“Cameroxn, do you like oolong tea?” ~ Yuri offering the player character tea in Doki Doki Literature Club

Inspiration

Ah, Doki Doki Literature Club, a chance to craft a drink as complex and nuanced as the poems written by the Literature Club members. I start with one for Yuri, a lover of tea and complex storylines (not unlike nuanced flavors in a drink). Her favorite ice cream flavors are chocolate and raspberry, and she’s a fan of a cuppa with a good book.

For her mocktail, I take an experimental approach, water‑distilling raspberry and cacao hydrosols to pair with Taiwanese Oriental Beauty oolong tea (a tea quite literally bitten by a love bug). For the cocktail, the interpretation leans Manhattan style: an oolong‑infused vodka base, paired with vermouths, chocolate bitters, and a custom raspberry lactic syrup to keep things decadent.

Workshopping

Yuri’s Best Tea

I began developing drinks for the members of the Literature Club based on their actual flavor preferences, seemingly revealed in the Self-Love side story of the game. For example, all of the Literature Club members have a favorite ice cream flavor: Monika’s is vanilla, Sayori’s is cookie dough, Natsuki’s is strawberry (a favorite of mine as well), and Yuri’s is chocolate and raspberry.

Oddly enough, from the base wiki, that was about all I could find about their preferences, with the exception of Yuri. Yuri also has a favorite cupcake flavor, namely matcha green tea. That immediately got me thinking of using tea in some capacity for a drink for Yuri, but something about this extra piece of info felt like a string of inspiration worth pulling on, so I dug deeper. Yuri talks about tea quite a lot in the script of the game, and the only reference to a specific tea I could find in the base game is during a moment where she is alone with the player. Yuri brings her “best tea,” implied to be an oolong, and meticulously prepares it for her and the player to enjoy, before sitting on the floor of the classroom and enjoying a cup with “a bag of small chocolate candies,” since they “go well with the tea.” (These are quotes from the game’s script.)

Yuri’s preferences toward novels are complex and filled with symbolism, which gives me the impression that she ponders the same nuances in her teas. With that in mind, I want to craft a drink that does not distract too much from the particular tea I choose for the recipe. First things first was to choose a tea.

Clearly, pre-canned teas or mass-market tea powders were not going to cut it for Yuri’s seemingly refined palate. Besides, she picks her "best tea" to share with the player. So I crowdsourced some info regarding oolong teas that might be considered “the best” or “premium” from the perspective of a Japanese audience. Though DDLC does not seem to canonically take place in Japan, my impression is that it is at least a Japanese anime inspired setting. Along the way I learned that the majority of oolong teas consumed in Japan are imported from China or Taiwan. Further along, I narrowed my search down to four main teas: high-grade Tie Guan Yin, a famous Chinese oolong; Da Hong Pao (Big Red Robe), another famous oolong from the Wuyi Mountains (which I know by name from my workshopping with the Claptrap mocktail); Dong Ding (Frozen Summit), a popular Taiwanese oolong; and finally Dong Fang Mei Ren (Oriental Beauty), another celebrated Taiwanese oolong.

Among these teas, I found the most thematic resonance with Oriental Beauty, namely because a lot of the honeyed sweetness that develops in the tea is the result of the plant’s chemical defense mechanisms when the leaves are bitten by small insects, the tea jassid. Something about the tea being bitten by a bug, a love bug, felt fitting for Doki Doki Literature Club’s theming as a dating-sim vibe.

Specifically for the mocktail, I'd use this tea brewed as the base. I attempted to brew it with the same confidence that Yuri does when serving tea for the player on Day 3 of Act 1. Brewed at exactly 202° F (94.4° C) for 5 minutes with 3 g of oolong tea. This was then reduced on low heat until it measured almost exactly half of its weight to create a tea reduction or concentrate.

Now, it was a matter of determining the other details for a pair of drinks that had three main flavor components: Yuri’s best oolong tea, the chocolate that pairs so well with it, and the raspberry that Yuri enjoys alongside that chocolate flavor.

