So, around this time last year, she and I had just begun work on The Aviary: Holiday Cocktails. We were excited to make something in this funky "slow-zine" softcover style. As we waded into it, we wondered what other ideas might fit this form factor well.
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Something that I was particularly-fascinated by when we were making the Aviary book were the "N/As" – non-alcoholic drinks. These recipes were SO cool to me; they require exponentially more care and thought than actual cocktails, because every bit of them is made from scratch.pic.twitter.com/gSdYh2C53B
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You can buy boozes that have insanely complex flavor profiles, ready to go right out of the bottle. But if you want to take out the booze, you have to start building all that same complexity from nothing.
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Also, EACH of the Alinea Group's restaurants develops their own battery of n/a's...not just The Aviary. The collection of recipes from each restaurant differs wildly from that of the others...there's a flabbergasting variety amongst them all.pic.twitter.com/8VY6hpQtFO
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Anyway, one day, while talking about these things, Chef Achatz sort of casually made this comment "Yeah, this is what we do all day...we try to combine flavors in interesting ways. These n/a's are the same, just with liquid."
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This insight blew my mind. These are some of the world's best chefs, choosing to focus part of their energy on spirit-free drinks. These aren't just soda water with lime...they're not "mocktails". They're full-on cookery, just with liquids instead of solids.
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Anyway, Sarah and I thought a non-alcoholic booklet could be fun. So we went to work coming up with a pitch to present. We pulled about 20 recipes from our archives here; these recipes are kitchen-scale (so, they're meant to serve like 80 guests. Not super-useful at home).
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I worked on scaling down all the recipes to be reasonable at home, sourced all ingredients, did all the recipe testing, and make everything entirely at home.
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Further, I photographed everything in our apartment as well (on my kid's 1.5-foot-tall coloring table). After about a month of work, Sarah and I had a prototype that we brought in to present to Nick and Chef.pic.twitter.com/PuzDPKuYTR
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(I made the cover in Houdini, using a couple fluid emitters pointed at one another with a bit of color diffusion to make a nice, tasty-looking splash).pic.twitter.com/evYayeQUUW
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Anyway, we showed this thing to Nick, saying "Do you think this would be a good idea for a booklet?" He flipped through our prototype, tossed it on my desk, and said "no." Then he smiled, and said "You guys should make a full-on book about it." So we did.
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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?pic.twitter.com/UPeZ7NRo2O
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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.pic.twitter.com/AY5p0ILie3
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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.)pic.twitter.com/cIGhAJ1Mxe
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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.pic.twitter.com/G13AeSS7nX
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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.pic.twitter.com/9y4sDRtKO8
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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).pic.twitter.com/cwdWdRb8WH
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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...pic.twitter.com/fAnRqUcT9V
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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).pic.twitter.com/tDm14uqNgJ
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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)pic.twitter.com/Ik5GPyzlqp
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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.pic.twitter.com/RHPwHnWqG9
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Oh, also, we're working on something else that we'll be releasing around the same time. Have a great weekend!pic.twitter.com/A2jAHJrtzM
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