Annual Vancouver Cocktail Week elevates the city's libation culture
You can't keep a good cocktail down. And despite COVID-19, government health warnings and inflation, Vancouver hasn't lost its taste for bespoke libations.
Case in point: Vancouver Cocktail Week (VCW). The celebration of booze, bitters and bartenders is back for its third year in a row.
This year, interested imbibers have a choice of 35 events, including food-and-drink pairings, seminars, neighbourhood crawls, elevated happy hours, distillery tours and drag shows. Many of the city's top mixologists will be participating, along with some out-of-town guests.
“We have award-winning bartenders here, and the ingredients they use are often local and organic,” said Gail Nugent, publisher of The Alchemist magazine, presenter of VCW. “A lot of work, time, energy, creativity go into them. And so we're celebrating that culture, our community here, and how strong it is.”
A sampling of events includes Old Bourbon, Modern Cuisine: Four-Course Dinner and Cocktail Pairings with Old Forester at Glowbal; a Main Street Cocktail Crawl; and a Spirited Cocktail Dinner at Suyo Modern Peruvian on Main Street, with cocktail pairings from Max Curzon-Price, the 2023 Michelin Exceptional Cocktails winner and bar manager of the year. Out-of-town mixologists like Diego Cabrera from Madrid's Salmon Guru, No. 16 on a list of the world's best bars, will demonstrate their skills at Laowai and Pourhouse.
“Going to some of the world's top bars is a special experience,” Tarquin Melnyk said.
Melnyk, who works with local cocktail ingredients supplier Efcon Imports and mixes drinks at Copperpenny Distillery in North Vancouver, will be pouring drinks and delivering a seminar at the VCW with Pacific Rim head bartender Robyn Gray.
“Obviously, going to a pop-up in Vancouver means you don't have to hop on a plane. Spending a hundred bucks for a guest experience gets you in the wheelhouse of what they have to offer.”
The week also includes two signature events, the Sunday Cocktail Brunch at Botanist at the Fairmont Pacific Rim (March 3) and the closing Green Garden Gala in the ballroom of the Sutton Place Hotel (March 9). The latter features more than 35 premium brands as well as food, live music and a DJ, with partial proceeds going to the B.C. Hospitality Foundation.
There are bitters with the sweet vermouth, however. COVID “decimated our entire industry,” noted Gray, who will be a VCW guest for the third year running.
In addition, carefully crafted and even adventurous cocktails in this town aren't as uncommon as they were, say, in 2009, when Gastown's The Diamond — which closed last summer — opened.
“Vancouver's cocktail scene was very progressive relative to the rest of Canada,” said Gray. “I think a lot of people from Seattle were looking to us as well as people from Toronto. Now chain restaurants are serving Old Fashioneds and Negronis, and cocktails are first and foremost on their menu.”
Vancouver Cocktail Week offers sippers and mixologists a chance to relive, if not reclaim, those halcyon days, when the search for the perfect cocktail was an end in itself. It's also a learning opportunity. Seminars include Chinese Spirits with Hope & Sesame (from Guangzhou), Laphroaig Master Class, and Gray and Melnyk's The History of Tonic.
“Tonic water played a huge part in the history and the development of our world,” said Gray.
Quinine, from tree bark, was and is used to combat malaria, one of the deadliest diseases known to man.
“Quinine wasn't synthesized from tree bark until the 1940s, which saved soldiers' lives. Whoever controlled quinine was able to win wars.”
He and Melnyk will expand on this theme in spirit form at the closing Garden Gala.
“We're going to be making a deconstructed gin and tonic,” Gray said, “with a tonic air, a type of tonic foam on top. And then we're going to have a very herbaceous gin with a lemon herbal syrup similar to chartreuse.”