About
About this project
Who made this, why, and exactly how AI was and was not used to make it.
The project
Asia Pours is a Gen A 2026 graduation project created for Asia Society Switzerland, presented at the State of Asia conference on 5 November 2026. The recipes were specified and researched by the author, whose editorial judgment, rather than any generated text, is the layer that decides what is worth printing.
The booklet argues that a cocktail is the smallest usable unit of cultural fluency. Three Asian ingredients, ube, yuzu and matcha, each illustrate a different supply chain governance pattern that matters to anyone doing business in Asia: origin without control, origin as strategy, and origin under siege. A fourth pattern, that color is a distribution strategy, ties the three together. This site collects the recipes, the argument and the sourcing behind both.
The author
Simon Engel is a passionate hobby bartender and beverage connoisseur. He learned barkeeping with the European Bartender School in Cape Town and holds a WSET Level 2 in Wine. He is part of the Gen A fellowship cohort 2026, building bridges between Asia and European business.
With this project Simon intends to put his beverage skills to practical use: a guide for business travelers and executives who want something worth sharing at the table. He is of the opinion that business culture is best explained through taste and ingredients.
A note on the recipes
Every measure is printed as specified. Where a build carries a technical tension, whether color chemistry, dilution, cost or body, it is stated openly in the balance note rather than quietly corrected.
Use of AI in this project
This booklet was researched and written with the assistance of Anthropic's Claude, used as a research, drafting and editing tool: to locate and cross reference published sources, to draft and structure the narrative text, to analyze the balance logic of each recipe, and to produce the layout of this site.
All photography in this booklet and on this site, both the six cocktails and the three origin images, was AI generated to a specified art direction and is captioned as such wherever it appears. This is not decorative and not a footnote: none of the people, places or objects pictured are real.
Every factual claim traces to a named source, listed in full on thesources page. Figures were checked against primary or institutional sources where available, and market research estimates are identified as such. Where sources conflicted, the more conservative figure was used. The analogies drawn to wider trade patterns are editorial interpretation by the author, not sourced claims.
The what to expect notes are predictions reasoned from ingredient behavior. The tasting notes under each recipe are the author's own, and where they disagree with the prediction, the tasting wins.
The booklet
The site draws on the full printed booklet, which includes additional figures and sourcing detail not reproduced here.