She Blows Raspberries

A while back, I refurbished a water distiller that I found on a walk around the block. My first thought, naturally, was that I could use this to make a rudimentary still for cocktail experimentation. The thing is, I cannot legally distill alcohol by any means without a license here in the United States. I also had no intention of making distilled water for home use, so this water distiller went unused for some time. Later on, I found Tracia C’s Instagram with a bunch of examples of housemade hydrosols, aka water distillates. After discovering yet another drinkable substance that I didn’t know about, I searched for it and realized I already had two hydrosols in my stock: orange blossom water and rose water. The thought occurred to me that if those were made by distilling blossoms and petals with water, couldn’t I do the same with my refurbished appliance? It wasn’t specifically made for this, but I had to give it a try.

To set up my test, I put water and washed raspberries into the water distiller and let it run its cycle. Before letting it go through its first run, I modified a large fine-mesh strainer so I could keep the raspberries partially suspended in the distiller to minimize contact between the berries and the water itself. Kind of like a botanical basket in gin distilling, the idea is for the exchange of flavors to happen between berry and vapor. After the first few minutes, a clear liquid began dripping out of the distiller, and it smelled like a raspberry bush. It had an aroma not unlike like the raspberries themselves but also like leaves. Tasting this distillate, the flavor was not super potent, but it retained more of the leafy flavors than the juicy ones. I let it continue through its cycle, swapping the output container every so often so I could see how the flavor of the hydrosol changed over time.

What came out first (the heads) smelled the most like fresh raspberries; what came next (the hearts) retained a raspberry-like smell, but it was a bit more jammy and cooked. The final cuts (the tails) were more leafy and tasted a bit bitter, as the water distiller began burning what was left inside it. One of the main disadvantages of a distiller made specifically for water is that it churns all the way through whatever you leave in it, so you have to know when to stop it early.

Ultimately, I didn’t use the raspberry hydrosol as the base of Yuri’s drinks, because the flavor wasn’t raspberry enough. The aroma, on the other hand, made for a nice addition that I added to the cocktail and mocktail for garnishing purposes. Overall, the smell of the raspberry hydrosol could certainly be more “raspberry,” but I’ll take that as a challenge once I obtain a better means of conducting steam distillations. In the next section, I return to the distiller to capture the flavor of cocoa beans and cacao husks, which worked better for Yuri’s mocktail specifically.

Raspberry Hydrosol (via a Water Distiller)

• Place raspberries and water into the distiller.

• Collect the first few drops of hydrosol (the heads). Bottle and refrigerate.

• Note: This is not an efficient process and is likely not recommended by the manufacturer of the water distiller.

• Caution: Running this for too long will cause whatever’s in the distiller to begin burning, which, in the best-case scenario, is annoying to clean up and smells unpleasant.

Before I moved on to the other flavor components of the drink, I was still left with quite a few raspberries, so I opted to make a quick macerated syrup out of them. Using the same method as an oleo saccharum, I covered washed raspberries in an equal weight of sugar and left them to turn into a deep red syrup. I strained out the syrup and added enough sugar to bring it to 66° Brix (66% sugar, or the same sweetness as a 2:1 simple syrup). As I workshopped the rich raspberry syrup, I found that the flavor kept falling a bit flat, so I decided to bring back a bit of brightness by mixing in a little lactic acid. The acid could likely be dialed in more accurately, but with that small pinch of extra acidity, I inadvertently made the most faithful raspberry syrup I think I’ve ever tasted.

Raspberry Lactic Syrup (66° Brix)

• Wash and pat dry some raspberries.

• Cover and coat the raspberries in an equal weight of white granulated sugar, and let rest in a sealed container at room temperature for 24 hours.

• Strain out the liquid, sugar-adjust to 66° Brix, and acid-adjust with a touch of lactic acid.

  • For me, the original syrup measured 60° Brix, so I added (111.44 g × (66 – 60) / (100 – 66)) = 19.7 g of white sugar.

  • For 100 g of sugar-adjusted syrup, I added 0.5 g of lactic acid.

