Canada's only magazine dedicated to distillers, spirits and cocktail culture.
One of the world’s best whisky festivals is just a short ferry ride away from Vancouver, but you’ll have to act fast if you plan to get tickets. The Victoria Whisky Festival returns for its 19th year January 16 through 19 at the Hotel Grand Pacific. These four days of all things whisky kick off with the Canadian Whisky Awards and continue with masterclasses, whisky dinners and consumer tastings, featuring more than 200 whiskies from 50 distilleries.
It’s alive! For the duration of spooky season, Vancouver’s dearly departed haunted house-themed cocktail bar has been resurrected as a pop-up experience at a popular craft distillery.
Sons of Vancouver has brought back The Dark Manor Inn, the quirky and short-lived cocktail bar that never made it to its first Halloween, by way of decor and inspired sips taken right from the late watering hole, which closed in the summer of 2019. (The Dark Manor, which was tied to Vancouver’s popular Shameful Tiki Room, ran out of a Fraser Street address that next became the Michelin Guide-endorsed Say Mercy! restaurant.)
Unlike some boozy events, Vancouver Cocktail Week isn’t just a big party (though it offers plenty of opportunities to raise a glass and get your ya-yas out). And unlike other boozy events, it’s not a trade show where you wander from booth to booth sampling wee sips of things (though it does feature loads of exciting new spirits, bitters and cocktails to taste and try).
What Vancouver Cocktail Week is, is a celebration of community, and not just the community of talented bartenders and industry professionals in this city. It’s also a celebration of you, the guests they serve, the whole reason the industry exists in the first place.
That’s why VCW events take place, not in a convention hall, but in the bars and restaurants where the city’s best bartenders can show you what they do best.
And it’s also why VCW24 has something for everyone, whether you are only just discovering cocktails or want to add to your collection of recipes for your next dinner party, expand your knowledge as an industry professional or simply enjoy a fun night out on the town.
Here are just some of the exciting experiences you can discover at VCW24, March 3 to 10.
One of the most exciting aspects of the third annual Vancouver Cocktail Week is the unprecedented opportunity it offers for guests to taste international flavours and meet bartenders from far-flung regions of the planet. Here are just some of the festival’s great dinners, seminars, guest shifts and other events that bring the rest of the world home.
Tickets are now on sale for the third annual Vancouver Cocktail Week presented by The Alchemist magazine. Save your seat for the best seminars, most exciting cocktail-paired dinners and unmissable signature events like the closing Green Garden Gala.
Don your fascinators and fedoras and get ready for a day at the races.
At 5 p.m. on Wednesday, November 3, it became official: Vancouver is about to have its first ever cocktail week. We’ll drink to that!
From March 6 to 20, 2022, Vancouver Cocktail Week presented by The Alchemist magazine will celebrate the excellence of the city’s cocktail scene and the hospitality of its bars, hotels and restaurants.
“This is just what we do,” says Trevor Kallies, president of the B.C. chapter of the Canadian Bartender Association and the creative force behind one of Vancouver’s most dynamic cocktail events. “This” isn’t just making great drinks, although it’s that, too. Mostly, though, it’s coming together to help those who need it most.
It’s one of the city’s most dazzling drinking events: The Science of Cocktails pairs some of Vancouver’s most accomplished mixologists with the wow-factor of physics, chemistry, and biology for an epic open bar night to remember.
Vancouver’s favourite high-speed bartending competition returns on January 26, and this time it’s both a launch party for Vancouver Cocktail Week and a fundraiser for Australian bushfire relief.