THE STORY BEHIND THE COCKTAIL NAME

The theme of minimal waste and maximal taste prompted me to look more carefully into the bar I work in and surrounding businesses. I wanted to identify what we waste the most of and how it can be better utilised. The base flavour of my cocktail is created by a waste free orange & coffee sorbet that is made in house. There is also a couple of tiny cafes around the bar that don't trade over weekends, which are constantly wash all their all the coffee grounds and cold drip coffee leftover grinds down the drain. Old brioche buns also get thrown out as they wouldn’t be fresh enough for Mondays trade.

I took all these waste products off their hands and put them to good use for my cocktail entry.

In our venue we make heaps of Old Fashioned and negronis, so we have plenty of zested whole oranges which we juice up rather than just throw out. I’ve used this juice to make a moorish sorbet. A 10:2:1 ratio of orange juice: coffee excess/grinds: caster sugar goes into a sorbet maker and the final product is an aromatic, tangy yet creamy sorbet with a hit of bitterness and subtle coffee taste. This is then placed in a Nutri bullet with the rest of the ingredients.

Fino sherry is rapid infused with a lime and husks (left over from all our citrus juicing). The reason I have chosen to rapid infuse over a sous vide method where a plastic Cryovac bag cannot be recycled. With rapid infusion the only by-product is the empty N02 canister, which can be recycled when disposed correctly. Pavan liquor is then added to add a slight touch of sweetness and aromatics to balance out the bitterness of the coffee and the salinity of the sherry. And then of course, we add a 45ml of our hero which ties all the flavours together, Sipsmith Gin. Then…we BLEND!

Once blended it is placed into the flute glass and topped with a house made brioche & pineapple skin soda. The soda is made using the brioche bun which was gifted by the cafe and the off trimmings of pineapple skins (left over from the pineapple juice that is used in another one of our popular house cocktails). The glass is then dusted with a home-made citrus sherbet made using the dehydrated citrus husk that helped infuse the sherry combined with some icing sugar and citric acid. Inspired by the theme of the blend, this drink is therefore entirely closed loop and ZERO waste comes out of it. As the sorbet also acts as the ice, we also eliminate the need to use any access water.