Beverage

It’s summer. You’ve got your Shibumi sunshade. You’ve got your platform flip-flops. But one trendy accessory is missing: the drink in your hand.

A few years back, the must-have summer cocktail was the Aperol Spritz. Then came the summer of frosé, the summer of White Claw, and the summer of the espresso martini (and other coffee cocktails). But summer 2022 hasn’t found its One Drink to Rule Them All — and that’s OK! We’ve found some possible candidates.

Hong Kong’s Penicillin, winner of the 2021 Ketel One Sustainable Bar Award, is more than green. It’s a new shade of super-ultra-green.

On the menu, you’ll find vodka infused with scrap bread, rum flavored with used tea leaves, and the One Penicillin, One Tree cocktail, which funds the planting of a Mallotus muticus tree in Borneo. The bar’s tables were built with tropical storm debris, and even the lights were salvaged.

Does it all sound a little… fussy? Here’s the kicker: Penicillin owners Agung Prabowo and Roman Ghale also operate a traditional dive bar, Dead&, that serves cocktails on tap and canned beers. Dead& provides ingredient sourcing for Penicillin, Agung tells 50 Best — for instance, Dead&’s discarded paper cups are recycled to make coasters, menus and labels for Penicillin.

The moral of the story: Whether you run an upscale cocktail bar or a neighborhood watering hole, sustainability is within reach. All it takes is creativity and collaboration.

Smoothies will never grow old.

They’re always being reinvented: as an afternoon pick-me-up, a pre-workout booster, a post-workout reward, a meal replacer, a refreshing breakfast, or an indulgent dessert. Consumer tastes have evolved right along with them, as smoothie fans continually ask more from their drink. What do on-trend smoothies look like right now?  

The global craft-cocktail movement was reaching ever-loftier heights, with more and more creative, fanciful and expensive concoctions — and then, suddenly, the bars went dark.

From Los Angeles to New York and beyond, restaurant and bar operators have turned to takeout cocktails to bring in much-needed revenue. And it seems to be working! But before you start batching drinks by the barrel, you need a plan.

By now, you’ve probably heard the news: Drinking isn’t as cool as it used to be.

Compared to millennials at the same age, Gen Z consumers are drinking over 20% less per capita, a groundbreaking report from Berenberg Research revealed. Conscious of their health and image, they instead opt for low-alcohol or nonalcoholic beverages. (This is not true in every nation, of course; alcohol consumption is rising overall in countries like Vietnam, India and China.)

As demand for alcohol dries up, culinary innovators are trying something new. “Juices and other interesting beverage pairings will take another leap again to the main stage,” Justin Cogley, chef of Aubergine in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, predicted in Food & Wine.

Juice pairings aren’t brand-new. The concept is credited to Rene Redzepi, founder of world-famous Noma restaurant in Denmark, who began serving sophisticated blends to non-drinking customers more than a decade ago. At the time, other chefs doubted the idea would go mainstream. Now, however, juice pairings are proving popular with customers who don’t drink, who are drinking less, or who just want to experience something new. Here are some tips for trying it yourself.

Healthy milkshake? It sounds like an oxymoron. But that’s exactly what Subway offered in summer 2019 with an exclusive partnership with Halo Top Creamery: a line of hand-spun milkshakes that customers could feel good about ordering. The shakes, each with 350 calories or less, contain at least 20 grams of protein and a hefty helping of calcium.

The Halo Top milkshakes were a limited-time offering, tested in just 1,000 stores. The jury’s still out on whether the chain will make them a permanent addition to the menu — but in the meantime, we’re seeing a growing interest in milkshakes among fast-casual and QSR restaurant operators. They’re a high-dollar menu item with universal appeal, both as a meal add-on and a snack for the in-between dayparts.

Hamilton Beach Commercial dives deep into global milkshake trends: novel flavors, vegan shakes, fresh presentations and alcoholic kicks.

Who doesn’t love a pop-up cocktail bar? They build buzz. They boost sales during slow days or seasons. And, with themes as diverse as Christmas and cherry blossoms, they’re fun and endlessly inventive.  

But they’re not easy to execute successfully. Just ask cocktail chef Matthew Biancaniello, founder of Eat Your Drink and “LA’s most inventive barman,” as Eater LA has dubbed him. We asked Biancaniello what he’s learned in five years of running innovative pop-ups and bar residencies — here’s what he told us.

People never seem to lose their thirst for smoothies. The global smoothie market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 6.8% until 2023, according to Mordor Intelligence, driven by the demand for healthy, quick meal replacements. 

On the surface, a smoothie seems like the easiest possible addition to a café menu. Fruit, ice, blend, pour. Right? Not quite. There’s an art to making smoothies that will win over customers and keep them coming back for more.

Hamilton Beach Commercial has been in the juicing business since 1932, when we first introduced the iconic 932 manual citrus juicer. So when we began designing otto™ the Juice Extractor, the newest addition to the FreshMark™ family of commercial juicers, we had a lofty goal: to build the best centrifugal juicer out there.

Achieving the ideal balance of speed, durability, flavor and yield was a formidable challenge. Based on feedback from our partners in the field, our engineers have spent more than two years fine-tuning components of otto. “This is the most testing we’ve ever done on a product,” observes Karen Williams-Roman, Global Commercial Product Manager for Hamilton Beach Commercial. Here’s what we looked at — and what you should consider when you’re investing in a commercial juice extractor.

Psst. Want to see a magic trick?

In just 20 seconds, this ordinary blender will turn regular skim milk into silky, frothy cold foam. Amazing!

For our next trick, we’ll combine some raspberries and heavy cream. Voilá: indulgent, flavored whipped cream — and yet the delicate berries haven’t been smashed to pieces. How did we do it?

It’s the magic of the AirWhip frothing jar. This innovative jar harnesses the power of a Hamilton Beach Commercial high-performance blender to rapidly foam, whip and emulsify while treating delicate ingredients with care. What can it do in your kitchen?