Signals & Stats

Drink and be merry: If LS:N Global made… a cocktail

By Daniela Walker and Rachael Stott 23 : 12 : 2014 Raising The Bar : Cocktails : Tolkien Tipples

London – LS:N Global’s cocktail would play with your senses, surprise with unexpected ingredients and transport the drinker to another era, but not 1920s Prohibition, because if we learned one thing in 2014, it was that speakeasies are dead and our cocktail is anything but.

Communion Bar, London

Rev JW Simpson, Tolkien Tipples Micro trend

The Beaufort Bar Menu at the Savoy Hotel by Helen Friel

Fragrances at The Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Berlin

White Lyan pre-batched cocktail, London.

The LS:N Global cocktail would surprise and delight drinkers with juxtapositions of unusual ingredients – like the savoury and sweet combinations from The Shrub & Shutter or perhaps a darker, more psychedelic route with DIY additives that change the flavour, like the bumps at London’s Bump Caves.

It would be served at the perfect temperature, without the need for ice, taking inspiration from Ryan Chetiyawardana's White Lyan bar.

While we like to think our cocktail is complex, like a classic Old-Fashioned, its elements will be easily broken down so that we could create a Carry-On Kit of the essential ingredients and enjoy it on our flight home for the holidays. We also hope that at-home cocktail connoisseurs would be able to replicate it, perhaps using the Pernod Ricard Project Gutenberg modular mixology app to help with all of the measures. And if that proves too complicated, we would offer the cocktail in pre-batched bottles for when people want to simply pour and sip.

One taste of our cocktail would be transformative, taking the drinker back in time with flavours once suited to a mediaeval feast. A note of mead or serving it in a goblet would pay homage to the fantastical wave of drinks we described in our Tolkien Tipples microtrend.

Lastly, never forget that a cocktail is more than just a mixed drink. While important, we want our cocktail to be about more than just taste; it should engulf the senses. In particular, our cocktail would play on the sense of smell, like the Fragrances Bar in Berlin, where the menu features fragrances rather than tasting notes. Indeed, the cocktail menu is almost as important as the cocktail itself. Ours would have a sense of whimsy and a weight to it, like the Beaufort Bar’s pop-up book menu, to help drinkers lose themselves in the pages before they even taste the drink.

If LS:N Global made… 2014 is a series of reports reflecting the LS:N Global team’s pick of the best innovations of the year, and those that will be most relevant for consumers in the coming year.