Weekend Recap: Holiday Fun At Haxtons And Cocktail Wars Finale!

Wednesday before Thanksgiving is not only one of the biggest bar nights of the year, it's one of the biggest shopping days for markets and...

Weekend Recap: Holiday Fun At Haxtons And Cocktail Wars Finale!

Wednesday before Thanksgiving is not only one of the biggest bar nights of the year, it's one of the biggest shopping days for markets and package stores. So Clammie and Tall Boy headed down to Haxtons on route 2 in Warwick to greet customers at the door. Wishing everyone a happy Thanksgiving and making sure they remembered 'Gansett for the weekend. One customer said his son was coming home and requested anything, but Narragansett beer. So he bought a 12 pack of Gansett lager bottles for himself and some porter for his son. Sneaky, but smart man. Both Clammie and Tall Boy are very efficient folks when it comes to getting a job done. What the hell. While they were there they decided to do some holiday shopping too. Clammie proceeded to load up a cart with the essentials. Gansett lager 12 pack bottles (enough to share) and some new porter 16oz cans. Tall Boy grabbed a case of light tall boys. It seemed to be fitting. After that you know they had a great Thanksgiving weekend.

Narragansett beer was the proud sponsor of the 2010 Cocktail Wars which took place all year long at the Woodward Tavern in Ames Hotel in Boston. What a year it's been and several concoctions later the finals took place last week. Congratulations to John Lermayer who won the competition. Here are some photos and a recap from the DrinkBoston.com article.

*Photo by Mark Andrew Deley of Crammed Media.

A Splendid War

As my friend Senator John aptly tweeted during the grand finale of the year-long Cocktail Wars at Woodward Tavern in the Ames Hotel, "If you dropped a bomb on the Ames Hotel, we’d be drinking light beer and screwdrivers for months."

Arguably Boston’s three best bartenders ’ Jackson Cannon of Eastern Standard and John Gertsen and Misty Kalkofen of Drink ’ competed against each other and Miami’s finest, John Lermayer, in a showdown that capped a series of drink-mixing battles between Boston bartenders (and sometimes their colleagues from other cities). And there to cheer the competitors on was seemingly every other bartender of note who wasn’t on the stick that night. Thankfully, no bombs were dropped. Except for this one: the guy from Miami won.

That’s right, John Lermayer, who tends bar at the Florida Room and consults for hotel bars around the world, bested his Beantown colleagues fair and square. I should know, because I was one of the judges. His winning cocktail, the Misty Morning Sour (see below), hit all the criteria admirably: quality, creativity, presentation and use of surprise ingredients ’ persimmon and Barenjager honey liqueur. Misty Kalkofen took second place for her mezcal-based Per Simon. In the quality department, all the cocktails got high marks on my ledger ’ particularly considering they were each created in an astonishing 20 minutes.

Here are some pics from the bash, plus the recipes that each of the four competitors came up with. What a pleasure it was to literally drink in their talents. Click here for the complete collection of photos and recipes.

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