May is my birthday month (that’s right it lasts the whole month), and seeing as I have very sensitively reached the quarter century point I thought I would celebrate maturely with my also-adult friends. So I organised an afternoon out to a “magical cocktail experience…broadly inspired by fantasy and science-fiction” at The Cauldron.

The experience started with an email with directions to a black door next to a hair salon (mystical), and very specific instructions to arrive precisely on time and not a minute early or late (v difficult to co-ordinate 8 people to do this). We arrived at exactly 12:30pm (well, 7 of us did – there’s always one) and were lead down the stairs into the venue.

We were given some fabulous robes, introduced to our potions master and shown to our tables. Then we were left with wands, recipes and ingredients to make our first “potion”. Some of the steps of our recipes required us to ask our potions masters to bring us measures of special, magical ingredients. Which leads me to a quick review of the potions masters:

Potion master 1 was serving ‘this-is-just-a-day-job’ realness. Perhaps his low-level sass and high doses of clearly bored and over-this were part of his wizarding character. Potion master 2 was serving ‘modern-day-witch’ realness in her Adidas sliders and robes. I was digging it. Potion master 3 was serving ‘weasley-sibling’ realness and had 💯 taken the job so that he could live out his wizarding fantasies. 10/10 for enthusiasm, jokes and immersive theatre talents.

I’m not a fan of spoilers so all I’ll say about the cocktails themselves is; great fun to make, but delicious they were not. There were 8 of us there so of course the drinks were met with mixed reviews, some were loved whilst others were loathed. But to be honest, you’re not there for delicious beverages, you’re there to be a bad-ass cocktail conjuring, cauldron stirring, wand wealding witch or wizard.

Here’s some photos for those visual learners amongst us:

Of course, I also have to take this opportunity to thank the tree of life for her kind and generous offering. (If you know, you know).

Best bit: living the dream in a real life potions class, and getting squiffy with friends.

Worst bit: probably just not loving the taste of the drinks, but I hardly noticed because I was actually enjoying myself so much!

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