How to Make Talosian Tea

I’m on a pretty intense deep dive into Star Trek, which means it’s time to make a cocktail based on Romulan Ale.

Romulan Ale popped into my head at the first thought of a Star Trek drink. To me, that is the quintessential Star Trek liquor. It’s also extremely recognizable because of its blue color. So the first challenge became making a blue cocktail.

It’s honestly easy to make a blue cocktail. You can simply use Blue Curacao. Boom. Blue Cocktail. Add vodka to up the proof and a lot of people will be fine with that. But Blue Curacao is full of artificial colors and is extremely sweet. I’m not a fan of either one of those things. The solution is to use butterfly pea tea.

This is a tea made from the flowers of the butterfly pea plant and is fairly common in Southeast Asia. When it’s brewed you get a brilliant blue tea that has an earthy flavor close to matcha.

The challenge is that if you add any acidic ingredients to the tea, it turns from blue to purple. It’s very sensitive to the pH of the drink and the slightest change will affect the color. So you have to be very careful adding anything other than clear spirits.

I also found a reference to some Romulan ale that was made with some honey-like secretions of insects in Star Trek Online. So of course I had to use a honey simple syrup. Honey tastes surprisingly good with this cocktail and I say that being admittedly obsessed with honey. Having said that, there is a slight problem with using a honey simple. I’ve done some more experimenting since I shot the video recipe and feel there should be a change.

The honey simple syrup is just acidic enough to make the drink change color a bit. I’ve found that a weaker honey simple doesn’t affect it quite as much. You have to compensate for the weaker honey flavor by doubling up the amount used, but somehow it seems to make the honey flavor even more noticable.

Anyway, when it’s all said and done, you have a great drink that’s a tribute to Romulan ale. There is a part of me that wants to call this Romulan Ale because in my humble opinion it is superior to all the other recipes I’ve seen. Most of them rely on Blue Curacao and vodka, which is a cop-out. It’s just sweet and strong and something you could get frozen on the sidewalk in Las Vegas.

This cocktail is complex and refreshing without being overly sweet. You should absolutely try this and if you want to call it Romulan Ale, I’m not going to stop you. I’m going to call this version Talosian Tea, to distinguish it from all the others out there.

(For those of you non-Original Series fans out there, Talosians were the first aliens ever encountered in Star Trek from the pilot episode.)