bringing drinks to life

This will be a brief blog for 2 reasons...

Firstly, the really interesting updates will be made over the next 5 days from New Orleans so honestly there is not much I can write now that will top that. The whole B&T team will be attending Tales of the Cocktail so hopefully we will end up with a stack of stories, ideas, thoughts, pictures and tasting notes to throw at you over the coming months!

Secondly, I still need to pack!

I thought though that you might (or might not) be interested in hearing what we are going to be doing while we are in the States. At least you will know wether or not you want to bother checking out our blog over the next two weeks! Between the three of us we are booked in to attend 54 seminars, 15 tastings, 4 VIP parties, and awards dinner and 2 cocktail comps... well that's the plan, but actually we are just going to go with the flow and see what happens.

Some of the seminars that we are most looking forward to are: 'The fine art of banging out drinks like a maniac' 'mixologists and their toys' 'history of saloons in America' 'American whiskey legends' ' cocktails that made gin famous' 'a brief history of alcohol' 'the old fashioned'... you get the idea!

Anyway what we are looking forward to most of all is the experience. Our industry is full of great characters who are generous with their time, opinions and knowledge, drop 20,000 of them into a city with as much social, historical and especially cocktail heritage, give them a playground of restaurants, hotels and bars, add a good measure of spirits and see what happens next! We can't wait to see the results!

Then we are off to visit a few of the distilleries up north. On this trip we will be visiting most of the large scale distilleries (Jack Daniel's, Woodford Reserve, Heaven Hill, Four Roses, Wild Turkey, Makers Mark, Jim Beam, Ridgemont, Buffalo Trace...) and we are hoping to do a similar trip next year but to the smaller distilleries. We have been reasonably lucky with our timing and are hopefully going to get to go along to a barrel selection and taste some bourbon straight from the cask. A few of the distilleries have also been kind enough to let us have some time with their master distillers which should mean we will all walk away experts on the subject of American whiskey! If you have any questions you have always wanted answered please drop me a line at dan@bittersandtwisted.com and I will do my best to get you an answer.

Anyway, I really do still need to pack so I had better leave off here... we will be updating the blog regularly and posting loads of pictures from New Orleans as well as our 11 state road trip!