Every Spring semester, the second, third, and fourth year design students at Ohio State pause studio classes to participate in a design charrette, a one week collaborative design challenge. Each year has a different theme and challenge, and for 2023 that prompt was "Mocktails." Each group of three was tasked with designing a drink that incorporated both a cultural element inspired by the cultural background of a member of the design department as well as a randomly assigned ingredient. At the end of the charrette, we would bring our drinks to Priority Designs, who sponsored the project, and have a mocktail party!
My team's assigned ingredient was fat, and we chose to talk to a staff member from Puerto Rico to inspire the cultural aspect of our drink. We gathered information about Puerto Rican culture and researched different uses of fats in cocktails. Sitting down for a brainstorming and sketching session with my team, we decided that making a fruity mocktail was too obvious, and that it was likely that many of the other teams would design a fruity drink. After some iterations, we opted for my sketch:
This drink is based around the popular Puerto Rican pastry: the quesito. These are flaky pastries filled with sweet cream cheese and topped with a honey glaze, although other fillings are popular such as guava, bacon, and dulce de leche. Our conversation with Juan from Puerto Rico lead us to our drink base, malta. Malta is a popular soda made of malt. It's hard to describe to someone who's never tasted it, so you might have to give it a try! Next we added some thinned out caramel sauce to the malta, referencing the dulce de leche filling of some quesitos. Then, we added a little bit of orange juice to add acidity to the drink and fill out the flavor profile. Next, we made a "fat foam" consisting of a sweet cream cheese whipped topping with bacon fat and bacon crumbles folded into it. This is placed on top of the malta base and then the drink is garnished with orange zest!
We served our drink with bacon, orange slices, and actual quesitos so that people could taste the inspiration behind the drink.
For the party, we had to convert our drink into a shot size sampler. The shots were set up in the same way as the full drink, with the malta, orange juice, and caramel drink base at the bottom and the "fat foam" and orange zest on top. We provided a plate of bacon, orange slices, and quesitos as well as the base drink matla for guests to taste if they wanted. Overall, I think we had an incredibly unique drink design and I'm glad we opted for sweet and savory as it's different than what other groups had created and allowed us to stand out. In the end, we won a "judge's choice" award and a "how do I even drink this?" award! Our drink was strange and at times divisive (one of my professors loved it and the other hated the taste!) but we received mostly positive feedback, with some guests returning for seconds and even thirds! This charrette was so much fun, I had a total blast playing mixologist with some friends and creating such a great mocktail with them.
