We did the entire thing the same way we'd made our prototype; I did all the scaling and testing in our small apartment kitchen. I felt working this way was important: I want these recipes to be easy to make at home, and what better way than to make all of them in a home kitchen?
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I felt the same about ingredient sourcing; when I could, I would try to use ingredients we could find online or in our local supermarkets, rather than doing special-order stuff through The Aviary itself. Here's what that looked like a few months in.
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(...and here's what it looked like after Sarah gently asked me to please clean my shit up or she was going to send the previous photo to Chef.)
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The recipes themselves were super-fun to make, and scaling them all down myself forced me to learn how to taste and evaluate them. I brought each version of each drink in to the chefs to let them taste a couple times per week.
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I ended up making most drinks several times before getting them to a point where we all agreed they were delicious.
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In doing this back-and-forth, we ended up expanding the scope of things dramatically; what started as a book with about 30 recipes grew into one with over 120 or so. There's some pretty fun stuff we developed just for the book (things that were never served in the restaurants).
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Anyway, I'm excited today because we've gotten a big box of proofs from our printer and are putting the finishing touches on things before pushing "go" on our big print run. We're debating a few different cloth-cover slipcase options...
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...and a few interesting cover treatments (we're working on a textured cover that has sort of a glassy "varnish" over the hero drink, so that the whole thing is fun to touch).
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Sarah just finished up the end sheets (the two pages that secure the main book block to the cover itself). I generated the linework in Houdini – a combination of Tessendorf waves and a fluid simulation – and she hand-painted the ice cubes and the water textures)
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Anyway, we aim to have it ready to ship within the next few months, and are very excited to share it.
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So!! Pumped!! Thank you for sharing this wonderful story, and huge congratulations to you and Sarah! I really love that you did all the development in your home kitchen.