(4 Mar 2020) LEAD IN:
Want to bring out your inner Harry or Hermione?
A cocktail bar in London is offering potion classes to adult wizards and witches in order to conjure up their own magical cocktails
STORY-LINE:
Fancy celebrating World Book Day ( 5 March) in style?
Well here in London these grown ups sit around glowing crystal balls waving magic wands to create delicious cocktails.
With a nod to the famous Leaky Cauldron pub in J K Rowling's Harry Potter fantasy book series, The Cauldron is an immersive cocktail bar inspired by fantasy and children's novels.
Located not in Diagon Alley, but in Dalston, east London, visitors dress in wizard robes and sit at tables filled with bottles and potions brewing mystical potions using molecular mixology and IoT (Internet of Things) wands.
"Our mission is to bring fantasy and magic to life with science, technology and design and to allow people to step into the imaginary world of their childhood, in a really authentic way," explains Matthew Cortland, who is CEO and Co-founder of The Cauldron as well as the technical brains behind the operation.
"So this is a potion making class, where people come in, they get a robe, they get a magic wand, that's one of our custom magic wands that actually works, and they learn to brew molecular potions, which are molecular cocktails where we employ chemistry in the drink making process."
After getting their robe and wand the first thing visitors do is 'magically' pour themselves a welcome drink from a "beheaded magical creature".
The wands are bespoke and use special embedded technology to enable customers to operate things at The Cauldron, as if by magic.
"All of our magic wands are made in house and they are embedded with our technology which allows them to control the environment around the customer. So they're used to stir drinks, to turn on lights, to unlock cabinets, to pour drinks, as imaginative as you can be is what we make it. And these new wands that we have are actually capacitive touch, so they turn on with the capacitance of your body, similar to how your smartphone would work when you touch it," says Cortland.
This isn't Cortland's first career - he started out as a high school teacher.
And now he's not only channelled his love of literature into The Cauldron, he also asks visitors to bring along a children's book which he then donates to a London literacy programme for children.
"I began my career as a high school reading teacher, teaching literacy to secondary school students with a programme called Teach for America. And I've taken my love of literature and kind of channelled that into my experience as an educator and then later bringing that into an experience that makes adults interact with technology, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and literature in an authentic way," Cortland explains.
Cortland came up with the idea for The Cauldron along with co-founder David Duckworth, who is also an expert mixologist. It's the latest in a line of immersive bars from the duo's company The Magic of Things, which can be found in London, New York, Edinburgh and Dublin.
Duckworth explains that thanks to molecular mixology, science and technology you get to see drinks do things at The Cauldron you may have not seen before:
"Our magical drinks range from drinks that expand out the glass and grow towards you to things that are on fire to things that bubble and smoke and are made in interesting receptacles and look very visually aesthetically magic as well," he says.
He adds that themed drinks, such as a recent love potion for Valentine's Day, are often very popular.
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