Though a few places around San Francisco have served cocktails containing sesame in recent years, suddenly it seems we’re sipping on seeds all over town. Local drinks feature black and white sesame seeds in a variety of forms — as decorative dust, oil, syrup, and salt — and draw inspiration from countries including China, Mexico, and Japan. The flavor trend seems to sit in with some larger ones: a rise of Japanese cocktail ingredients, increased popularity of orgeat and the tikification of not-traditionally-tropical drinks, plus the use of newish techniques to alter the form of ingredients between liquids and solids.

And drinkable sesame is having a broader moment nationwide. You can lighten your coffee with sesame milk, and syrup maker Torani crowned toasted black sesame as the “flavor of the year.” In a press release, the company cites the new flavor as tapping into two consumer trends: sesame as an ingredient in a number of international cuisines, and black-colored syrup making drinks more photogenic.

Drops of sesame and other colored oils on martini-style stirred drinks provide a slight aromatic boost — plus it’s just fun to watch the blobs float around and merge as they’re consumed. At the just-opened Akikos, beverage director Quade Marshall offers a drink with sesame in two forms. The Foreign Delegate made with cognac, aged sake, sesame orgeat, bitters, and sesame oil riffs on the Japanese Cocktail with a nod to the Fog Cutter, speaking to Marshall’s time in tiki bars. The sesame oil, dropped atop the drink, serves as a garnish, as it does at Devil’s Acre in a stirred cocktail created by former employee Jordan Hernandez called the Full Moon made with mezcal, apricot, and vermouth.

To infuse sesame into spirits, most local bartenders use the technique of “fat washing,” which involves soaking a fatty or oily substance in a spirit, freezing it, and straining it off to leave the flavor and silky texture of the ingredient behind. In San Jose, Jean Garcia of Haberdasher collaborated with a fellow bartender on the Sunomono, which features gin and sesame-infused shochu. To wash the spirit, Garcia heats both the spirit and oil to get the most flavor possible out of the sesame, before freezing and filtering. Garcia says she initially tried coconut oil fat washing but found the flavor too subtle. In this cocktail, however, she opted for sesame in order to bring “an Asian element” to the drink.

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