Cocktail Stories: Orkney Breezer, Seed Library
Ryan Chetiyawardana’s latest cocktail trick at London’s Seed Library involves using a sheep’s pancreas to reveal childhood memories of eating ice cream.
“It’s a slightly bizarre starting point for unlocking flavours,” admits Ryan Chetiyawardana (also known as Mr Lyan) of one of the primary ingredients to Seed Library’s Orkney Breezer, which has been raising eyebrows (in a good way) since its launch on the Shoreditch bar’s spring menu.
The ingredient in question is sheep pancreatic enzymes, which are part of the cocktail’s nod to the weird but wonderful ingredients you find around the coast of the Orkney Islands. He says: “It was born out of research the team were doing when we tasked them with this idea of: ‘How do we find different parts of flavours?’”
Chetiyawardana says Scotland’s west coast was a fun area for the team to dive into, considering what can crop up as ‘flavour’. “There are seaweeds and coastal herbs and fruits. They feel often overlooked and, in some ways, maybe a little mundane – but, actually, they’re very wonderful, and should be celebrated in the same way other fine ingredients are.”
According to Chetiyawardana, rare-breed sheep that are ‘lost’ on North Ronaldsay – the northernmost island of the archipelago – forage on the seaweed, which gives their pancreas an “incredible” profile to work with. “There’s just such a bounty of flavour,” he says.
The other ‘accidental’ ingredient in the cocktail, sea buckthorn, has a tropical taste with a passion fruit aroma, even though some people say “it doesn’t smell very appealing at times”, he says. “It also married in this incredible creaminess from the seaweed – it tasted like a Solera ice cream.”
The fluffy and creamy profile leads to the sentiment of the cocktail’s story: being able to enjoy an ice cream on the beach. It’s evidence, Chetiyawardana says, that “you don’t need to go to a tropical island to get that sort of joyousness”.
To compare it with another cocktail, the Orkney Breezer is something like a Whisky Fizz – although it’s very much one of a kind. Highland Park adds soft fruitiness rather than the robust smokiness one might expect from a single malt from this part of the world. And, as polarising as its two main parts may sound, the final product is “absolutely approachable”.
Orkney Breezer
Ingredients
50ml Highland Park 12 Years Old
30ml Tropical garum*
3 dashes Lovage tincture
3.75ml Lactic acid solution
10ml Gomme
Method: Spindle mix with crushed ice or shake hard with cubed ice, strain into a chilled goblet, and crown with 50ml soda water.
*Sea buckthorn and kombu blended then fermented with sheep’s pancreatic enzymes, then strained.
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