Ingredient HUNTING WITH FEVER-TREE
Earlier this year, Fever-Tree along with 12 exceptional bartenders, ventured out to Wasing Estate for an exciting day to learn about all things ingredients and foraging. Quality and flavour of ingredients are key in bartending and the creation of cocktails, something that is also at the heart of everything we do here Fever-Tree. This trip allowed us to experience this ethos first-hand locally with 12 bartenders handpicked from some brilliant bars. Miles Irving, Nick Strangeway & Valentine Warner, all world leaders in wild food, drinks and ingredient hunting, lead the day with three focus areas...
Miles guided us around the estate, showing the sheer abundance of wild ingredients that is available so locally to London. We tasted, picked, and collected ingredients with foraging equipment, to then be lead through a flavour extraction session by Nick. It included live distilling and extraction as well as using a larder of preserved ingredients for us to get creative with. Finally, Valentine cooked an incredible feast using foraged ingredients as well, creating rustic salads, stuffed whole bbq’d trout and elderflower fritters to name a few.
The bartenders who got to experience the trip were handpicked from some of the best bars including; Three Sheets, Swift, The Connaught, Layness, Seed Libary, Hawksmoor, Happiness Forgets, & Claridges.
To put all the foraging practice into use, we split into groups to create 3 cocktails, an aperitif, one to pair with the main course and the final group cocktail, with the dessert. Each of the drinks used ingredients we found that day and featured one of Fever-Tree’s Sodas, Tonics and Gingers. These drinks reflected our ethos of going to extraordinary lengths to find the best ingredients for our mixers. Everyone had an incredible day learning about ingredient hunting and foraging from Miles, Nick, Valentine & us at Fever-Tree, and felt inspired to bring and use these learnings back at their bars.