- Baby Yoda cocktails are becoming popular at bars all across the US after the beloved chararacter first appeared on the new “Star Wars” show “The Mandalorian.”
- The trend appears to have begun at Laka Lono Rum Club, a cocktail bar in Omaha, Nebraska.
- Assistant manager Josh Soto posted a photo of the Baby YoDaiq cocktail on Reddit, where it instantly went viral.
- Cathryn Grange, a bartender at Laka Lono, told Insider that the drink was “just a product of goofing around” on a slow Sunday.
- Baby Yoda cocktails have since popped up in bars from New York to California.
- Visit Insider’s homepage for more stories.
The first season of “The Mandalorian” has come and gone, but it’s clear that the hype around Baby Yoda is here to stay.
Everyone’s favorite character from the new “Star Wars” show on Disney Plus has been turned into everything from memes and toys to tattoos and a holiday pie.
And now Baby Yoda cocktails are popping up at bars all across the US as well.
The trend appears to have begun at Laka Lono Rum Club, a cocktail bar in Omaha, Nebraska
Cathryn Grange, a bartender at Laka Lono, told Insider that the drink was born on a slow Sunday.
"It was just a product of goofing around," she said. "I threw some lime wedges on a glass for ears and thought, 'How can we kick it up a notch?'"
Grange wrapped a napkin and twine around the stem of the glass for Baby Yoda's robe, while assistant manager Josh Soto added the eyes, using a bamboo pick to attach Amarena cherries.
"Cat and I had been talking about her idea of creating a Baby Yoda cocktail for a week or so before it was created," Soto told Insider. "We use our down time on our Sunday shifts together to [try] new cocktail ideas, so we decided to use that day to make the Baby Yoda!"
Grange said she wanted to use ingredients with "strong, unique characteristics" for the Baby Yoda cocktail to represent the fact that "'Star Wars' is an expansive universe full of strange foods and drinks we can only imagine."
The Baby YoDaiq, as it has since been dubbed, is a frozen daiquiri that features Rhum Agricole, Midori, Genepy, lime, pineapple juice, and coconut cream.
Bartender Cathryn Grange found that getting Baby Yoda's 'likeness' was the hardest part when it came to building the cocktail
"We had to make it look like a creature and evoke that same 'aww' reaction the real Baby Yoda gets," she said. "I'm not going to pretend Baby YoDaiq looks exactly like his puppet counterpart. It actually reminds me of the Popsicles you get from the ice cream truck - the ones that are supposed to look like Spider-Man, but come out melted and lazy-eyed."
"But that's really the charm of it," she added. "The 'wrongness' is what makes it novel, and weirdly cute. Plus it'll get you drunk!"
After they created the Baby Yoda cocktail, Soto decided to post a picture of it on Reddit for fun.
Grange said Soto thought that a "few hundred people would appreciate it." The photo ended up getting 46,000 upvotes at the time of writing.
"It was astonishing how quickly it blew up," Soto said. "In less than five hours after I posted it on Reddit and Laka Lono's Instagram page, the cocktail had reached the front page of Reddit and the revolution had begun!"
The Baby Yoda cocktail has since become a bona fide hit at Laka Lono, with Grange estimating that the bar sells up to 100 a night
Bradley T. Moore, Laka Lono's general manager, said people have been traveling from out of town just to get their own Baby YoDaiq.
"We had people come from Kansas City just to drink one where it was created and try the original recipe just a couple of nights after it went viral," he told Insider. "Since then all kinds of people have come out from all over the states to try one. Just the other night we had people from as far as Portland and Dallas in to try the drink."
Laka Lono's Baby Yoda cocktail helped launch a new trend, and soon bars from New York to Arizona were whipping up their own versions
One such bar is the Dromedary Urban Tiki Bar in Brooklyn, New York, which created a Baby Yoda cocktail with creme de menthe, mezcal, and coconut cream.
"We saw other bars starting to post photos online, and since Dromedary is a tiki bar, fun and kitschy drinks are right up our alley," bartender Danielle Jude Langlois told Insider.
After playing around with the ingredients to get the perfect green hue, the Dromedary staff also added napkins for Baby Yoda's robe to "help the illusion."
Langlois said the most challenging part was making the drink transparent enough that Baby Yoda's eyes would be visible inside the cocktail.
"It was important that they'd be able to float properly, and not have to be skewered or sink too much in the drink," she added.
Like the Baby Yoda cocktail served at Laka Lono, Dromedary's drink has become an instant hit. And Langlois isn't surprised.
"I think it's become this iconic meme image very quickly and can actually be replicated pretty well in cocktail form, which is really rare," she said. "Plus, it's so cute."
And the team at KegWorks.com have since created a version to help 'Star Wars' fans make their own Baby Yoda cocktail at home
Vicky Suto, the company's e-commerce director, told Insider that the KegWorks team wanted to incorporate ingredients that hadn't been used in other Baby Yoda cocktails, but were still readily available and easy to work with.
They settled on a matcha base along with gin, ginger syrup, lemon juice, cucumber slices, and cherries.
"Once we had the recipe down, we asked our resident 'Star Wars' fans for some naming suggestions," Suto said. "And it was only natural we landed on The Matcha-lorian."
The Matcha-lorian has become yet another Baby Yoda cocktail to go viral, and Grange said she's excited to see that the craze won't be slowing down anytime soon.
"I love seeing all the different interpretations from bars around the country," she said. "I'm an artist before I'm a bartender, and having tens of thousands of people connect with my idea is the ultimate creative payoff."
- Read more:
- A self-taught baker made an incredible Baby Yoda pie for the holidays
- People are using makeup to transform themselves into Baby Yoda
- Jodie Comer's dramatic green Golden Globes dress is being compared to Baby Yoda
- 'Baby Yoda' toys and stuffed animals are finally available to pre-order - here they are
