Butterfly pea flowers add a royal purple hue to this citrusy-floral G&T.
• 2 oz. Royal Gin
• 0.5 oz mandarin juice
• 0.25 oz. simple syrup
• 4 oz tonic water
Royal Gin & Tonic
DIY Gin & Tonic
Make summer’s favourite cocktail your very own with these bespoke ideas
Gin is unlike any other spirit. Simply put, gin is a distilled grain mash that produces a neutral alcohol or vodka. The spirit is then redistilled with botanicals, herbs and spices to achieve the final product. It doesn’t rely on aging in oak barrels like whisky, and it doesn’t rely on one agricultural product to achieve its flavour, like agave for tequila. The infusion process will determine the flavour profile of each gin.
In other words, gin is essentially a botanical-flavoured vodka. And that means, even though not very many of us will ever have access to a still, we can make our own quality gins by working with infusions.
Summer in a glass
For nine months of the year, we can enjoy our fancy drinks, our boozy drinks, our brown-bitter-stirred drinks all we like. But when summer rolls around, we just want something easy. Cool. Refreshing. Even better if it’s made with watermelon.
Joey Watermelon Drink
This perfect patio cocktail recipe is from Joey Restaurants.
• 8 (1-inch) cubes of fresh watermelon
• 8 to 10 fresh mint leaves
• 1.5 oz Absolut vodka
• 0.25 oz agave syrup
• 0.5 oz fresh squeezed lime juice
Mark your calendars with these 5 cocktail events
The Weather Network has forecast a hot, dry summer for B.C., so get out and make the most of it at these upcoming events.
Deighton Cup
Don your fancy chapeaux and hoist your glasses! The ponies hit the track once again on July 20 for the 11th annual Deighton Cup at Hastings Racecourse. Some 5,000 people gather at the track to gamble on the ponies while enjoying swish fashion, buckets of bubbly, fine cigars, gourmet cuisine and, of course, cocktails. The event includes an annual mixology competition, plus sweet summer sippers to enjoy trackside. deightoncup.com
Night on the pier
As the sun sinks to the west on August 8, some of Vancouver’s top bartenders will start shaking things up at this chill party on West Vancouver’s Ambleside Pier. This fundraiser for local arts programs is part of the Harmony Arts festival (August 2 to 11), and there will be food, fun, gorgeous views and plenty of great cocktails to enjoy. harmonyarts.ca
Negroni Inverso
Try this negroni at Nicli Antica in Gastown, or make it yourself at home.
• 0.75 oz Espolon Blanco
• 0.75 oz St-Germain
• 0.75 oz Contratto Bianco
• 0.75 oz fresh lemon juice
• 2 oz Lambrusco
Poolside reading
Looking for a good beach read this summer?
These new books will quench your thirst for words and cocktails alike
In Bloom
Created by Jeff Savage, head bartender at the Fairmont Pacific Rim, this cocktail captures all the berry bright, delicately floral flavours of summer. Note that you will need an electronic scale to measure the ingredients for the sherbet.
• 1.5 oz raspberry-infused pisco (see note)
• 0.5 oz Aperol
• 1 oz lemon juice
• 0.5 oz Grapefruit and Rose Sherbet (see recipe below)
Celebrate Canada Day with this iconic Canadian whisky
Celebrate the most important day in the Canadian calendar with the country’s iconic homegrown whisky, J.P. Wiser’s! Before Canada was even Canada, J.P. Wiser’s was distilling and barreling whisky in 1857 in Prescott, Ontario. That makes it Canada’s oldest continuously produced Canadian whisky.
Bottled Up! with Joey Donnelly
Meet Joey Donnelly, a maritime treasure of a human, who has made a solid east-coast stamp on the west-coast hospitality industry here in BC. He is the GM of Clough Club in Gastown (his last name is unrelated to the Donnelly Group) and even after almost a decade in Vancouver (with eight years under his belt at the Clough), he still greets you from behind the bar with genuine maritimer charm and an enthusiastic drawl of, “Hey Bahd!” He also owns a couple of restaurants in Tofino with some of his old ‘Scotian pals’ (being the much-admired Lil’ Ronnie’s Backyard BBQ, of which a second location just opened in early June 2019), and he sits on the Board of Directors for the newly formed mental health initiative, Mind The Bar, which serves as a resource for Vancouver hospitality workers struggling with thoughts of suicide, addictions, depression, or workplace harassment. Despite his efforts to be low-key, Joey is absolutely beloved in the industry, from colleagues to patrons to musicians to CEOs. If you don’t know him, you should. Hailing from the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia, this is Joey Donnelly.