Tales of the Cocktail 2 - So far, sooooo good

It's day two of Tales of the Cocktail and I'm still going strong. Currently I'm skipping the "spirited dinners" drinks-and-food pairing dinners happening all over town because as a vegetarian they don't make these things for me. ("Can you pair this vermouth with a salad?") So I had my own beer and pizza pairing at a microbrewery chain. It was good until they brought the "pizza," which was like a salty Boboli bread with sweet pasta sauce and uncooked tomatoes on top. Yeah, not so great.

So far I've attended seminars on:

• Cocktail history ("I didn't bring any ice tools because they're really sharp and really hard to get on airplanes" - David Wondrich),
  
• The history of the Napoleon House cocktail bar ("It's like a New Orleans day spa" - David Wondrich)
• Ice ("An honest ice cube became impossible to find."- Sasha Petraske, speaking about ice machines up until a few years ago)
• Rum (so much good information it's hard to put it down)
• Forgotten and lost cocktail ingredients (Much like the Imbibe article by Paul Clarke of the same name)
• Pisco (my favorite seminar so far- great info and great swag too.)

Pisco is the new gin. I'm just going to call it out. (Take note of the date.)

And I've hung out with Paul Clarke, Tony Abou-Ganim, Jamie Boudreau, the Liquid Muse, Stephen Beaumont, Robert Hess, Ted Haigh, Beachbum Berry, and more other people than I can name. And tomorrow at the Cocktails and the Blogosphere event it should be an even more ridiculous clusterf**k. I'm in heaven.

Labels: events, tales_of_the_cocktail