Sauced

Traveling Tales of the Cocktail to Return to Vancouver

Save the date, drinkers.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Sep 15, 2011 at 03:53PM 0 Comments

Here’s a photo of a block of ice I took at Tales Vancouver 2011.

Last year, I attended the first ever Tales of the Cocktail mini-conference in Vancouver, a condensed version of the full-on booze blowout that happens every July in New Orleans.

Both events are entirely too much fun, but the Vancouver one is slightly more manageable as it is 1) closer, and 2) shorter. (Still, go to New Orleans in July. I plan to be there, and I want to see you).

In 2012, Tales returns to Vancouver February 12–14. As in 2011, conference HQ is at the Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel and there will be six seminars, a bunch of tasting rooms, and opening and closing receptions.

Tickets for the public will go on sale in November but if you’re a member of the media or a bartender who is interested in apprenticing, hit up the Tales website to register now.

And to get a sense of what this whole thing is about, you might consider checking out my coverage from last year.

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Tags: Tales of the Cocktail, Tales Vancouver

One More Vancouver Post: Quick Travel Tips

Four things to keep in mind for your next trip North.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Mar 18, 2011 at 12:22PM 2 Comments

Yew, in the Four Seasons Vancouver, has half-price wine bottles every Sunday.

Photo Courtesy: The Four Seasons

This will be my last post about Vancouver, I promise, at least for the foreseeable future. But in case you’re planning a jaunt north, I thought I’d share a few of my findings before I forget them.

1. The Diamond in Gastown. I didn’t find the Diamond, I followed the Tales cocktail crowd there. And I’m so pleased I did. In discussions about Vancouver cocktail destinations, you hear about L’Abbatoir, Pourhouse, The Keefer, and West. But not the Diamond. In any case I’d never heard of it. But I loved the tiled walls and the old-world feel and the easygoing staff and the really good drinks. You’re not in the states, so might as well ask the ’tender to make you something with Havana Club.

2. These are the sort of bargains I always wish I knew about when traveling: At the high-ceilinged Yew lounge in the Four Seasons, bottles of wine are 50 percent off on Sundays. (I was loving the food friendly BC sauvignon blancs I tried when I was in town). And If you’re in Vancouver for business, the cushy chairs by the glass fireplaces work great for booze-enhanced meetings.

3. The Templeton Diner. This is a tiny diner on Granville Street sandwiched between a bodega and a sex shop. There are individual jukeboxes at each booth, those one-serving boxes of Frosted Flakes and Rice Krispees that you may recall from childhood, and bowls full of little jam packets with foil lids. I hope I’m not making it sound kitschy because it’s not. It’s perfect. Breakfast is served every day until 3pm—I was all set for typical diner fare and was surprised with organic turkey sausage and pillowy, seed-flecked slices of multigrain toast.

4. Amtrak will subtly sell you a bus ticket for your return trip when you think you’re buying one for the train. Look closely when you book. If your ticket costs $40 instead of $45, you may be going Greyhound. The man at the ticket counter in Vancouver said that no one mentions this to travelers in Seattle “because they’re afraid they’ll lose customers.” No kidding, that’s what he said.

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Tags: Wine Specials, Diners, Tales Vancouver, Vancouver, Travel Tips

Lessons from Tales Vancouver: the Vancouver Cocktail

A tasty drink named for the city where it was (probably) invented.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Mar 17, 2011 at 11:26AM 0 Comments

The Sylvia Hotel

Photo courtesy: Wikipedia

Cocktails are about drinking, of course, but they’re also about stories. Magazine writers know that. Marketers know that. And bartenders, well, they really know that. You sell a drink by spinning a yarn.

But we love these stories, don’t we? Even if they are often more like legends than historical accounts. They provide us with chatting fodder at parties, introductory paragraphs, and something fun and tasty to think about when the post-work traffic grinds to a halt.

Two stories associated with the gin-based Vancouver cocktail that may or may not be true:

1. It was invented at the Sylvia Hotel in Vancouver—the city’s first cocktail bar, according to the Calgary Herald.

2. It was the last drink actor Errol Flynn drank before moving on to that great cocktail lounge in the sky. (Indeed, Errol Flynn did die in Vancouver following a week-long booze binge).

