Suzaku Maru ✕ ES Magazine
Our most popular serve so far this season has undoubtably been the Suzaku Maru, our storied seasonal CBD sour. A total collaborative effort from the whole management team, last week Alex spoke to the ES Magazine about the process behind creating it and the importance of story-telling! Here’s the full unedited transcript.
What inspired this drink?
We wanted to riff on a Pisco Sour (a very popular off-menu order in the Autumn) with a floral, Japanese element as there's a lovely crossover between Pisco and winter blossoms. I'd recently finished a book called Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson. It’s a classic Le Carré style thriller: in it a spy infiltrates an impenetrable Russian research centre in Siberia. To get into the region he has to go incognito aboard an ocean trawler called the Suzaku Maru that crosses the pacific from Latin America and docks in Japan.
Diego worked on balancing the base with pisco (a Peruvian brandy) and chilli; Anna came up with the kombucha with jasmine and ume as the sour element; then I balanced the sweet using our honey and ginger CBD syrup and added some aquafaba to give a saline, sea water texture. The result is a really collaborative effort between the management team here at the bar and shows how storytelling can lead creativity (or is it the other way around!)
How popular is this drink?
As with most of our CBD cocktails they hold the most popular place on the menu despite always being the most expensive! I think this drink is the most popular this time out as it is hands down one of the best we've ever done. Our menu is short and seasonal with 6 house cocktails in fixed styles:
1. Stirred in glass on ice
2. Stirred and served up
3. Sour
4. Long or fizz
5. Fix
6. Dessert
We tend to try and move around the placement of the CBD offering on each menu to add variety but when it comes to a CBD cocktail and the house sour aligning we always see a spike in popularity!
What kind of reaction does this drink get from customers? This could be simply seeing CBD on the menu, or tasting the drink itself.
I think curiosity about CBD leads people to try it. We place symbols on our menu to outline the strength of each drink and the CBD offering has a Marijuana icon above the stars for strength. this is an instant talking point and draws customer naturally towards it regardless of its position on the list. Taste wise, as mentioned before, we copped a trend towards Pisco sours in the Autumn so making a variant on it with strong wintery flavours is chicken following egg. People are responding well to both the taste and the CBD in the drink. We make our syrups strong from scratch so that you get a high dose of full spectrum CBD in each cocktail to counterbalance the alcohol. the two work wonderfully well in harmony but you need a high dose to prevent the CBD from getting lost. The honey ginger syrup we do is also our most accomplished and popular syrup.