Tayēr + Elementary’s Monica Berg Wants People to Know That Those Picture-Perfect Strawberries Probably Taste Like Nothing — Here’s Why

'I could easily make a daiquiri that probably tastes nice 360 days a year — but at what cost?'

Flavors and ingredients have always been top of mind for Monica Berg. But they’ve become even more of a pressing concern these days.

The award-winning bartender and cofounder of London’s much-lauded Tayēr + Elementary recently launched Muyu Liqueurs in the United States along with fellow mixologists Alex Kratena, best known for shepherding London’s Artesian to international acclaim in the mid-2010s, and Simone Caporale, the genius behind Barcelona’s Sips Drinkery House, which won top honors at the 2023 Spirited Awards at Tales of the Cocktail.

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The liqueurs, of which there are three — Jasmine Verte, Chinotto Nero, and Vetiver Gris —are not what one would call “ordinary” or “common.” In fact, they’re about as esoteric as you can get — something that Berg is mindful of in terms of sustainability, not wanting to overuse ingredients just because they’re widely attainable and relatively inexpensive. “It’s a project that we started back in 2016 and it came after we had this experience that made us rethink how we talked about flavors, what we thought about cocktails, how we thought about composing liquids — and it kind of made us curious as to what could happen if you focus on flavor first,” Berg told Food & Wine.

“We just wanted to honor and celebrate the kind of biodiversity that we find in nature. In our everyday lives, we are exposed to less and less of it because we have all come to work with the same ingredients all the time — all the same flavors. We wanted to rethink how you could work with flavors and we wanted to unlock ingredients that were normally not accessible to bartenders like ourselves,” says the Norway-born bartender. “We wanted to try to preserve the kind of biodiversity that has always been around us. As bartenders, we realize that we don’t actually know how to create something ourselves — but we are good at mixing and combining ingredients into recreating a memory, recreating a specific flavor profile, and sometimes creating something that doesn’t already exist.”

Berg shared her thoughts on the trends in the food and drink space at the Futures Lab during Tales of the Cocktail this July, along with Gary Gruver, director of global beverage operations at Marriott International; Stephanie Jordan, founder of Avallen Spirits & Drinking Out Loud; Kat Kinsman, executive features editor at Food & Wine; Matt Molino, chief strategy officer and partner at NVE Experience Agency; and Rachel Burkons, founder of Smoke Sip Savor, Feast & Flower.

Here, as with her talk with Tales of the Cocktail’s Futures Lab, Berg details the next big thing in ingredients and what the future of the cocktail and spirits world could look like.

Focusing on flavor first and foremost naturally lends itself to sustainability — and is the way ingredients should be sourced

Some of Berg’s primary concerns are sustainability, ingredient sourcing, and the kind of world we could be leaving behind for future generations if we’re not more mindful of the ways in which we build flavor in our own homes — or even how we consume it as we’re out and about in the world.

To Berg, focusing on flavor naturally lends itself to sustainability, given that better-tasting ingredients are ones that are in season and not grown year-round in a greenhouse. “I think that we need to be better about using our ingredients to the full extent and not be so wasteful of what is around us. How things are grown is one thing, but how are we buying things? A lot of fruit and vegetables have what you call a natural season, which is how it would grow in a place if we didn’t interfere,” Berg explains. “Something that is growing within their natural season will always have more nutrition and more flavor, it just won’t be available 365 days a year. Modern society has compromised and sacrificed nutrition and flavor for availability. You can go to the supermarket and find all these picture-perfect strawberries, but they’re not going to taste like anything. But if you get those three, four weeks — like I said in my talk — then you understand why strawberry is such a prized ingredient.”

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Climate change also plays a huge role in how we ought to be thinking about our own consumption. With the agricultural need to feed a ballooning global population, that would require a bit more thoughtfulness. “We are at a crossroads right now because, as I referenced in my talk at Tales, there was this report [on Earth.org in 2019] that was published looking at the last 250 years — and seeing how many species have become extinct. 571 plants, fruits, and vegetables have died off in the last 250 years, which is five hundred times faster than the natural extinction rate,” Berg says. “That is mainly due to one thing: humans. A lot of our ingredients, a lot of the nature around us, have already died or are dying right now. And we are at the point where we now have to make a choice. If we want to have flavor in the future, we need to hold off a little bit — and stop and see what is happening around us.”

"Modern society has compromised and sacrificed nutrition and flavor for availability."

Expect people to lean into their hyper-local flavors and their own cultural references

The future of flavors and ingredients is naturally driven by the exchange of cultures in society because flavors and, by extension, ingredients are an expansion of culture. In fact, we’re already seeing it today with once-rarefied flavors like masala and matcha, but it will be presented in even higher relief as the world moves toward a more globalized way of living. “There’s much more diversity, much more individuality, much more people bringing flavors from their cultures — flavors that previously weren’t necessarily accepted,” says Berg. “If you look at the ecology of drinking and you look at a drink’s significance in the society they come from, it all makes sense. It makes sense why Italy drinks so much wine; it makes sense that Germany drinks beer and has schnapps and grain spirits — because that’s what grows there.”

It’s no secret that culture is largely intertwined with a people’s palates and a country’s agricultural bounty — so hyper-local flavors are bound to make their way into the greater world: “It almost always starts in smaller cities and towns because you are much more connected to your environment there. In cities like London, New York, Paris, and Dubai, you're spoiled for choice, so you don’t have to think about these things,” Berg says. “I could easily make a daiquiri that probably tastes nice 360 days a year, I would just get Thai limes from various parts of the world at different times of the year. But at what cost?”

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Beyond that, there can be a great many takes on a particular flavor profile — and these things in and of itself make for deeply rooted cultural exchanges. For instance, a curry dish in Malaysia may take a different form in India, which, in turn, can look different from what it might be in Indonesia.

“When someone brings us an ingredient or someone brings us something fun, we play around with it and make something out of it. And when people see it, they go, ‘Oh, my God, I grew up with this flavor.’ And then you have people from 10 different countries say, ‘I grew up with this flavor, but it looked like this where I grew up.” Berg says. “Here in London, you have this custard tart, which is very popular and I think comes from central England. Whereas where I come from, in Norway, it’s a brioche bun with a vanilla custard filling. And you go to Hong Kong, there’s the egg tart and in Portugal, it’s the pastel de nata. So, you know, all of us have the same flavor combinations, but they look and feel different. It’s very right that flavor is very unifying, and I think that we only will suffer in the future when we lose it — if we don’t preserve it.”

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