Photos from Cocktail Week and Our Issue 2 Release Party…

For one miraculous week in May, the town of San Francisco takes a break from their usual of celebrating the end of the day with brilliant, seasonal cocktails, to celebrate the entire week with brilliant seasonal cocktails.  But it’s not just locals: alcohol lovers from around the globe travel to the birth place of pisco punch to spend a week, tasting, teaching, talking and sometimes tottering from bar to bar, to find out what this city has to offer up for cutting edge cocktails.

The week includes a plethora of events, from product tastings, to bartending competitions, gala’s and after parties and with this week overlapping with the 200th anniversary of the cocktail, there was much to celebrate.

Thursday was education night.  A handful of the most exciting mixologists of San Francisco hosted bartending classes from their own bars.  I was invited to learn about batching cocktails from H. Ehrmann at his neighborhood saloon, Elixir.  Twenty other classmates and I squeezed into a space adjacent to the main bar.  The annex is transitioning from itself into a wine bar, and with its industrial lighting and black walls, we had the pleasure of pouring drinks in a black box theatre – a mix between performing and consuming.

We made 3 drinks, a Tommy’s style triplesec-less Margarita, squeezed with fresh limes and balanced with organic agave nectar; a Barbary Flip, the official drink of SF cocktail week, shaken with a freshly cracked egg white and topped with a bitters soaked strawberry, and the famous SF Pisco Punch.  H. kept things light and casual and the night was filled with hands on experiences of squeezing our own limes and cracking our own eggs, while also peppered with all sorts of history, tips and tricks that every bartender should know.  We learned what can be batched ahead of time, and what should be added right before you drink.  Hold on to your citrus and egg last.

We learned what some of those fun little tools that bartenders carry around in their bag when they travel are, and the nuances between shaken and stirred. The channel knife is for zesting and the difference is all about letting air in and diluting the drink more.

The night ended with the group mingling around the punch bowl, each equipped with our own vintage punch cups freshly picked from a local thrift store.  Thus ended one night of the celebrations.