Five classic cocktails with a future twist.
For IFTF’s 50th Anniversary, I led the Food Futures Lab’s creation of a cocktail recipe book based on our research report Food Innovation: Recipes for the Next Decade. By incorporating today’s early signals of change—lab grown egg whites, perennial wheat, or AI-designed plant-based milk—these “edible futures” gave people a taste of what’s to come and asked them to rethink the possibility in every sip. Since then, we’ve served these cocktails to several hundred people—and even got some dairy farmers to consider a White Russian made without cow’s milk.
Download the full book at www.iftf.org/cocktails
Cocktail book images and text are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 | © Institute for the Future.
Project team: Sarah Smith (concept, writer, art direction, page layout), Max Elder (writer), Quinault Childs (writer), Yan Yan (illustrator)
What would you like to drink?
White Russian Intelligence
Russians and automated bots aren’t such a tasty combination (just ask Hillary). But by 2027, a combination of automated kitchen robotics and artificial intelligence will reinvent the White Russian to taste great, look out for the environment, and not influence any national elections.
This drink’s signature heavy cream comes from The Not Company, who created an artificial intelligence food scientist to formulate its plant-based dairy substitutes. Their AI sorts through massive amounts of data on human nutrition, taste preferences, and environmental impact to create novel food formulations. Forget using that old burnt carafe of coffee—bartenders of the next decade can incorporate robotics that automate the production of perfect quality foods. Use Blossom Coffee, a wireless coffee maker developed at MIT. It downloads brewing settings from a database populated by roasters who want to ensure peak flavors of their coffee in homes. These appliances create new precision methods for cooking and open platforms for peer-to-peer sharing.
However, when everything is digitally connected, we need to be on the lookout for ransomware, even in our kitchen appliances. Now your online enemies can sabotage your identity and—even worse—burn your coffee.
Ingredients
1 1/2 oz. vodka
1 oz. Blossom Coffee
3/4 oz. coffee liqueur
3/4 oz. vanilla liqueur
1/4 cup The Not Company heavy cream
a dusting cocoa powder
Combine vodka, coffee, and vanilla and coffee liqueurs in an ice-filled shaker. Shake. strain into a chilled cocktail glass filled with ice cubes. Top with Not Co. heavy cream and dust with cocoa powder. Don’t have access to Not Co. heavy cream, but still want a less caloric or vegan-friendly version? Try this classic cocktail with soy or any nut-based milk! No matter what you use, this cocktail always abides.
Ginetic Fizzicist
As climate change increases mean temperatures around the world, a gin fizz is the perfect craft cocktail to cool you down in that summer (and winter) heat! For those worried about the raw egg in this cocktail, have no fear; Clara Foods creates an animal-free egg white alternative that is salmonella-free and formulated with precisely the proteins you need for the perfect froth.
How do they do it? Clara is at the forefront of a new approach to farming, called cellular agriculture, using advances in synthetic biology to engineer yeast that create the proteins found in egg whites. You’ll need some cultured flavoring from Ginkgo Bioworks, a biology company that produces food flavoring through designer yeast strain fermentation. Because the final flavor doesn’t include the engineered yeast, it can be labeled as natural, which has already started causing some confusion and controversy among eaters. This process of engineering yeast has actually been used both in food and medical applications for decades, however as it becomes more common we can expect to see more consumer protests and calls for transparency.
Ingredients
2 oz. gin
1/2 oz. lemon juice
1 Clara Foods animal-free egg white
1 oz. lavender simple syrup (see below)
a splash club soda
to garnish: lavender flowers and sliced lemon
lavender simple syrup: 1 cup water 1 cup sugar 2 tbsp. Ginkgo Bioworks lavender flavoring
Fill both a tumbler and a shaker with ice. Add gin, lemon juice, lavender simple syrup, and Clara egg white to the shaker and shake for 30-45 seconds. Strain into tumbler and top off with club soda. For a fancy garnish, add lavender flowers and a thin slice of lemon. To make the lavender simple syrup, combine water and sugar in saucepan over medium heat until the sugar has dissolved. Let the syrup cool for one minute, then add 2 tablespoons of Gingko Bioworks’ signature lavender flavoring. Chill in the fridge until you make your cocktails!
Now Who Gets the Last Word?
When this drink was introduced at the Detroit Athletic Club in 1915, equal parts gin (floral), green chartreuse (herbaceous), maraschino (sweet), and lime (citrus) duked it out on your taste buds for which flavor got The Last Word. One hundred years later, the question of who gets the last word is still up for grabs, but now our understanding of taste perception makes it even more contested.
Charles Spence’s Crossmodal Research Lab at Oxford University studies the complex relationship between our senses. They have found that people enjoy the taste of red wine significantly more under red lighting than green lighting and that playing high pitched sounds makes chocolate taste sweeter and low pitched sounds makes it more bitter. By manipulating the light and sound of your surroundings, you too can play with this synesthesia to make the drink as sweet or as bitter as you’d like. Trying to cut back on sugar? Use less maraschino and pump up those sweet melodic tunes.
