Canada's only magazine dedicated to distillers, spirits and cocktail culture.
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.
• 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
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
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
A sparkling goblet filled with golden elixir revolves lazily in mid-air, twirling a couple of inches above the vapours of dry ice billowing from a wooden platform. It looks like magic, and it is, sort of.
• 1.5 oz Bols Genever
• 0.75 oz dry vermouth
• 0.75 oz cold-pressed white tea
• 0.25 oz BOLS Maraschino
• 1 barspoon peated Scotch whisky
• 1 barspoon salt water (5%)
When Devin McKeigan created her cocktail for the Bacardi Legacy cocktail competition, inspiration shone around her like a bright beam of light.
“Within the industry I’ve met so many people…everybody fuels my light, not just in the hospitality industry, but everyone I’ve met. It’s all of us working together,” says the bartender for the Toptable Group’s newly opened Elisa Steakhouse.
• 2 oz Bacardi Añejo Cuatro rum
• 0.75 oz Martini Bianco vermouth
• 0.25 oz rich apple demerara syrup (see note)
• 2 dashes Scrappy’s Seville Orange Bitters
• 2 to 3 spritzes of salted caraway solution (see note)
In January, Drinks International, a trade publication for the alcohol industry, released its annual list of the 50 best cocktails—or at least the best-selling ones—around the world. It’s perhaps no big surprise that the top drink, for the fifth year running, was that classic whisky-based bittered sling, the Old Fashioned.
• 1.5 oz dry sherry
• 1.5 oz dry vermouth
• 1 dash Angostura bitters
• 1 dash orange bitters