Doki Doki Chocolate

At this point, I was focusing on building out Yuri’s mocktail and all I really had was oolong tea plus raspberry syrup (and that hydrosol as a mist over top for garnish). Yuri’s favorite flavors are chocolate and raspberry, and the only idea I had for a while was just adding more syrup. I didn’t want to add too much more because if I added more syrup, I felt I’d need to add juice like that from a lemon to balance things out. I pictured Yuri’s drinks to be more Manhattan or old fashioned style, and typically, they don't have any juice in them. Granted, I was more focused on the mocktail, which doesn’t have any alcohol in it, but I still wanted the challenge to capture that gentler complexity without the added citrus. Before relenting, I tried to see if I could incorporate the chocolate flavor via water distillation, as a hydrosol like I attempted with the raspberry.

Setting up the cocoa distillation wasn’t much different; I essentially put some crushed cocoa beans and cacao shells in the distiller with water and let it run. I pulled four fractions from the distillation that all had slightly different tastes and smells.

1. The first pull, the heads, had such an intriguing smell that reminded me of something I’d order at a Chinese restaurant, something like a veggie stir-fry, I think (this one honestly confused me, my guess is I didn’t clean out the distiller well from my previous run).

2. The second one had a flavor reminiscent of chocolate but much more similar to that of a grain. It reminded me most prominently of the barley tea that I’d experimented with while developing Sonic’s mocktail.

3. The third pull seemed to taste roasted like that of a coffee bean. The flavor leaned even more into that graininess from the second pull making its flavor similar to that of a malty beer.

4. The final pull, the tails, gained a mild bitterness partially from the now mild burning happening in the distiller. It also developed a bit of a tanginess too that wasn’t all that unpleasant.

Having different options to work with was actually pretty cool! I felt that I had so much more room for a more specific interpretation of Yuri’s mocktail, and that extra complexity felt totally in line with her character. Even better, it got me thinking about another layer of possibility. If a hydrosol is essentially distilled water, could I use that water to brew the tea itself instead of using regular water?

To summarize, I took a bit of oolong tea and left it to cold-infuse into each of the hydrosol pulls above. None of them tasted particularly good. For sure, they tasted more leafy, a bit rustic, and a little “damp” for lack of a better term. More importantly, none of the combos made the tea taste more “tea-like.” My control of just sipping the oolong tea itself had notes of melon rind and a honeyed sweetness. Every infusion seriously distracted from it, so I kept the hydrosol separate in the final recipe.

When all was said and done, I picked one of the hydrosol splits to use in the mocktail, specifically pull #2. I found that this one did the best job of giving a slight boost to the oolong tea’s flavor and even made a nice base for the little bit of chocolate bitters that I would add to further push those more obvious chocolate flavors to the forefront.

Cacao Husk and Bean Hydrosol (via a Water Distiller)

• Place crushed cocoa beans (1 g), cacao husks (15 g), and water (750 ml) into the distiller

• Collect the four fractions of the distillation (for me, that was swapping collection containers about every 10 minutes after the first few drops)

• Pick whichever fraction you feel tastes best with some brewed oolong tea (for me, that was the second fraction)

• Note: This is not an efficient process and is likely not recommended by the manufacturer of the water distiller.

• Caution: Running this for too long will cause whatever’s in the distiller to begin burning which, in the best-case scenario, is annoying to clean up and smells unpleasant.

Yuri Mocktail

• 2 oz (60 ml) Oolong Tea Reduction (50% reduced; Valley of Tea Oriental Beauty Oolong)

• 0.5 oz (15 ml) Cacao Husk and Bean Hydrosol

• 1 tsp (5 ml) Raspberry Lactic Syrup (66° Brix)

• 2 dashes Chocolate Bitters (Honest John)

• 3 drops 20% Saline Solution

• Method: Stir & Strain

• Garnish: Fresh raspberry, raspberry hydrosol mist, and a piece of Chocolate

The Cocktail Club (if only)

Most of the work I had put into Yuri’s drinks was focused on producing the ingredients for the mocktail, the non‑alcoholic drink. While working on those ingredients, I quickly made a cold infusion of the “Oriental Beauty” oolong tea into some vodka (Grey Goose), a process that took only 20 minutes. I knew I wanted an old‑fashioned/Manhattan‑style drink, and if my infused vodka would be the base, then the raspberry lactic syrup would be the sweetener, and I’d pick out some chocolate bitters to round it all out. Before putting ingredients to glass, I wanted to take the opportunity to research ingredients in a way I hadn’t tried recently.

