Canada's only magazine dedicated to distillers, spirits and cocktail culture.
From left to right, Sabrine Dhaliwal, Uva Wine & Cocktail Bar; Reece Sims, Brix+Mortar/The Diamond; Liana Madera, The Diamond; Jasmine Radu, Tocador; Amber Bruce, The Keefer Bar. Cathy Browne photo 
Bonnie Stewart of The Granville Room was the fastest qualifier and is going to nationals. Cathy Browne photo |
Your chance to taste and discover spirits from 40 distilleries from around the province will be Saturday, April 14 at the annual BC Distilled.
Canada’s biggest artisan and micro-distillery event continues to grow, with 12 new distilleries featured among the nearly four dozen slated to take part in 2018’s festivities.
With a puff of dry ice, the 2018 edition of Science of Cocktails has proven once again that physics, chemistry and thermodynamics are as important in your glass as the spirits and bitters.
Bartenders from all over Vancouver, as well as Calgary, Toronto, Halifax and Las Vegas, headed over to Science World last week to put their skills to the acid test.
—Nick Charles (William Powell) covers the essentials in the 1934 classic movie The Thin Man.
One hundred and seventy-five. That’s a lot of spirits to taste, especially when they range from akvavit to amaro to apple brandy.
But throughout December 2017, that just what I and seven other spirits experts from coast to coast did, sniffing, swirling, sipping and occasionally spitting, as we judged the inaugural Canadian Artisan Spirits Awards.
Imagine you make widgets: finely crafted, artisan widgets. Customers pay more for vintage widgets, so there are laws around how old they have to be as well as their quality. You spend a couple of years building your factory with expensive, traditional widget-making equipment. You hire workers, pay for raw materials, power and utilities, and finally fill a warehouse with a bunch of bulky, heavy containers, then wait a few years before you can sell any of your exquisite stock at a premium price. In the meantime, you absorb labour and storage costs to maintain your inventory, which you lose a mysterious chunk of every year as some widgets slip through the cracks and just disappear into thin air.
The Sidecar is one of the great Prohibition-era classics, a boozy-but-vibrant three-ingredient cocktail that fulfills our desire for both the depth of brown spirits and the bright acidity of citrus. It should be a rock star among cocktails, yet where Old Fashioneds, tiki drinks and even the horrible Gimlet have made their comebacks, the Sidecar has somehow eluded its just recognition amid the modern cocktail revival.
It’s time for that to change.
Sláinte! January 25, 2018, is Robbie Burns Day—a day dedicated to the life and poetry of the late Scottish radical poet, Robert Burns. Burns suppers typically include haggis, Scotch whisky and the recitation of Burns’ poetry. For those planning on cheersing the famed Scotsman this year, here are three tribute-worthy whisky cocktail recipes that can be easily recreated at home.
1.5 parts DEWAR’S 12 Blended Scotch Whisky
0.75 parts lemon juice
0.75 parts honey syrup
3 slices fresh ginger
Candied ginger garnish
Using a wooden muddler, muddle the fresh ginger in the bottom of a cocktail shaker until it is well mashed. Add the blended Scotch, lemon juice, and honey syrup, and fill shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled (about 20 seconds). Strain into an ice-filled rocks glass (you may wish to double strain through a fine tea strainer to remove the small flecks of ginger), and spray the Islay Scotch over the top.
1.5 parts DEWAR’S 12 Blended Scotch Whisky
0.75 parts lemon juice
0.50 parts simple syrup
0.25 parts. Crème du Mure
Blackberry garnish
Add all ingredients (minus crème de mure) to the glass. Fill with crushed ice and stir. Top with more crushed ice and then drizzle crème du mure on top. Garnish with a fresh blackberry.
2 parts DEWAR’S 12 Blended Scotch Whisky
1 part Martini Rossi (Sweet Vermouth)
3 dashes bittercube Corazon bitters
Garnish with lemon twist
Stir and strain
Glass and ice—rocks / large cube
He may have a lengthy career in brewing behind him, but Gary Lohin is clear: “I’ve been a whisky aficionado for even longer.”
He got his start in beer at Whistler Brewing back in 1989, before spending most of the 1990s at Sailor Hagar’s Brewpub in North Vancouver. He moved to Central City Brewpub in Surrey in 2003 where his Red Racer beer lineup established him as one of B.C.’s top brewmasters. It was on trips to Oregon and California that he visited microdistilleries and began noticing that breweries there were adding stills. So, when Central City began planning its new production facility in 2010, Lohin suggested to his business partner that they should add a distillery.