The end of the 2010s was a strange time in the cocktail world, as everyone tried to make their mark either through esoteric techniques — or blatant gimmicks. This was an era of ubiquity for fat-washed cocktails and milk punches, rotovaps, centrifuges, and liquid nitrogen. A time when, if you ordered many bars’ house Old Fashioned, all of a sudden a glass cloche and smoking gun would appear out of nowhere and suddenly the entire room would start to stink of burning wood chips.
It would all quickly become so groan-worthy, so clearly designed to get drinks posted on Instagram.
However, one thing that seemed explicitly designed for this maximalist, visual spectacle era never seemed to trend the way its creators initially hoped for.
I’m talking about the Flavour Blaster — British spelling correct — a handheld device costing nearly $500, which produces bubbles that sit atop coupes and, when popped, explode into wisps of smoke (the company calls them “aroma clouds”) containing one of 20 different scents, including mixed berry, coconut, and lavender.
By now, in this more restrained post-pandemic time, I thought the Flavour Blaster had been placed in the dustbin of cocktail history alongside other gimmicky gadgets from the past. I thought it was now only still used by the cheesiest and off-trend of bars — the kinds of bars rimming glasses with candy sprinkles. So you can imagine my surprise when the hottest spot in New York introduced a cocktail utilizing the gadget.
“The Flavour Blaster is a good product to have to create something that’s hard to create any other way, and then they make it simple and easy to use as well,” says GN Chan, co-founder and bartender at Double Chicken Please, which was named Best Bar in North America in 2023.
For the aforementioned drink, called Custard Bun, Chan builds a cocktail with sake, palo cortado sherry, sparkling wine, and pu’er tea. For the Flavour Blaster bubble, he makes his own aroma, wanting to create the sensation of walking into a Chinatown dim sum house and smelling the palo santo wood incense burning and the chrysanthemum tea poured to welcome guests.
Chan’s not alone. Increasingly, top bartenders are using the Flavour Blaster as a legitimate bar tool that can add not just aroma, but pizzazz to any cocktail.
Why Not?
The Flavour Blaster was the brainchild of U.K.-based hospitality expert Colin Myers and manufacturer Robert Flunder. Early on, the duo created products like the Dry Ice Machine, a device able to rapidly chill two glasses. Later, they wanted to create a device that could provide the theatricality of dry ice with better ease.
Eventually, bartender Simone Caporale, of London’s famed Artesian Bar, joined the JetChill team. He had long had a vision for a device that could not only add visual theatrics but also aroma, all without affecting the flavor of the underlying cocktail. By 2017, the trio had created a prototype of the Flavor Blaster, which could trap aromatized vapor within an edible bubble. Thanks to early online buzz and viral social media, by 2018 the product launched with thousands of advance orders.
Even from the get-go, however, as I saw early-adopting bars post about it on social media, I thought it looked a bit corny. Was anyone really aching to have a glob of edible bubbles resting atop their coupe glass?
Chan actually was.
In fact, over a decade earlier, while working at New York’s Angel’s Share, he had tried to create something similar using a smoking machine and edible bubble mix. He found it hard to pull off and never consistent. The Flavour Blaster solved all his problems.
“I know a lot of people think it’s kind of gimmicky, a crowd pleaser, but for me, it’s like, ‘Why not?’” Chan says. “If it makes sense, if it gives people a great experience, and if it fits into what you want to express with your drinks, why not? It’s just a tool.”
Just a Tool or Drink Theater?
More and more top-flight bartenders are starting to agree with Chan. That includes Josh Harris and Nick Amano-Dolan of San Francisco’s Trick Dog and Travis Tober of Austin’s Nickel City. Jeffrey Bell, managing partner of New York’s PDT, has recently used the device at special events to make “smoked” Old Fashioneds.
“I thought it was a better way to add subtle aroma without burying the base cocktail with smoke,” he says, though he’s yet to use it at his own bar. “I don’t necessarily see a need for it at PDT, but can see how consumers would love it [at] bars with a little more theatrical programming.”
Indeed, it’s not purely the aromatic capabilities that drive the modern bartender to use the Flavour Blaster — the visuals, of course, do matter.
“Drink theater has exploded in the last couple of years,” says Josh Durr, the founder and CEO of Hawthorn Innovations, the bar-focused creative agency that represents the Flavour Blaster in North America. “If you look at the top 10 bars in the world, they all have their own way of incorporating this kind of drink theater in some way, shape, or form and they all kind of do it a little differently, you know?”
Admittedly, “drink theater” and use of the Flavour Blaster itself still remain centered in Europe and Asia, though bartenders in America have begun slowly dipping their toes into the water. Hawthorn is willing to help create custom aromas for certain bars — a turnaround that takes a month or two — as well as ancillary tools all meant to elevate the drink experience.
“We have a new product where the Flavour Blaster bubble sits on top of a light bulb, and then there’s a button you push that sucks the bubble down into the drink,” he says. “So there’s a whole bunch of crazy, Willy Wonka weird stuff we’re working on.”
*Flavour Blaster has an R&D team, an engineering team, and a flavorist in-house in the United Kingdom. Hawthorne, in turn, has another 25 employees who can execute 3D design as well as a build team to further create products for drink theater. The company does around $15 to $18 million in custom innovation projects for liquor brands per year.
If the necessities of the pandemic and to-go cocktail culture led to more canonical drinks and more stripped-down service, Durr feels we have firmly returned to more showy, baroque drinking.
“We have all kinds of fun new aromas like truffle and bubblegum, you know, so we can think about using it for a Michelin star kind of experience or at a dive bar that wants to do something kind of silly and weird.”
“We’re now in this world as a society where experience is king, you know, especially with a younger generation,” Durr says. “So anything that creates an experience that’s beyond just serving a drink, a wow factor, a cleverness, an extra step, if you will, is desirable.”
The Wow Factor
Like any tool, a bar’s use of the Flavour Blaster has to thread a fine line between esoteric necessity and pure gimmickry. The fact that the Flavour Blaster is now in use at plenty of chain restaurants — Outback Steakhouse, Morton’s, P.F. Changs, not to mention Royal Caribbean cruise lines’ Icon of the Seas — surely isn’t helping serious users of the tool.
Its appearance in a Google ad and Taylor Swift being filmed popping a Blaster bubble at Koma, an innovative Japanese restaurant in Singapore, might not have helped the device’s “serious” bona fides, though both undoubtedly aided in its further ubiquity.
Durr, for one, doesn’t seem to care. If the Flavour Blaster is to become a mainstream bar tool, he believes it will have to be used at bars both high-end and low-end, ones advanced and for neophytes, bars sophisticated and cheesy. “We have all kinds of fun new aromas like truffle and bubblegum, you know, so we can think about using it for a Michelin star kind of experience or at a dive bar that wants to do something kind of silly and weird,” he says.
It even appeared at this year’s Academy Awards Governor’s Ball in a drink created by famed bartender Charles Joly.
“I think that the wow factor and the drink theater is here to stay, but it will continue to evolve,” Durr says. For him, the biggest sign that Flavour Blaster is here to say is the sheer number of cheaper knockoffs, like the Aroma Blaster, the Vapour Blaster, and the Flavor Blaster (American English spelling), all currently available on Amazon.
“That’s why we’re not resting on our laurels,” Durr says. “We’re continuing to create new ways to use the Flavour Blaster.”