I heard a third story at Tales of the Cocktail during a seminar on gin led by master gin distiller Desmond Payne and his colleague Dan Warner. Warner asked a Vancouver bartender—I failed to get his name, bad reporter—to tell us his story about an encounter with his hometown’s eponymous cocktail.

It seems that recently, this bartender and a few of his local bartending friends got to chatting about the Vancouver cocktail, and ended up hopping a cab to the Sylvia to see if they could still order some. When faced with their request for “a round of Vancouvers,” the bartender on duty confessed he didn’t really remember how to make one. So the crew coached him through it, and the upshot of that morning (yeah, it was morning) is that the Vancouver cocktail is now back on the menu at the Sylvia. Legend restored.

So now you can get one there next time you are in Vancouver. Or you can make one yourself using the recipe below (adapted from the Calgary Herald. Use Jamie Boudreau’s instead, credited to the Stan Jones Complete Bar Guide, if you like. Boudreau is Canadian, after all).

Or you can go to a good cocktail bar here in Seattle and see if you can’t get one of our local drink mixers to make you one.

The Vancouver Cocktail
2oz gin
0.5oz sweet vermouth
splash of Benedictine
generous dash of orange bitters

Combine the above ingredients in a mixing glass filled with ice and stir until chilled. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with an orange or lemon twist.

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Tags: Cocktail Recipes, Tales of the Cocktail, Tales Vancouver

Lessons From Tales of the Cocktail Vancouver: Ice

Cold took center stage at the BC cocktail conference.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Mar 16, 2011 at 12:00AM 0 Comments

Jon Santer’s block of ice.

Ice—a subject I’ve written about before —was something of a theme at Tales Vancouver this year. At least half of Dave Arnold’s seminar was devoted to the subject.

The should-be-obvious-but-often-isn’t takeaway from that lesson: Don’t ever let anyone tell you that a certain shape/type of ice is colder than another, all bar ice is 0 degrees Celsius. An ice cube that melts slower is chilling less. I could try to summarize all the fascinating stuff Arnold explained about dilution in cocktails, but he does it himself so well: Read all about that here.

Later in the day, Charlotte Voisey (unfairly pretty and has an English accent) and Jon Santer led a second ice seminar. Voisey gave an engaging lecture detailing the history of commercial ice, and then Santer destroyed a big-ass block of it with a chainsaw.

But wait, you may be thinking, who cares?

Good question, and one I think that Santer addressed well when he recalled how he came to care about ice. He told us that back when he was a bartender in San Francisco, he and his colleagues wrung their hands over the fact that the drinks tasted better at craft cocktail bars in New York than they did on this coast. Why would that be, Santer remembered thinking, when the west coast has better spirits and much better produce than back east? He went on a reconnaissance trip to NYC’s top spots and there he discovered the answer. It came down to the care and attention they were putting in to their ice programs.

If you want good bar ice, it generally has to come to you by way of:

1. A Kold-Draft machine, an expensive device with an inverted evaporator system that produces cubes under pressure, locking out air and impurities.

2. A big-old block of commercial ice—purified, air removed, and agitated during the freezing process—delivered to a bar/restaurant and then broken down by way of a bartender with a chainsaw. (The ’tenders at Rob Roy and Mistralkitchen do that.)

Now that we’ve established the importance of good ice, the question is: How can you make the best possible ice at home, assuming you don’t have the space/time/funds to invest in a $200 block of it and break it down yourself? Firstly, if you’re going to serve cocktails, you want the freshest ice possible. Freeze it that day, if possible, in clean trays. Use filtered water. Boil it first. If you can freeze in a freezer that’s only used for ice, all the better. Santer suggested investing in a silicone tray. And if you want to freeze a big block and then chip the ice yourself into spheres or whatever, you might invest in a hotel pan. But that’s a whole other ball of…ice.

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Tags: Cocktails, Tales of the Cocktail, Tales from Tales, Tales Vancouver, Ice, DIY Cocktails

Lessons From Tales of The Cocktail Vancouver: Rapid Infusions

Dave Arnold’s whipped cream-charger technique creates infused spirits in mere minutes.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Mar 15, 2011 at 09:53AM 1 Comments

Don Lee demos Dave Arnold’s rapid-infusion technique.