Ingredients
3/4 oz. gin
3/4 oz. green Chartreuse
3/4 oz. maraschino liqueur, like Luxardo
3/4 oz. fresh lime juice to garnish twist of lime
Programmable Philips Hue light bulbs [select “cocktail party” preset mode]
MP3 sound files to enhance bitter or sweet flavors [listen to the “Sonic Seasoning” episode of the 20k Hertz podcast]
Vigorously shake all ingredients together with ice. Strain into a martini glass and garnish with lime twist. Use smartphone to activate light and sound flavor manipulation settings.
Cricket’s Knees
The Bee’s Knees was a cocktail designed to mask the awful taste of prohibition-era homemade gin with honey. Now, bigger problems than bad gin confront our food system—about one third of all food produced for human consumption is wasted every year, bee colony collapse threatens the pollinators responsible for 75% of our crops—just to name a few.
Now, engaged eaters are using ingredients that have both culinary and functional purposes to address urgent future challenges. Beekeepers from Bangalore to Boston are tending rooftop hives and entomophagists are growing crickets on their countertops. Others are working to create new markets for foods once deemed undesirable: Imperfect Produce sources produce that doesn’t fit cosmetic standards to be be sold on grocery store shelves and instead sells them directly to consumers. Chili lime crickets ease people into familiarity with a protein source that produces 100x less greenhouse gas emissions than beef. Eaters are no longer just “demand” at the end of a supply chain; they are collaborators and investors and if history has taught us anything, they definitely won’t let constraints stand in the way of a good drink.
Ingredients
2 oz. Gin (we suggest Anty Gin)
1 oz. Imperfect lemon juice
1/2 oz. rooftop honey
1 Imperfect lemon twist
for garnish: chili lime crickets
Combine equal amounts honey and hot water, mix thoroughly. In a shaker, combine gin, lemon juice, honey syrup and ice. Shake vigorously and strain into a chilled glass. Garnish with ugly lemon twist and candied crickets.
Perennial Prairie Peach
In 2017, almost all of America’s 46 million acres of wheat are monocultures of annual grains. Every year we have to till and replant, and in the process tear up topsoil and release much of the carbon that had once been fixed into the ground.
The Land Institute in Kansas is researching and developing a new kind of wheat, a perennial grain that doesn’t need to be planted every year. Now that you’re saving time by not tilling your wheat fields every year, you can kick back with friends and enjoy a pitcher of this refreshing beer cocktail.
Use Long Root Ale, a beer from Patagonia Provisions and Hopworks Urban Brewery, which is made from Kernza, a perennial grain. Kernza sinks roots 10 feet deep into the ground so it requires less water and prevents erosion, and produces edible grains for five years. The Grapefruit hop-forward Pale Ale mixes perfectly with a tangy peach shrub, which helps boost biodiversity at a different scale: inside your gut. The apple cider vinegar in the shrub contains a “mother” (a colony of beneficial bacteria) that your gut microbiome will love.
Ingredients
5 oz. white rum
5 oz. peach shrub
1 1/4 oz. orgeat
20 oz. Patagonia Provisions and Hopworks Brewery Long Root Ale
For peach shrub: 4 medium peaches, 1 cup granulated sugar, 1 cup grated fresh ginger, 1 3/4 cup apple cider vinegar (with “the mother,” such as Braggs), 1/2 cup white balsamic vinegar
For the Cocktail: In a pitcher, mix together white rum, peach shrub, and orgeat. Refrigerate at least 1 hour before serving, or mix and refrigerate up to 24 hours in advance. When ready to serve, add beer to the pitcher and stir gently. Serve cocktails in ice-filled highball glasses.
For the peach shrub: Cut the peaches into 1-inch cubes and place them, with the ginger, in a wide-mouth container. Cover with sugar and lightly crush the peaches using a muddler. Cover and refrigerate overnight. Press peach mixture through a fine-mesh sieve into a clean medium-sized bowl. Discard peach solids. Add both vinegars to peach juices. Whisk to combine. Pour through funnel into clean bottle. Seal bottle and shake vigorously. Store in refrigerator for 3 to 5 days, shaking periodically to help dissolve sugar. Strained shrub keeps up to 6 months in the refrigerator.
Why Cocktails?
Legend has it the first cocktail was made in 1586 aboard Sir Francis Drake’s ship stranded near Havana. The sailors were too sick to sail, so they mixed together ingredients on hand: mint, lime, chuchuhuasi tree bark soaked in rum, and cane sugar. This improvised concoction (sounds like a mojito) set the stage for nearly 500 years of spirited ingenuity.
In the next decade, the ingredients we’ll have on hand to make cocktails will be drastically different: lab grown egg whites in your gin fizz, climate change fighting perennial wheat in your beer, or entirely new and unexpected recipe combinations designed by artificial intelligence to reduce food waste or maximize flavor. Getting creative with future cocktail recipes can help us think about how best to meet urgent, global challenges that extend well beyond how to sail our stranded ship back home.