Shake. Stir. Straight up. Fizzy. Sweet. Sour. Ever feel like cocktail options are just a roll of the dice? Renaissance guests feel that way all the time now that Renaissance cocktail blocks have rattled into cocktail hour. It’s an opportunity for a little interactive excitement around the bar when five o’clock rolls around and the Cocktail Culture “ritual” begins. Jay Coldren, senior director of design and development of F&B for Marriott International, cracks the code.

COCKTAIL BLOCKS
“Renaissance cocktail blocks are five big dice representing the ‘building blocks’ of a handcrafted cocktail. There are blocks for spirits, fresh ingredients, glassware, method of preparation, and flavor profile,” explains Coldren. “With five blocks and six choices per block, there are 7,776 potential combinations in the Cocktail Culture experience,” so if a guest sees the same drink twice, it’s time to stop drinking for the night.

John Eddleman, director of restaurants at the Renaissance M Street Hotel in Washington, D.C., lays out the details: “The first block has the spirit: rum, vodka, Tequila, whisky, gin, or brandy. The next block has the flavor profile: dry, sweet, fizzy, sour, fruity, or crisp. There’s a block for the glassware to be used, with a bartender’s choice for them to get creative. Another block is the process: rolled, on the rocks, stirred, shaken, up, and ‘surprise me.’ The final block lists the fresh ingredients: berries, lemon-lime, tropical fruit, orange, pineapple, and ‘local specialty.’ That local specialty can be unique, like basil, thyme, or oregano. It’s a local specialty that the bartender and I decide on,” Eddleman explains.

In describing how the blocks come together to build cocktails, Coldren says, “The Mojito has skyrocketed in popularity over the last five years.Well, if you change the fruit and spirit, that formula still works pretty well.We used Dale DeGroff’s ultimate cocktail formula: a proportion of spirits to a souring component to a sweetener. It works for Collinses, Mojitos, Daiquiris—it’s an alchemist’s stone for cocktails. Great cocktails are about balance, so if there is a formula, and it’s balanced to start with, just adapt based on what the guest wants. And the guest gets to help shape the experience.”

GUEST INVOLVEMENT
“Working with beverage companies and great bartenders, we created a program called Bar Arts for all our hotel brands, using fresh juices and ingredients,” says Coldren. “We built upon that for our Renaissance brand and took it to another level.”

Guest involvement is at the center of Renaissance Cocktail Culture. “We went through a concerted effort in the last year with several research companies to figure out what is appealing about the brand,” continues Coldren. “We found cocktails are important for people who go from Renaissance to Renaissance. The keywords for these guests are ‘discovery’ and ‘interactivity.’”

Guests want a sense of place. The average Marriott guest is looking for consistency, but the Renaissance guest is the kind who opens the drawers and looks inside—they’re businesspeople, but they like to explore. “They don’t see travel as a chore,” says Coldren. “They use it as a tool to see more of the world. Since we have guests who like to discover and experiment, why not set up a program where they get to play with the ingredients at the bar? We designed Cocktail Culture for them.”

THE RITUAL “We have a nightly ritual at every property,” says Coldren, “a kind of contest as to who in the bar area can make the best cocktail. When someone wins, we keep that recipe at the bar for a year.”

“The ritual involves getting customers to roll the dice and create the cocktail of the day,” says Eddleman. “We begin at five o’clock because meetings are finished and guests may be checking in. There could be 10 to 40 people [in the bar]. Especially when it’s a fun crowd, people get very involved.

“We take the blocks and put them in a Boston shaker. We shake them to get attention and create excitement around the bar, then we call the guests over and explain. Once we create the first guest’s specialty cocktail, the bartender and the guest taste it to see if it needs tweaking. Then there are judges among the guests who evaluate the drink. We give everyone a sample in shot glasses. It gets everyone in on the action.”

Once approved, that cocktail becomes the specialty drink of the day. “We tell everyone at the front desk and the concierge what the drink is, and we write it up on a pad. I keep the original, and a copy goes to the guest so they can take it home and make it for their friends. The bartenders get a kick out of it. Our bartender Sandy is extremely creative about making drinks, and she loves to do this. She helps guests make up creative names, like the Sextini, the Mama Mia Margarita, and the Pineapple Pen (which had no pineapple and no pen). One woman rolled the blocks across the floor like craps, they hit the wall and whatever came up was the drink. She called it Mary’s Crappy Drink.”

“Here in D.C., the specialty cocktail is $5. Some are phenomenal. One guest came up with a signature cocktail [using] fresh blackberries, raspberries, mint, thyme, vodka, Champagne, and simple syrup. It was terrific.”

TRAINING
For the Cocktail Culture rollout, Coldren had all the bartenders and F&B directors join in on conference calls. “They had already participated in the Bar Arts program. The one drink we kept driving home was the Mojito, or essentially a variation on the Mojito. You just cut the fruit and make a Mojito using the flavor profile to adjust.”

Eddleman describes training at his property. “Each day, we went over the steps with the bartenders: crafting local signatures, creating the Cocktail Culture atmosphere with the blocks, the proper way to muddle, correct water and ice proportions, etc. Everyone received intensive training in handcrafted cocktail basics. When we first rolled out Cocktail Culture, it took weeks of training to get staff using free pour, not jigger. We test them daily to make sure they’re pouring exact, not over or under.”

DOLLARS AND SENSE
How’s it working? Coldren reports, “We have seen a 6.8 percent increase in bar revenue at Renaissance hotels sincethe first of the year. Our revenues are increasing in this economy. To move the numbers upward so significantly is a credit to the Cocktail Culture and Bar Arts programs.” Overall bar numbers are up across the board at Marriott since the launch of the Bar Arts program.

“We have quite a bit of guest feedback,” says Coldren. “We tested several programs. There are some business travelers who say ‘I don’t understand it.’ But among the ‘discovery business travelers,’ Cocktail Culture is the program that scores off the charts with the people who drive our brand.”

There’s an investment in fresh ingredients, but Coldren sees new economies. “We’ve found it’s less expensive per ounce than purchased sour mix, especially when you make your own simple syrup. We control that cost. With fresh juices, it’s still about three cents less per drink. It’s more labor intensive, but the bartender does have some downtime to prep.”

WHY DOES IT WORK?
“Cocktails are catching up to food,” says Coldren. “Over the past 10 years, we’ve stopped making overly complex, stacked-up food and gotten back to core ingredients. That’s the whole point of this program: no chemically laden sour mix—a couple of fresh ingredients with great technique and focus on how things are made. It’s exactly what happened in the culinary world—focusing on core technique.”

LOOKING AHEAD
“We’d like to make this something that can be extended beyond the bar,” Coldren continues. “A smaller dice version could be taken away from the bar, put on a card, and handed to the server, like a sushi order pad. We may try to expand the flavor profile so our more sophisticated bars can have more custom dice with local ingredients. Our thinking goes toward creating a bar chef jockey station in the front with some induction burners, refrigerated drawers, and ingredient bins. It makes sense for our more sophisticated urban properties.” Viva la cocktail hour!