Infusing spirits isn’t rocket science, but it does tend to require some time, right? Most recipes for home infusions direct you to leave your strawberry-flavored tequila or your basil-mint rum sitting around for at least a week.

Well.

Yesterday at Tales Vancouver, the first class I attended was called the Science of Cocktails, led by Dave Arnold with Don Lee. Dave Arnold is the director of culinary technology for the French Culinary Institute in New York. He’s got the whole mad scientist act down; he was hilarious and brilliant yesterday, leaping around the stage (at one point even falling off of it), talking a mile a minute about the rate of ice dilution and the advantages of prestirred cocktails and juices squeezed a la minute versus in a machine.

Arnold does a lot of amazing experiments in his lab, but most of them are off-limits to those of us who can’t afford a centrifuge or a rotary evaporator. However, towards the end of the class, Arnold and Lee showed us how to create near-instant infusions with an iSi whipped cream charger, which—if you’re a naughty kid—you probably remember as the “whippet thingy.” A lot of us food people have one at home, at the ready should we feel the urge to make amaretto-laced whipped cream.

But wouldn’t you so much rather use it to make chocolate nib-infused vodka? Or some such?

Here’s how Arnold—who first published his findings on his blog last August—explains the science:

“When you charge your whipper with nitrous oxide, high pressure forces liquid and nitrous oxide into the pores of your flavorful food (your seeds or herbs or what-have-you.) When you suddenly release the pressure inside the whipper, the nitrous forms bubbles and escapes from the food quickly, bringing flavor and liquid out with it.”

We tasted Arnold and Lee’s iSi-infused coffee vodka yesterday. They presented it in a cocktail with salt, simple syrup, and lemon peel. I got no bitter coffee flavor at all; Arnold says it is likely that bitter flavors takes longer to extract. For this reason he says cocoa nibs are a great ingredient for rapid infusions too. You get all the chocolate flavors and none of the bitter.

If you’re going to try this at home (I am going to try this at home), be sure to read through Arnold’s post for ratios and important step-by-step instructions, both crucial to infusing successfully.

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Tags: Tales of the Cocktail, Tales from Tales, Tales Vancouver, Science of Cocktails

Tales of The Cocktail Vancouver: The Details

Tales Vancouver costs $155. Let’s talk about what that buys you.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Dec 21, 2010 at 03:35PM 1 Comments

Free drinks abound at Tales of the Cocktail

Photo: NOLA.com

Back in November we learned that Tales of the Cocktail, the (until now) annual New Orleans booze convention, was headed to Vancouver. Canadian Tales takes place March 13 through 15 at Vancouver’s Fairmont Pacific Rim and costs $155. Tickets go on sale January 15 on the website.

I spoke to Tales founder Ann Tuennerman this afternoon, she says she expects about 400 people to attend the first conference in Vancouver, reminding me that Tales New Orleans started out with 200 people crammed into the Carousel Bar in that city. In New Orleans last July, 18,750 people attended the conference.

Like the original Tales, Vancouver’s conference is designed with and for professional bartenders, though cocktail enthusiasts, as Tuennerman calls we lay people, are welcome. (Not always by the professional bartenders, but that’s another story.)

Tuennerman also said that there will be more Tales in more cities down the road, but she wasn’t ready to announce places and dates.

The $155 ticket to Tales Vancouver buys: an invitation to a welcome reception hosted by the Canadian Professional Bartenders Association—the organization worked with Tuennerman and staff to organize the conference—and another by Gibson’s (understand: every event at Tales is sponsored by someone); three 90-minute seminars (more on those later); an invite to the closing reception; an invite to the BC bar crawl; a couple of lunches; some schwag (recipe book, tote bag, etc); and a free membership to the Canadian Professional Bartenders Association, should you desire one.

Parties that are drowning in free booze aside, the most valuable thing in this package are the three seminars. If you’re a booze nerd you will love every minute of them.

Seminar topics include:
Famous New Orleans Cocktails (Chris McMillan and Philip Greene), Who’s Your Daddy? A Mai Tai Paternity Test (Jeff Berry), The History of Importance of Ice in Cocktails (Dave Arnold and Eben Klemm), and The Science of Cocktails: New Techniques Behind the Bar (Dave Arnold and Eben Klemm).

So who’s going?

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Tags: Tales of the Cocktail, Tales Vancouver