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Getting Ready for the Taster's Choice

November 29, 2010

Doing a little homework for this Wednesday’s Fillmore Street Holiday Cocktail Crawl, which is the Fillmore District’s (for you folks in San Francisco Bay Area) way to welcome the season and sample some tasty cocktails. Here's the plug for the event: It only costs 5 dollars and the “crawl” takes you to some of the hipper locales in the hood. Plus each pub will feature a special Tequila based cocktail that you get to sample. Plus all the registration money benefits the African American Art & Culture Complex. Yum and for a good cause. Sold? Want more details? You can find it here at Nirvino, which is one of the co-sponsors, or you or go to Brown Paper Tickets: Now back to my “homework”. Here’s what’s I signed up for: making, tasting and sampling all the featured drinks. At the event attendees will have the opportunity to text in their favorite- so one of these drinks will be crowned the Fillmore Favorite. Why not do a dry run and then compare their results to ours? Thanks to Nirvino I got all the recipes and held a little pre-tasting with some hip, swank and cool friends that I managed to scrounge up. Securing the location, time and date of the event was easy – my place a time of my choosing. 7pm on a Friday worked for both me and my friends. A somewhat harder and more time-consuming task was securing all the ingredients for the cocktails. Here’s a run down of the cocktails that I had to the goods on:
  • The Redevelopment
  • Fillmo’better
  • Jalisco Blossom
  • Joplin’s Juice
  • Zapata
  • These nifty Tequila drinks included some pretty exotic specifics: J. Witty Chamomile Liquor, Luxardo Marachino Liquor, Bitter Truth Lemon Bitters and St. Germain-an elderberry liquor-not to mention Tres Agaves Tequila. I was able to get all this plus the requisite cherries, pineapple juice and lemons in one or two stops. So far easy enough but not inexpensive. The tab for the liquor ran over 120 bucks not including the Tequila that I had in my stash. I had two more ingredients on my list: Kashmiri Chili Agave Nectar and 99 Proof Banana Liquor. Getting any chile-infused liquor was going to be impossible and I was definitely out of time to make it myself. Thankfully, Lenny who created a drink that necessitated this ingredient, offered my up some. Danke Lenny! Lifesaver. The banana liquor was a bugaboo. I went to no less than five places before finding it at a local chain store. Want to know which one? Click here. I don’t know why I didn’t start there. While they didn’t have 750 ML size. They did have a trial size. Note: Two minis were the perfect amount for the recipe and it saved me some bucks, too. So, if you’re thinking about doing something like this in the future. Good tip for all you out there who might be crafting up some specialty drinks this holiday season. My shopping was completed and I ended up with a table full of liquors, mixers, garni and tools. Take a look at the haul:
    Got the goods!
    In tomorrow’s blog I'll explain what happened when we started creating, mixing, tasting and discussing.

     


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