Is Non-Alcoholic the new Vegetarian-Presentation
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Is Non-Alcoholic the new Vegetarian-Presentation
- 1. Is non-alcoholic the new vegetarian? @KOKO_ALEKO @ALEX_KRATENA
- 4. mushrooms
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon everybody, I am super excited to be here! My name is Alex and today I want to talk to you about non-alcoholic drinks. This whole thing blows me away, this amazing festival, celebration of food & drink is simply brilliant and mainly we’ve spoken about 2 things. The first one is human creativity demonstrated not only by all the speakers, but also in fact by everyone here, by all of you. The second thing one is the future; none of us actually know where the whole drinks industry is all heading. There’s lot of research being done and many companies and brands spend ridiculous amount of money to see where the whole industry is heading, but at the end of the day, none of us knows how people will drink in 2050, in fact none of the trend forecasting agencies actually know what will happen in next 5 years. If you ever find yourself at the bar asking for non alcoholic drink, I mean of course all of you bartenders actually never find yourself at the bar not drinking. But if you do go to bar and ask for non-alcoholic cocktail the bartender serving you will go: Why me? In the best case in most places you will get lemonade, or fruit punch, and if you want something more the bartender will probably pin you to the wall!
- I have a huge interest in non-alcoholic drinks and the things I value about my job the most is freedom & creativity. I mean anyone slaving in hospitality on minimum wage needs creativity to stay motivated and of course bartenders love freedom, especially they are free to do 9 double shifts straight in a roll. What I particularly love about bartenders is that they are like children. They love freedom, they want to be creative and often they take 2 things you would never imagine they could be working together and they make insanely amazing cocktail. They create flavor combinations you never dream about, but for some reason the alcohol & bar business in general, or perhaps fellow bartenders make them believe that alcohol is the only vehicle to carry and deliver flavor. I feel that bartenders are almost afraid to be drinking non-alcoholic, for some reason drinking alcohol is cool. They think that selling alcoholic drinks makes more money, but the truth is that the moment you look into your Manhattan with small batch rye, home made bitters and craft vermouth, you often make considerably smaller margin than you do with amazing non alcoholic cocktails. I am absolutely not advocating against alcohol here, but I can’t help myself to ask: ‘is non alcoholic the new vegetarian?’ I feel that if there are so many amazing vegetarian dishes, if chefs don’t need meat on every plate why should we limit ourselves only to alcohol?
- I think that non-alcoholic is critical for future of our profession, on one hand we look down our nose on all the artificially flavored, sugar-loaded sodas, but on the other hand, what are the non-alcoholic options we provide to people. It is naive to expect people who are paid to sell volumes to maintain responsible conduct and ethical behavior. Us, bartenders, have new opportunity and responsibility to advice others on what to enjoy. I think that it is often the names that preoccupy us from fully exploiting the real potential of ingredients. If I take this (glass) and pour water inside we are all going to agree it is a glass, but the moment I put flower inside (put flower) does it become a vase? We got so many ingredients around us that we sometimes forget and perhaps don’t use everything as much as we should.
- One of the reasons I like the challenge of making non-alcoholic drinks, is because it demands that we focus on ingredients even more, since we can’t simply add any big flavor lift from wine, spirit, or liqueurs. Desire to serve drinks with no alcohol pushes you to research into how to make best use of vegetables, mushrooms, seaweed, herbs, rice, nuts, but also learn about techniques like fermentation.
- If making cocktails is like creating perfumes, meaning creating flavors, which don’t exist in nature, the best example of flavor you are all familiar with, yet doesn’t exist in nature is Coca Cola. We all use Campari as a reference to flavours, yet the key lies in understanding all the different elements and that’s exactly how we need to approach flavours. So if this (take a charger) is for Mac user a charger, to us, bartenders it is obviously a very stylish bottle opener. This is the way how we need to rethink our approach to ingredients and radically change a view of what makes a great drink.
- At Artesian we list both alcoholic and nonalcoholic cocktails together without making any distinction between them. Of course the cocktails we make are primarily alcohol driven, but living in city like London we’ve identified the need of something different, something that would remain delicious, yet also beautifully presented and I love watching guest reaction when they take a sip, express their satisfaction and than ask: so what’s the alcohol in this? They often seem shocked that flavorful drink actually doesn’t contain a drop. We enjoy playing with people’s expectations. This whole thing means we can serve more drinks to people and guest who either can’t, or don’t want to be drinking can enjoy delicious drink without being pointed at, or feel pushed on the side, or wondering where the non-alcoholic section is. One guest recently told me that the reason he enjoys entertaining his business partners at Artesian all the time is because no one can ever tell, whether he’s having alcohol, or not. If you are going out five nights a week, surely there’s always at least one you don’t want to be drinking.
- It is the marketing, traditions and perhaps our own mind & conventions making us think we should be serving primarily alcohol, but what it comes down to is only hope to change how we perceive ingredients, is that we look at richness, and complexity of what makes a great cocktail and we radically rethink our ways. We need to be ready to be wrong, because if we are not ready to make mistakes, we will never create anything meaningful. To me there’s only 2 types of drinks, the bad one and the good one. The current state of affairs won’t service what Omnivore celebrates the most and that is human creativity. Thank you!