Canada's only magazine dedicated to distillers, spirits and cocktail culture.
After working for five years as a bartender on cruise ships, Tiffany Davis is well acquainted with the benefits of cocktail bitters.
“I went through so many bottles of Peychaud’s,” she laughs. “It was the best cure for seasickness.”
Now safely moored on dry land, as a bartender at the Shangri-La Hotel Vancouver’s Market by Jean-Georges, Davis still relies on bitters, but primarily for their cocktail applications.
• 0.75 oz (20 mL) Del Maguey Vida Espadin Mezcal
• 0.75 oz (20 mL) French sweet vermouth
• 0.75 oz (20 mL) Heering cherry liquor
• 0.5 oz (15 mL) pineapple juice
2 tsp (10 mL) orange juice
1 tsp (5 mL) lemon juice
2 dashes Bittered Sling Autumn Bog Cranberry
INGREDIENTS:
• 1.5 oz (45 mL) Taylor Fladgate White Port
• 1 oz (30 mL) Beefeater gin
• 0.25 oz (7 mL) Okanagan Spirits Haskap Liqueur
• 0.75 oz (22 mL) freshly squeezed lemon juice
• 2 dashes Bittered Sling Autumnbog Cranberry Bitters
• Tonic water
What’s the best way to get into the festive spirit? Why, with some festive spirits, of course.
All over Vancouver, the city’s best bartenders are shaking, stirring and mulling the best seasonal flavours into cocktails designed to warm body and soul. And truly, can you think of a better way to bring this cold, dreary year to a close?
• 2 oz. Cherry Heering
• 0.5 oz. orgeat syrup
• 0.25 oz. Fernet-Branca
• 1 oz. lemon juice
• 1 egg white
Close to 3,000 bartenders around the world vied to be the best, but in the end it was the U.K.’s Grant Murray who was named winner of the prestigious 2016 Peter F. Heering Classic Challenge at London Cocktail Week in October.
Vancouver entrant, Andrew Schneider, bartender at Vij’s, advanced to the final round of the competition, held as part of the World’s Best 50 Bars gala countdown, and judged by spirits luminaries, David Wondrich, Lauren Mote, Simon Difford, Charlene Dawes, Hamish Smith, and host Andrew Seymour.
It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, reading 141 books over the course of a few months, but that was a side project of mine over the fall and if I’m going to be completely frank, since we’re old friends now, I’ll admit that it wasn’t always tea in my cup as I worked my way through eight linear feet of Canadian nonfiction.
Now that I’ve finished the reading, you’d think I’d never pick up a book again, but I found myself leafing through Charles Dickens the other day—it’s the snap in the air—and came across this passage from Our Mutual Friend: “The bar of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters was a bar to soften the human breast.…[The rooms] had red curtains matching the noses of the regular customers, and were provided with comfortable fireside tin utensils, like models of sugar-loaf hats, made in that shape that they might, with their pointed ends, seek out for themselves glowing nooks in the depths of the red coals, when they mulled your ale, or heated for you those delectable drinks, Purl, Flip, and Dog’s Nose.”
• 1.5 oz. rye whisky
• 0.3 oz. amaretto
• 0.3 oz. Cocchi Americano
• 0.3 oz. maraschino liqueur
• 3 dashes of bitters
• 1 maraschino cherry
It will be just two short years in February since Sons of Vancouver opened for business—with a 700-litre still repurposed from a dairy pasteurizer. And, like so many of the distilleries around B.C., owners James Lester and Richard Klaus have barely had time to pause for breath.
Take the past few months of 2016 as an example: Sons ran a successful crowdfunding campaign to upgrade to a proper—and much bigger—still, opened a tasting room, and will release a special barrel-aged edition of their signature No. 82 Amaretto in time for the holidays.
It wasn’t meant to happen this fast.
Whistler is synonymous with winter. Temperatures fall and, in short order, so too does the snow and a barrage of tourists eager to take to the slopes.
And when those tourists have had their fill of the great outdoors, many of them descend upon Fairmont Chateau Whistler’s The Mallard Lounge.