Beijing Boyce

I helped create a cocktail for the Girls in Tech China launch last Saturday afternoon at CNEX. While I have experimented with cocktails, most notably during this session with Echo Sun and George Zhou just after they left Midnight Bar and just before they opened Q Bar, this was the first time I put much thought into it. (Though I do have an idea for a cocktail that could either turn out to be one of the best, or worst, ever–maybe this experience will inspire me to get off my ass and try it.)

I told attendees at the GIT China event that I had three goals. One, to use tequila, for the purposes of the name: it ended up as Girls in Techquila. Two, to make sure it had lots of antioxidants, because healthy living is what I’m all about. Three, to make it strong, because after a heavy day of repositioning satellites, laying underseas cables, or creating software that would taser people who try to enter elevators before those inside get out, girls in tech need a good stiff drink, a kind of hard reset to start the evening right. (During the talk, I also mentally crossed “stand-up comedy” off my list of future careers.)

Creating the cocktail involved a half-dozen tasting sessions at Fubar with combinations of tequila, lime juice, cranberry juice, lychee liqueur, creme de cassis, soda water, and ginger ale. Most of these versions tended to go down too easy, in that Kool-Aid sort of way.

Enter bar consultant Paul Mathew, author of the Blood and Sand site, who adjusted a few proportions and suggested using yangmei juice–he even procured two cartons for a taste test–as an alternative to cranberry juice. This worked well, and after a few Skype sessions with GIT China’s Jenny Bai, Jing Zhou, and Elyssa Wilensky to finalize  details, we were ready to go.

You can find Girls in Techquila at Fubar for RMB35, or RMB25 during happy hour, or anywhere else you can get the bartenders to follow the recipe–it seems you can go with anywhere from 30 ml to 50 ml of tequila without affecting the integrity of the drink too much.

In addition to Paul Mathew, thanks to Links China for sponsoring the Jose Cuervo tequila and for rep Ricky Wang showing up and to Chad Lager, Xiao Ming, and Seven at Fubar for providing a testing venue and bringing ingredients for the cocktail launch.

I’ll post some photos of the cocktail and the after-party at Fubar when I get them…