Canada's only magazine dedicated to distillers, spirits and cocktail culture.
What’s new? What’s next? In some ways, the pandemic has changed everything about how we drink. In others, it’s only accelerated trends that were already in the works. We checked in with experts both local and global, and here’s what they had to say about the way we’re drinking now and in the months to come.
This summer we plan to party like it’s, well, not pandemic times. In fact, we’re going to have some fun playing with retro cocktails in different formats, like jelly shots and boozy popsicles. I mean, who says a cocktail actually has to be liquid? Here are the nostalgic patio crushers we plan to enjoy all summer long.
When restaurants and bars were given the green light last year to open temporary patios in response to the pandemic’s toll, the team at The Keefer Bar didn’t want people sipping cool cocktails on alley benches. In went a mini-putt course, fire tables on custom wooden decks, booths, a disco ball and artist-designed graffiti on the walls. The Keefer Yard was born.
“It feels like you’ve walked out of normal city life and stepped through the doors of Narnia, only it’s an outdoor cocktail bar,” says The Keefer Bar’s media-relations rep, Chantelle Benzies. “I describe it as a daydream.
“Every day we are adapting in ways to make the Yard as memorable of an experience as possible, while also keeping it as safe as possible,” she says. “It feels really nice to be able to offer an exciting experience to the community at a point when many of us need it the most.”
Plexiglas is so 2020.
With dividers now the norm in restaurants and bars, more places are getting creative with their pandemic shields. As long as partitions are “washable, rigid and impermeable” and measure at least 1.2 metres from the tabletop, pretty much anything goes.
Cocktail culture may be thriving in North America, but you could say Italy invented it with the aperitivo. Drawn from the Latin aperire, meaning “to open,” the term implies much more than a drink to whet the appetite; it’s a ritual of gathering with friends and unwinding after work over drinks and small bites and opening up conversation.
Here in Vancouver, several Italian hot spots are serving aperitivo-inspired cocktails, putting their own spin on la bella vita.
The Roof is on Fire! That was the name of a dangerous-drinks seminar that San Francisco writer Camper English (of alcademics.com fame) and Bittermens co-founder Avery Glasser gave in 2016 at Tales of the Cocktail. Their warnings on potentially dangerous bartending ingredients, equipment and techniques were so eye-opening, English later nabbed a grant to develop cocktailsafe.org, a geekily helpful website packed with deeply researched information and resources.
“Bartenders on Facebook were chatting a lot about potentially dangerous drinks … and I thought it would be useful to put all this information, and a lot more, in one place as a reference to bartenders everywhere,” he says.
Here are his top 10 red flags for home mixologists—and pros, too.
Ask a pro bartender for their must-haves, and the answer might be practical: bar mops (a cheap pack of these thin, absorbent white towels is smart, even for home) and pens. However, the essentials below look more aspirational on your home bar cart: always chic in stainless steel, they’re especially envy-inspiring in on-point finishes from gold and rose gold to gunmetal and matte black. (For a roundup of additional tools for the advanced bartending pro, read here.)
Cocktail lovers have a whole back-bar of B.C. craft cocktails and spirits to taste this holiday season. Mini-bottle sets are a hot commodity: Shelter Point’s 12 Days of Christmas advent calendar sold out, direct from the distillery, in hours. More common are spirit trios, which you can break apart into three little presents, or sample without investing in full-size bottles. Sheringham’s gin trios sell out at Legacy Liquor Store, where Remy Letendre, the buyer for the extensive B.C. craft spirits section, says, “This year, I was excited to see a few brands take part in the ‘tri-pack’ Christmas selection. I think it’s a great way for these craft distilleries to get people to try a wider range of products. The early success of the Esquimalt vermouth tri-pack just shows how people are willing to branch out … for home bartending.”
When Vancouverites look back at 2010, we think of the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, a rain-soaked Wayne Gretzky and all those red mittens. But the really big news that year could be found at the bottom of a cocktail glass.
Proper cocktail bars were finally opening all over town. Global spirits brand reps started showing up to dole out samples. The organizers of Tales of the Cocktail reached out to see if Vancouver would be a good site for Tales on Tour. (Spoiler alert: Yes, in 2011 and 2012.) And Imbibe magazine discovered “a Galapagos of mixology, a place where cocktails have evolved independently from the rest of the drinking world.”
Ten years later, we revisit the year that changed the city’s cocktail culture.
It gathered speed last year with Sober October before the holiday rush. After ringing in 2020, the trend was undeniable: #Dryuary was in full swing on social media and in the bars and living rooms of the nation, as the so-called sober curious or mindful drinking movement reached a new level of maturity.
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