Regional American Cocktail Trends

Posted on April 18, 2008
Filed Under Camper English |

This is the debut post from Camper English, a freelance spirits and cocktails writer in San Francisco. He chronicles his explorations of fine drinking at Alcademics.

Last year’s Tales of the Cocktail really got me thinking about regional cocktail trends. While much of the national reporting on cocktails concerns what’s happening in New York, not all trends flow from there. Cocktails coming out of NY tend to be poured from bottles in exact measurements, whereas those from San Francisco, where I live, tend to come from whatever is fresh at the farmer’s market that week. Last summer, this style of mixology began attracting more notice in the media.

I wasn’t the only one thinking about the different styles of cocktails popular in different parts of the country. New York area-based Jeffery Lidenmuth thought it would make a good topic for this year’s Tales as well, so we’re co-leading a panel on the subject.

Beyond NY and SF, we’re seeing an exciting cocktail culture booming in Boston, watching LA rapidly catch up to other large cities with the opening of cocktail-centric venues, seeing Chicago and DC’s cocktail culture move beyond the news-making molecular mixology at innovative venues and into more common bars and restaurants, watching Las Vegas’ competition-focussed mixology become popular throughout the country, and and finding surprising bastions of great cocktailing in smaller cities as influential bartenders lead the way.

Our panel will look at what’s happening in mixology in different parts of the country, what influences those trends, and what are some of the future hot spots for cocktails. That’s a lot of ground to cover! The hard part will be fitting it all in, so we will drink plenty of coffee first and talk very fast.

I hope you can attend our talk on Regional American Cocktail Trends on Saturday, July 19th, from 10:30 - noon. It’s gonna be great.

Tickets for this session may be purchased here.