Taking care: Creating a non-alcoholic cocktail for Generation X

Abstract

This paper reports on a Hospitality Research Project, a third-year project at Stenden Hotel Management School, dedicated to the design, creation and testing of three different non-alcoholic cocktail recipes for restaurant De Pleats in Burgum, the Netherlands. On the basis of existing literature several recipes were designed. A first selection was made according to the criteria of the restaurant owner (easy to create, no complicated ingredients, elegant and fresh, with fairtrade and/or organic products). This resulted in three non-alcoholic cocktail recipes, which were tested in the last stage of the research during a taste testing at Stenden University in Leeuwarden with fourteen participants. Results suggest that the vast majority of these participants of Generation X prefer a non-alcoholic cocktail with a flavour style which can be described as fresh, sour and contracting, as per the basic characteristics of the flavour styles of Klosse. It is recommended that De Pleats puts this non-alcoholic cocktail on their menu. For future research it would be recommended to duplicate this same experiment with the cocktails in a different order, and with another target group like Generation Y.

Keywords: sustainability, taste testing, flavour styles, taste preferences