Could This Be 2023’s Big Drink Trend?

Fashion and TikTok are well known as areas of rapidly changing trends, but the world of booze is not immune to them.Every year, new year, season, or binge-worthy TV series can be the catalyst for seemingly coordinated updates to bar menus everywhere. house of dragons star Emma Darcy).

And since the 1990s, now from style Web designit is not surprising that our drink also includes a decade. there is. actually New.

So while scanning the room beyond the threshold of a metaphorical saloon in 2023, looking for something unrecognizable from earlier points in history, I focused on an unlikely candidate: a tea bag.or sachetthat’s why give it to methe company behind the product also states it — there’s no tea there, after all.

Instead, it has a mixture of dehydrated and granular ingredients such as pekin chili, cinchona bark, smoked salt, and crystallized oranges that, when steeped in a water-booze mixture for a few minutes, make a high-quality cocktail. No shakes, no stirs, no mixology recipe books needed.

Sayso was founded in 2018 under the name Steep’t, but co-founders Alison Evans and Chloe Aucoin believe a mid-2022 reopening is a real jumping off point for business. The two came up with the idea while enrolling in a class at her school at Harvard Her School of Business called Startup Her Bootcamp. Or, to be more precise, it evolved from another idea they had for a mason jar-based all-natural cocktail-infused product they came up with. After you have made it clear that you want satisfaction.The time that the product required.

“We’ve taken these learnings and combined them by sticking to all-natural ingredients, but we’ve come up with a product that can be granulated into tea bags and infused almost instantly.” Harvard In keeping with the name of the university course, the two made their product from scratch and handcrafted it at home: “We turned our apartment into this very chaotic test kitchen. There we were ordering all these ingredients and testing different things,” said Aucoin.

Evans and Aucoin share a passion for food and drink, but neither had experience in the spirits industry before Sayso. After discovering that the recipe they made in their apartment wasn’t up to par, they hired a formulator to tweak it. The result was a margarita and an old fashioned. End of string.

The idea was well received and they stuck with it even after graduating from HBS in 2020. Soaring During Pandemicand while pre-mixed, so-called ready-to-drink (RTD) cocktails have been around for years, closed bars and restaurants are turning people with the desire to drink at home (or outdoors) into The ready-to-drink category, including hard seltzer, has blown up in the years since, but you don’t need to look data Know that you can expect to find canned Jack and Coke, rum-infused kombucha, or what they call Finnish long drinks at any store that sells liquor. Even small general stores have started selling cocktails like spherical cores. buzz ball.)

Knowing all that, I’m not surprised to find myself standing at the kitchen counter, sipping three ounces of tap water and one and a half ounces of Derma Gay Mezcal from a bottle while moving a tea bag up and down in a rocks glass. shelf. I expect and trust myself to have a spicy thin margarita in minutes.

But I’m surprised that the finished cocktail tastes closer to what the bartender put in front of me than any premixed drink I’ve ever had.

To be honest, I’m not a big fan of RTD cocktails. In my experience most of them are real stand-ins.The few good things succeed because they come close enough, or because the setting is right (I still fondly recall drinking a canned vermouth spritz while watching the Columbia River Gorge swirl out the window of an Amtrak Empire Builder observation car). Still, artificiality always seemed to be the inevitable tasting note.

Not so with my Seisomag. After three minutes of steeping and the addition of ice, the drink offers no clue that it came in a pouch that was packaged, boxed and sent to me. (pun intended). Even the mocktail version just swaps out the tequila or mezcal for more water or non-alcoholic spirits to make one.

Is it a fluke? I will also try Sayso’s other sachets, such as the Thin Cardamom Paloma, the Rosemary Honey Moscow Mule, and the classic Old Fashioned mix. One thing that sets Sayso cocktails apart from his RTDs is the DIY factor. For weak drinks, for example, the tea bag can be taken out immediately. In keeping with the American tea-drinker stereotype, leave the bag in when making a paloma, and for a mule, cut the thread with a pair of scissors, place it in an ice-filled jar, and shake the drink for more. Melts fast and chills.Cocktails.

I expected Sayso’s cocktails to be less flavorful, like tea. But again, the tea comparison is a bit false. Evans and Aucoin explained to me that, like tea, their infusions contain whole fruits and herbs, but some ingredients are granulated instead. When met my tap water and mezcal, it essentially turned into lime juice.

By the time I try old-fashioned drinks, I’m more impressed (and, admittedly, noisier) with these little bagged drinks. is a simple cocktail, but all its flavor intensity and complexity lies in its delicacy. There is also. But I am damned. It’s good, and I didn’t even use that good whiskey to make it.

Cocktails rely on a drinker’s home bottle collection, so bad liquor can be one of the things that causes Sayso’s bagged beverages to leak. Bottom shelf liquor, $10 per plastic handle How would that marg taste if it was made with the type of? The instructions are very clear and printed on each bag. Some people will undoubtedly ask: If you’re already mixing and measuring, why not make the perfect drink? scratch?

If Sayso’s position between bottled RTDs and canned RTDs and made-to-order is both its strength and its potential weakness, it’s up to the drinker to decide which it is. For me the answer is clear. I don’t keep cinchona bark, gentian root, smoked salt, etc. around the house, and at $3 per cup (minus the alcohol), it’s pretty affordable.

When something is brand new, it’s hard to tell if it will last for a long time or fade in a few months. Maybe three years ago you would have been skeptical of a cocktail in a tea bag. But not in 2023. Especially not after trying it myself.