This year's festival for cocktail enthusiasts lasts one day longer, includes more tastings and dinners than last year and allows spirit lovers to trade off attendance with a friend with a transferable pass.
The second Tales of the Cocktail on Tour Vancouver, an offshoot of a New Orleans event that celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, touches down at the Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel Feb. 12 to 15.
Bartender Lauren Mote says she and other celebrated mixologists including the Shangri-La hotel's lead bartender Jay Jones and The Keefer Bar's Dani Tatarin had more say in the festival's mix this year.
Instead of an opening party at the Vancouver Aquarium, which felt too far out of downtown last year, this year's opening is at Reflections, the outdoor courtyard bar at the Rosewood Hotel Georgia.
Participants attending seminar topics that include "bitter not twisted" and "tequila evolved" will emerge to find the Pacific Rim Fairmont buzzing with tasting rooms and a specialty coffee bar.
Mote was busy this week as she prepared to speak about her line of extracts at Barbara Jo's Books to Cooks mobile bookstore at the festival Feb. 12, host a five-course, five-cocktail Belle Epoquethemed dinner Feb. 13, and organize the Bitter Bash, the closing night party Feb. 14 at Masik Studios, on West Second Avenue near Columbia Street, which will include dancers, snow cones and food trucks.
Mote, the former general manager of The Refinery on Granville Street, started Kale and Nori Culinary Arts last year with her fiancé and chef Jonathan Chovancek. They combine drinks, ethically sourced and seasonal food and education for private parties and the Bitter Sling Bistro cocktail competition and dinner they host twice a month at Legacy Liquor Store in the former Olympic Village.
Mote plans to take time from her busy schedule to attend Tales of the Cocktail seminars by Dave Arnold and Harold McGee, who share her passion for the science of food.
With the chance to learn from big names in the bartending world and to create cocktails for special dinners, the festival offers apprentice bartenders "an almost once in a lifetime opportunity" to create and connect with seasoned professionals without having to leave town, Mote says.
"It's no different than having a really important food festival or something else of that nature come to Vancouver that puts the culture for the hospitality industry on the map," Mote said. "It's kind of the same feeling as the Olympics, only downsized a little bit. It's feeling special enough that they chose Vancouver to do their festival outside of New Orleans, which is really important because it's the biggest and most important cocktail festival in North America."
Nearly 100 CPBA members, many of them apprentice bartenders, comprise the two-year-old association, which is preparing to open a Calgary chapter in the spring.
[email protected] Twitter: @Cheryl_Rossi
