For the Goa chapter of the Dewar's Discoveries Challenge, five mixologists looked beyond the state's familiar beach-party image and turned to an overlooked coastal resource: seaweed. Guided by marine conservationist Gabriella D'Cruz, founder of The Good Ocean, they explored how Goa's seaweed ecosystems support biodiversity and ocean health.
The Dewar's Discoveries Challenge's premise was ambitiously simple. To send 50 mixologists from across India on the road, and let each city's own culture, not a brand brief, shape the cocktails that come out of it. The tour has already moved through Kolkata, Bengaluru, and Jaipur, each stop built around whatever is hyperlocal and specific enough that it couldn't have happened anywhere else.
Goa's leg took that idea somewhere unexpected beyond the beach parties and nightlife that flash through our understanding of the the state, but to something most visitors, and even many locals, walk straight past: seaweed.
That shift in focus came through Gabriella D'Cruz, a Goa-born marine conservationist and founder of The Good Ocean, widely known as India's first seaweed food company. D'Cruz has spent years working to popularize India's seaweed as both an ecological resource and a food source, and her pitch to the mixologists went beyond flavor. Seaweed, she explained, functions as one of the ocean's essential filtration systems cleaning the surrounding water while sustaining a biodiversity of fish, crustaceans, and shellfish most people never think to associate with a beach. It's an entire ecosystem hiding in plain sight, doing structural work for the ocean that nothing else in that environment replicates.
For the mixologists — Gautam Gibran, Rajib Mukherjee, Avinash Hegde, Kodhotu Suresh Juvin, and Calvis Camil Rodrigues among them, D'Cruz framed seaweed as inspiration on multiple levels at once: its flavor profile, briny and mineral, sure, but also its texture, and even the visual language of the ecosystem it comes from. The rocky coastline where seaweed grows became fair game for garnish ideas — rough textures, natural forms, a sense of place built into the glass rather than just the liquid in it.
On the Goan leg, the Dewar's Discoveries Challenge traded the postcard version of the state for its deeper but omnipresent ecological backbone.
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