Google deploys team to create most ‘instagrammable’ cocktail

Google has used its powers of social media to create a cocktail that it believes to be the most shareable, tapping into the most current trends of the cocktail zeitgeist.

The Not Pink Drink was designed to include all the current cocktail trends to entice the most social media engagement

The study saw a team of social media experts analyse the 10,000 most engaging UK Instagram posts featuring ‘#cocktail’ over the past year. The research was commissioned by Google to mark the release of its Pixel 3 smartphone.

According to the team, the hashtags #pink, #neon, #glutenfree and #vegan, were among the most popular, and attached to the cocktails most likely to shared across social media sites such as Instagram and Facebook, while ingredients such as lemon, elderflower and smoke were also key drivers to get people snapping and sharing.

The results showed 43% of the top posts tagged #gin over any other spirit and that #flowers made up nearly a quarter (24%) of the top flavours tagged.

Findings also highlight the best time to post a snap of your cocktail creations – Friday at 2pm – which is when engagement with cocktail-related posts peaked.

Armed with these findings, mixologist Matt Hollidge was tasked with creating the UK’s most shareable cocktail.

“Nowadays people don’t just want cocktails to taste good, they want them to be something they can share – which makes my job of creating them even more fun,” said Hollidge. “It’s all about what you can capture on your phone and show your mates, so using Pixel 3 as inspiration was really interesting. I loved the challenge of incorporating different features of the phone into the design, particularly the wellness colour-change elements. As well as making the final cocktail as photogenic as possible.”

The Not Pink Drink was made with a blend of 50ml gin (e.g. Bombay Sapphire) or Seedlip Spice, 20ml elderflower liqueur (e.g. St-Germain) or elderflower cordial, 1 tbsp butterfly pea flowers, juice of half a lemon, a dash of orange blossom water and 100ml Indian tonic water.

It’s garnished with a “wide angle” selfie skewer, adorned with pink macaroons and viola petals

Some of the more unusual optional extras if you want to achieve even more likes included the use of a night sight UV light, with 14% of posts analysed featuring the #neon tag, which makes the tonic water glow when placed under ultra violet light.

Posting a picture of this cocktail composition at 2pm on a Friday will result in an irresistibly shareable cocktail, apparently.