Brief: Design a mocktail! (Professors Will Nickley and Sebastien Proulx)
Location: The Ohio State University
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)
Na Amazônia! Photo captured by Will Nickley.
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!
Theresa, Sharon, and I at Priority Design's Mocktail Party with our drink and samples.
Introduction:
OSU's 2023 Industrial Design Charrette was all about designing 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 around assigned constraints. My team (myself, Theresa Pham, and Sharon Longdong) needed to utilize a 8 oz martini glass. Our required ingredient was to use a fungus, and our cultural inspiration was Brazil.
Our charrette kicked off with a drink/mixology demonstration from Ty Phillips-Bond, Beverage Director at Watershed Distillery.
Ty showing us how to make one of Watershed's drinks.
Research:
We spent a day researching different ways to incorporate a fungus into our drink, an ingredient that we were initially confused and concerned about.
Exploring foods that would count as a fungus.
We reached out to Dominique Flaksberg, a grad student from Brazil. She was kind enough to invite us into her home and talk us through 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.
They provided lots of clever insights, and perhaps a few distractions.
We spent the weekend brainstorming recipes and compiling research. Still struggling with how to incorporate a fungus, I reached out to a connection from one of my previous internships, Chef Aldana Iturri, a Recipe Development Chef at Hestan Cue. Aldana 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 developed during experimentation. We tried out several mixology methods and had little success. One such example was adding condensed milk to brewed Brazilian tea. While the concoction is one of Dominique's favorites, we simply could not get the ratios right.
We decided to go with more of a fruity drink when I was walking through my 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 developed a drink themed after the fruits of the Amazon!
We experimented with several 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 "Into the Amazon" in Portuguese, according to Dominique. While we went through tons of different ideas, we felt this encompassed our theme of the fruits of the Amazon rainforest best.
Photoshoot:
One of our final deliverables was to submit our drink for a photoshoot, where we also received a small critique 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 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.
A closeup of our new garnish, which has a mango flower dipped in grenadine for extra color.
Deliverable: Recipe
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 worked 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 recipe experimentation. And I must say, after this project, I am much more willing and confident to work with food! 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"