Oolong Tea‑Infused Vodka

• Per 1 L of vodka, add 20 g of oolong tea and infuse for 20 minutes.

• Strain out the tea leaves and bottle.

In the past, I’ve used resources like The Flavor Matrix to pick out flavor pairings. Flavors that pair well together tend to bring out the best in both, and adding a bit of, say, vanilla to chocolate can make the chocolate taste even more chocolatey. I wanted Yuri’s cocktail to taste predominantly like the oolong tea I had chosen, so at first I looked for flavor similarities with tea (69% pair with fig, 76% pair with squash/pumpkin, 60% pair with kiwi, all according to The Flavor Matrix). Typically, I would make another syrup or infusion to add those flavors to the cocktail, but the more infusions I add, the more “lost in the plot” I feel I become. This time, instead, I tried to find specific bottles that pair with oolong tea and raspberry, using the Death & Co books—namely Cocktail Codex and Welcome Home.

In Cocktail Codex (where I found the recipe for the oolong‑infused vodka to begin with) it’s used in two recipes that both feature vermouths and orange liqueurs. Orange wasn’t a flavor I thought was necessary here, so I took note of the vermouth and moved into the Death & Co Welcome Home book for further references. In the latter, I looked at every recipe that included a raspberry liqueur or anything with the name framboise (French for raspberry). I flipped through about 100 pages and found pretty much every base spirit you could think of: rums, whiskeys, gins, and liqueurs like Campari. I didn’t find anything worth picking out specifically, but it was a fun exercise regardless. After that deep dive, I had a moment of clarity: if I was trying to accent the tea flavor, maybe I should just use a spirit that already has tea in it.

I made two more quick infusions with the oolong tea: one with Drumshanbo Gunpowder Irish Gin and one with Roku Gin. Drumshanbo is made with gunpowder tea, while Roku uses sencha and gyokuro. The Drumshanbo infusion added a wonderful bouquet of botanicals and even accented some of the more savory notes of the oolong. Roku, on the other hand, with its prominent floral and citrusy yuzu, brought a brightness that was not present in the vodka infusion.

I tried a couple of demo drinks with the oolong infusions, the raspberry lactic syrup, and chocolate bitters (specifically Crude’s “Big Bear” coffee and chocolate bitters for its drier cocoa notes). Taking a note from one book, I added a bit of blanc vermouth (Dolin) to the mix, which not only bolstered the raspberry flavor but also the more melon‑like fruit notes from the oolong. I also leaned on some personal experience and split the vermouths with a bit of Carpano Antica Formula, a sweet vermouth that I’ve really appreciated for its red‑fruit flavors and botanical complexities that remind me of chocolate.

It all came down to which infusion to use: one of the gin bases or the vodka I started with. When mixed together, both gins made delightful cocktails. They were botanically complex, but very gin‑ and vermouth‑forward. Honestly, these would be great for a martini, but the flavors of oolong, raspberry, and chocolate were all muted, and I intended for those to be the focal flavors for Yuri’s drink. Ultimately, I opted for the vodka infusion. There’s so little flavor imparted by vodka that it allows the components from the other ingredients to shine. The mild tanginess from the raspberry lactic syrup and the subtle cacao and fruit‑like tea notes all have space to breathe. Even more surprising to me was that, when I used gin as the base, the vermouths were so much louder—like I could taste them far more than with vodka as the base. With the vodka infusion, the vermouths tasted like they were a part of the oolong tea, instead of the other way around. I was surprised that as I attempted to workshop my way away from the vodka infusion, I ended up reinforcing it instead, creating one of my favorite original cocktails to date.

Flavor Analysis

Cocktail:  Begins with nuanced oolong tea notes that quickly intertwine with a gentle tang of herbs and raspberry. As the flavor develops, it deepens into rich chocolate and cacao tones that linger.

Mocktail:  Opens with fresh raspberry aromatics. The first sip is light and cocoa-forward, like a soft chocolate milk. As the sip evolves, the oolong comes to the front, finishing with a gentle milk-tea impression.