper (at discretion)
- 2 lemon slices
- Mint Leaves
- Ice
- 2 oz Strawberry Kombucha
Garnish:
- Sea salt
- Pink Salt
- Lemon wedge
- Cayenne pepper
- Pineapple chunks
- Mango slices
- Blueberries
- Mint sprig
Recipe:
Make Açaí Blend:
- Thaw 1 açaí pack in a bowl of warm water. The goal is for it to reach liquid consistency.
- Add banana, pineapple, pineapple mango juice, and açaí into a blender. Blend until smooth.
- Place a strainer overtop a cup or bowl. Pour açaí mixture over to strain any remaining seeds out. This is a slower process, so don’t be afraid if it takes a few minutes!
Mix drink:
- Add ice cubes, a large mint leaf, and 2 lemon slices to a cocktail shaker.
- Add 4oz of the strained açaí blend, 20 ml of lime juice, 10 ml of blueberry lavender syrup, and cayenne pepper (we recommend 2 shakes, but add more if you prefer a spicier drink).
- Shake until mixture is properly blended, and the shaker is cold to the touch.
Enjoy:
- Combine a pink salt, sea salt, and cayenne pepper in a large, shallow bowl. Ratios are to preference (lower ratio of cayenne is recommended).
- Rim half the glass using a lemon wedge and the salt and cayenne mix.
- Pour drink into glass from the strainer.
- To make the garnish, string blueberries, pineapple slices, a mint sprig, a spiraled lemon skin, and a mango slice flower across a skewer and set across glass.
Drinking instructions (if any):
- Feel free to eat the fruit off the skewer while you enjoy OR slide the fruit off the skewer and dunk in your drink!
- The salt rim only covers half the glass, so you get to choose your drinking experience.
- Sip away!
Deliverable: AI Mocktail Visualization
Prompt: “purple açaí martini with salt on glass rim with pineapple chunks mango blueberry mint garnish” (Edited with Adobe Fresco)
Lessons Learned:
This charrette was so much fun, especially because Sharon, Theresa, and I had such great chemistry and were able to work well together. At the party, our drink received several compliments, and one judge even came back three times to continue enjoying it!
This was my first time working with food and recipe experimentation. And I must say, after this project, I am much more willing and confident with recipe development. I am by no means a chef, but am excited to see what other mocktails (or cocktails) I'll design in the future!
"A martini. Shaken, not stirred."
- James Bond, "Goldfinger"
