“If you weren't my houseguest, I'd beat you up right now!” - Undyne

Inspiration

Undyne is the royal guard with enough determination to warrant her name. She’s feisty, strong, and pretty okay at cooking. Oh, she’s also totally got a crush on Alphys. In drawing inspiration for Undyne’s drink, I wanted something that shared her blue-ish appearance while sharing some notes with the flavors present in the Alphys cocktail (since they’re kind of in love).

Workshopping

Blue Fish Lady

I was really hoping to develop a cocktail with a blue hue to match Undyne’s color in the game. For this drink, the color matching, I felt, would change the drink in a way that would unbalance it or divert it too much from the drink’s inspiration. Incoming tiny rant. So many times have I seen inspired drinks that need to be green (think Yoshi, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or Bulbasaur) so the recipe is doused in Midori the green melon liqueur. If looking to make a blue drink (for say, Sonic, Blue Shells, or Squirtle) then the drink often contains blue curaçao. Less commonly black drinks get activated charcoal, purple drinks may get crème de violette, and others will just get added colorants.

I’m certainly no exception to this and do sometimes use these ingredients for certain colors, but I feel that they should be used sparingly and not completely overwhelm the drink’s flavor unless it fits. In the case of Undyne, the kiwi fruit flavor that I decided to use goes well with the orange flavor of blue curaçao, and it helps to deepen the green color of the drink. Anyways.

A bit of kiwi juice and blue curaçao ultimately determined the color of Undyne’s drink. I did try playing around with some butterfly pea flower-infused gin which was more purple, but mixing this with muddled kiwi fruit caused a cool-looking gradient effect that didn’t quite fit the theming. Maybe I’ll save that for another drink.

I wanted to keep kiwi as the central flavor, so I paired it with a new bottle of rhum agricole that I grabbed just to have one in my collection of bottles. It has these dry sort of stonefruit notes that seem to make other tropical fruits taste more tropical. Rhum agricole is similar to cachaça in that they are both made from sugarcane juice instead of molasses like many rums are.

What I developed for Undyne was something of a dry kiwi daiquiri at first, but it was missing something crucial to Undyne’s character. She’s a fighter. I needed to add some kick. A bit of Ancho Reyes chile liqueur did the trick to add a slight spiciness that reminded me that this wasn’t just any one to mess with. I also found that the residual aftertaste of the rhum agricole and chile liqueur was very pleasant.

Fins and Garnish

During the fight with Undyne, she turns the protagonist’s SOUL to green. This changes combat to be more defense-oriented as you block Undyne’s barrage of attacks. To represent the green SOUL mode, I cut out a small heart from kiwi flesh and stabbed it with a blue cocktail sword.

The fins that adorn the glassware pictured above were made from printer paper. If you’d like to print out your own, here’s the sheet I used!

Flavor Analysis

A tropical blend of orange and kiwi flavors with a dry texture lending to the rhum and curaçao. A light peppery spiciness bites in through the subtler fruit notes of apricots and stone fruits.