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Asia Pours

The book

Twelve ingredients. Twenty four drinks. One story each.

Asia Pours is a book about where the things in your glass come from, who earns from them, and why the label rarely says.

Pre-order the Kindle edition, €24.99Read the booklet first →

Out 1 November 2026. 176 pages. Twelve of the twenty four drinks have no alcohol in them.

The cover of Asia Pours: twelve ingredients arranged on dark slate with the title set above them
The cover of the Kindle edition. AI generated.

Every fact is sourced.

176 pages, every factual statement tied to a published source.

Half of it is zero proof.

Twelve of the twenty four drinks, built with the same care.

Asia Pours treats a cocktail as the smallest usable unit of cultural fluency. A drink is small enough to finish and specific enough to mean something: it names a place, a season, a farm and a trade route, and each of those is a question somebody's counterpart in Manila, Osaka or Kyoto is dealing with now.

The booklet makes that case with three ingredients, a root, a fruit and a leaf, in six cocktails. It is finished and it is free by email. The book keeps the method and widens the subject.

Drawn for the book

Where the ingredient comes from

An ink drawing of a market trestle table under a canopy, loaded with dozens of yams drawn in outline, two of them colored ochre, with three outlined figures standing behind it.
A market table of yams. AI generated.
An ink drawing of three citrus trees in fruit with two outlined figures picking, and wooden crates beside them, one full and one empty.
A citrus harvest. AI generated.
An ink drawing of a round wooden soaking tub with eight whole yuzu floating in it, a stool and a pail beside it, and an outlined figure at the far rim.
Yuzu floating in a solstice bath. AI generated.

The scope

Twelve ingredients

Ube, yuzu and matcha are written and published as the booklet. The other nine are the book.

Ube

A whole purple yam lying beside a cut section, its flesh bright violet with pale marbling, on dark slate.
Ube, cut to show the flesh.

Yuzu

A whole yuzu with knobbly yellow rind beside a halved one showing thick pith and large pale seeds, on dark slate.
Yuzu, halved.

Matcha

A dark glazed bowl of whisked matcha under a fine foam, a bamboo chasen lying beside it, on dark slate.
Matcha, whisked in a chawan.

Calamansi

Several small calamansi, some whole with green rind, others halved to show orange flesh and pale seeds, on dark slate.
Calamansi, whole and halved.

Makrut lime

Four glossy double lobed makrut lime leaves beside a whole knobbly green fruit and a cut half showing thick white pith, on dark slate.
Makrut lime, leaves and fruit.

Pandan

Long green pandan leaves, one tied in a knot, beside a cut stem section and a small dark bottle of extract, on dark slate.
Pandan, leaves and extract.

Omija

Dried deep red omija berries spilling from a brown paper bag onto dark slate.
Omija, dried.

Osmanthus

A scatter of small dried osmanthus flowers, pale gold and four petalled, beside an open glass jar holding more, on dark slate.
Osmanthus, dried flowers.

Oolong

A heap of tightly rolled green oolong beside a heap of long dark twisted leaves, with three unrolled wet leaves in front, on dark slate.
Oolong, rolled and unrolled.

Sichuan pepper

Two heaps of husked peppercorns, red on the left and green on the right, with a few shiny black seeds between them, on dark slate.
Sichuan pepper, red and green.

Tamarind

Four whole brown tamarind pods, one cracked open to show dark pulp and seeds, beside a wrapped block of pressed pulp, on dark slate.
Tamarind, pods and pressed pulp.

Makgeolli

Two bottles of makgeolli side by side, the left one shaken and opaque, the right one settled clear with sediment at the bottom.
Makgeolli, shaken and settled.
Pre-order the Kindle edition, €24.99

Out 1 November 2026. Delivered to your Kindle on release day.

The method

What the record shows

Each chapter asks the same three questions: what the record actually shows, who controls the name, and where the value ends up. The answers differ enough to be worth the trip.

Ube: origin without control

It is not a purple sweet potato, not taro, and not new. The physical evidence sits in Ille Cave on Palawan, where archaeologists recovered charred purple yam tissue dated between roughly 8,250 and 3,050 BCE. The written trail begins in 1613, when the first Tagalog and Spanish dictionary lists it as uvi. Francisco Ignacio Alcina, a Jesuit writing about the Visayas between 1667 and 1670, found it growing in so many kinds and colors that he gave up trying to catalog them.

A market in ersatz ube has since grown alongside the real one, with purple sweet potato standing in for yam in boba shops and industrial bakeries. Purple has become a claim rather than a description. Bohol has applied for geographical indication protection for its Ubi Kinampay, the same class of legal instrument that protects Champagne.

Yuzu: origin as strategy

On the winter solstice, Japanese families float whole yuzu in a hot bath. The bath is said to keep colds away for a year. Nobody checks.

For decades fresh yuzu could not enter the European Union at all. In February 2012 Japan's agriculture ministry and the EU agreed quarantine conditions for Japanese citrus. Kochi's exports of fresh yuzu and juice ran at 26 million yen in 2010 and 40 million in 2011, then 89 million in 2012, the year the EU opened.

Both passages are from the booklet. Every factual claim on this site traces to a named source, listed on the sources page.

The offer

Asia Pours, Kindle edition

€24.99, out 1 November 2026. 176pages. Twelve ingredients from East and Southeast Asia, twenty four drinks, twelve of them without alcohol, and the commercial story behind each ingredient: who controls the name, what it had to become to cross a border, where the slowest decision sits, and what processing keeps and removes.

Pre-order now and it arrives on your Kindle on release day. A paperback follows, and the people on the list hear about it first.

Pre-order the Kindle edition, €24.99

Free, by email

Not ready to buy?

Take the booklet the book grew out of. Twenty four pages, three ingredients, six drinks with full builds, free and complete.

Send me the booklet

A cut purple ube, a whole yuzu and an open tin of matcha powder, grouped on dark slate with the rest of the frame left empty.
Ube, yuzu and matcha, the three the booklet covers. AI generated.

The list

Hear when it is ready

The full book is finished and the Kindle edition is out on 1 November 2026. Leave an address and you will hear once, on the day it is out. It is a separate list from the booklet, so this is the only thing it is used for.

Only the address. You will need to confirm it, the same as before.

One message, when the book is ready. You can unsubscribe at any time, and unsubscribing here does not affect the booklet list. The privacy notice sets out who processes your address and on what basis.

When

The book arrives 1 November 2026

The Kindle edition is out on 1 November 2026, and a pre-order arrives on your Kindle that day, automatically. Print will follow soon after.

Asia Pours is written by Simon Engel as a Gen A 2026 graduation project for Asia Society Switzerland. There is more about the project and its author, including the disclosure covering how it was researched and illustrated.

Every photograph and drawing on this page is AI generated and captioned as such, the cover included: the book is a real object, the ingredients arranged on its cover were never photographed. The book makes the same disclosure on page 4.

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