Doritos Nacho Cheese-flavoured booze has just become a reality
DORITOS Nacho Cheese chips have gone places through partnerships – from tie-ups with video game series Call of Duty to virtual concerts with the Netflix series, Stranger Things.
One place these flaming-orange chips have never featured, at least in a way officially sanctioned by parent company PepsiCo, is into alcohol.
But on Tuesday (Dec 12), these snacks will get sloshed with the launch of Empirical x Doritos Nacho Cheese.
The partnership with Doritos – the most popular savoury snack among Gen Z and the eighth-ranked brand overall – is the most commercial offering from Empirical Spirits, a Copenhagen-based distillery.
The limited release of the beverage, available at doritos.x.empirical.co and at to-be-announced locations in New York and California, will go for US$65 for a 750 ml bottle. (The companies did not disclose the number of bottles they will release.)
“We’re doing more disruptive partnerships,” says Courtney Larson, Dorito’s senior director of marketing. “When one of the most innovative flavour leaders in the world reaches out to you, you take notice.”
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Empirical was started by Lars Williams and Mark Emil Hermansen, both veterans of the kitchen at Copenhagen’s Noma restaurant. Williams oversaw the mad-scientist experiments in the restaurant’s Nordic Food Lab.
Its unconventional releases so far have included Symphony 6, a citrusy, light pink distillation of Pilsner malt, lemon leaf, figs and coffee. A line of canned cocktails in 2020 used ingredients such as toasted birch tea and Douglas fir infusion. The Doritos partnership is a “chance for us to get out in front of a whole new group of people, and showcase what Empirical can do”, says Williams.
Though PepsiCo is not paying for the partnership, it is supplying the chips: Williams estimates that they use a standard bag in each bottle of the 42-per-cent ABV (alcohol by volume) product.
Empirical’s liquid tastes uncannily like a bag of Doritos nacho cheese flavoured tortilla chips. The first whiff delivers an instant hit of corn, and then a follow-up of nacho-cheese powder.
Then, when you take a sip, any initial scepticism may well dissolve, depending on your tolerance for the flavour of toasted corn, and the cheese and onion powder that define so much of that Doritos flavour hit.
If you don’t want the full unvarnished experience, there are some cocktail recipes included to help maximise the corn-and-cheese powder kick, including the Double Triangle Margarita and a Bloody Mary incarnation. They were formulated by Iain Griffiths, who has worked at the acclaimed Mr Lyan bars in London.
The Doritos Nacho Cheese flavour has been hanging out in Empirical’s lab for a while, said Williams. The original version was made around the time the brand started in 2017. It was an “accident” that came about during early experiments with ingredients such as licorice, parsley and the North African spice mix, ras el hanout.
“One production guy went out to lunch and came back with a bag of Doritos,” says Williams. “I decided, ‘why not?’ and threw it in.” The impact of the infusion was shockingly successful. “When I tasted it, it was so much like Doritos, I just started laughing,” says Williams. But he ruled it out as an early Empirical flavour, in favour of more artisanal blends.
Not long after Empirical launched, however, a handful of PepsiCo executives ate at Noma and then stopped by the lab, says Williams. “I was clear with the team: ‘Do not give them the Doritos spirit. There’s a 99-per-cent chance we’ll get sued’,” he recalls.
Instead, the experiment was applauded. Williams says he recently came across a bottle of the spirit and thought the time might be right for a Doritos nacho cheese-flavoured spirit to become reality.
Doritos has no current plans to extend the collaboration once the run is sold out, but Larson says it is possible it could be renewed. The Doritos After Dark platform is encouraging its fans to use the chips more when cooking, whether by throwing them into cookies or crushing them to form a salty rim of a cocktail glass.
“We want to be creators in the culinary space,” says Larson, who added that the Empirical release could also be the start of a line of Doritos-meets-booze products.
If production is extended beyond the initial limited release, Williams says the Doritos flavour will be available when Empirical opens a 5,000-square-foot distillery in Brooklyn early next year. BLOOMBERG
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