Q: Are beverage recipes patented?

A: Yes, it should be possible to patent a beverage. After all, a beverage is nothing more than just a composition, and I, as well as hundreds of other chemical patent attorneys, make a living getting patents for compositions.

However, there are two serious problems that you need to consider before spending your money on a patent.

Firstly, it will be difficult (read: expensive) to get such a patent.

With respect to novelty, given that there are millions of drinks mixed around the world on daily bases, pretty much any combination of ingredients have been mixed to create a beverage. Luckily for you, it is up to the Examiner to find documentation that somebody somewhere created such a beverage – it is up to the Examiner to show that your invention is not new and not up to you to prove that it is new.

The problem is that it will be difficult to argue that your beverage is not obvious. If your invention is a mixture of several ingredients, it will be obvious to any bartender what your drink will look like or taste like.

Secondly, it will be hard to enforce your patent. How will you know if some bartender in a bar in a distant state will be mixing your drink to a customer? Or even to a customer on the other side of the restaurant?

Now, for the above, I simply assumed that you are asking to patent a mixed alcoholic beverage. However, if you are asking to patent a beverage that could produce on a large scale, such as, hypothetically, a milk that will reduce cholesterol, or a beer that reduces a beer belly, then yes, that will likely be more likely to be patented and more easily enforced.

Good luck!