Sunday, October 28, 2012

Event: Tapped Braddock

  Epic Developments Pittsburgh helped organize Tapped, a series of pop up beer gardens, this summer culminating in Tapped Braddock. These beer gardens featured local breweries, restaurants, food trucks and entertainment.  These included DrinksBurgh participants East End Brewing, Wigle Whiskey and some that I hope to get on DrinksBurgh, Full Pint Brewing and The Brew Gentlemen.
 Here are a selection of photos from Tapped Braddock. (Click on the photo for a larger view.)
Full Pint brought a nice selection of their fine brews.
The Brew Gentlemen lived up their name by looking quite dapper while sampling their brews. (Support their Kickstarter as well)
Kevin Sousa Took over Mayor John Fetterman's back yard for pig roast and Boyd and Blair cocktails. 
A local Reggae Band provided the sound track.


Local food trucks Franktuary and PGH Pierogi Truck rolled in with some goodies

Braddock lucked out with a beautiful fall day and the attendance showed it. 

Look for more Tapped Beer Gardens around Pittsburgh next summer.

Sunday, October 14, 2012

MxMo: Bein' Green


This month's Mixology Monday had a theme of Bein' Green and given the month I decided to break out a new recipe that I had created for the Cthulhu Tiki mug Kickstarter of which I am a backer. I wanted to create a green cocktail as part of my Lovecraft inspired tiki drinks.My starting point was the Fu Manchu listed in Beachbum Berry Remixed. I started off trying to make the creme de menthe play nice with the other tiki ingredients and while I did get them to mix ok, I don't particularly like mint. Sure it's fine as a garnish, but overall, I'm not a fan.

In the meantime due to the alcohol vagaries of Pennsylvania I couldn't find any curacao in the state stores other than blue curacao, (freakin' Quakers.) The result being that up until I finally ordered a bottle, all of my mai tais had blue curacao in them largely by default. Adding a blue curacao to the otherwise standard mai tai produces a rather sickly green color that isn't typically appealing. So while bashing my head and taste buds against creme de menthe I was also disappointed by having a sickly green mai tai. I think that you can see where this is going. I ditched the creme de menthe and started over with a more traditional style tiki drink that ended up being the sickly green I was looking for.






The Cocktail of Cthulhu
1.5 oz gold Puerto Rican Rum
1 oz silver Puerto Rican Rum
.5 oz blue curacao
1 oz coco lopez
1 oz orange juice
1 oz pineapple juice
3d 'Elemakule Tiki Bitters (sub Angostura)
6 oz ice
blend for 5 seconds
garnish with pineapple mint (I was out due to a cold snap at the time of photography)

Be sure to check out the behind the scenes of this shoot over on Drinktography.