SUGAR & SPICE

A cursory glance at some of Lauren Mote’s favourite go-to spirits might mislead you to think Canada’s bartender of the year makes incredibly complicated cocktails. There’s cachaca, distilled sugarcane juice from Brazil, calvados, an apple brandy from Lower Normandy, rhum agricole, another cane juice spirit but made in the French Caribbean islands, and aquavit, a Scandinavian spiced favourite that features caraway and dill. But that would be selling her short.

“The trend is becoming less about the fluff of what’s in the glass and more about hospitality and the guest experience,” says the bar manager at Vancouver’s Uva Wine & Cocktail Bar and co-proprietor of Bittered Sling, which makes small-batch cocktail and culinary bitters. “The drinks are all really simple, but use different combinations of spirits, a combination of flaunting the back bar and customizing the experience.”

Mote has been a bartender for 15 years, eight of them in Vancouver, where she moved in 2007 after being born and raised in downtown Toronto. The allure of Vancouver, she says, was that it was a city being built by young people, many of whom are now well-travelled, wellto-do and expecting to find the same types of foods and drinks they have experienced in farflung locales. That can be tough to do in a province with an unforgiving liquor board. But that just means bartenders have to do more things for themselves. For example, the lack of bitters, a key ingredient in many cocktails, in Canada meant there was a void just begging to be filled — so Mote started making her own.

In spite of the fancy spirits Mote favours, she is not above getting into some whiskies as well, but, again, she tries to go a bit beyond the typical bar rail tipples to find single malts from different parts of Scotland and Irish whiskies that are above the norm. “There are a lot of different blended whiskies hitting the market that are cheaper than single malts, but have a more interesting palate so they fit really nice into the Famous Grouse and Johnny Walkers of the world.”

Lauren Mote likes to use less typical spirits in

her creations