Tasting at LA Times The Taste

Food festivals are a ton of fun to visit – especially if there happen to be drinks to go along with the snacks. LA Times’ The Taste is one of our favorite foodie events in Los Angeles. It’s a weekend-long event at Paramount Studios, filled with restaurateurs, chefs, brand reps and bartenders promoting their places of work and giving out samples of some of the most delicious food you can imagine. And the samples aren’t small, so the evening is a lot more like a tasting menu with drink pairings than the sample area at Costco. In short, it’s awesome.

We were lucky enough to attend last year and came back for more this year, representing on a hot weekend in our Hawaiian shorts! For the food report, head on over to Baking Bites. We’re here for the drinks at Modern Tiki. If you follow us on Instagram, you were already treated lots of live stories while we were there. In hindsight, we could have been more organized about our presentations, but we think you got an idea of how awesome the reps we spoke to where.

Here is a mini roundup of some of our favorite moments from the event. We’ll raise a glass (of rum) to hopefully going back next year to cover it again!

There was a lot of whiskey – which is not a bad thing at all! It paired extremely well with some of the meatier options, like BBQ from Maple Block.

We loved these crazy to-go cups full of punch from Grand Marnier. They look like they’d be perfect for a to-go tiki drink!

We love Bitter Truth. Not much to say here because we’ve worked with these guys before, but it was great to talk to them and sample the lineup.

Spicy liqueurs and spirits are super hot – literally – right now. This is one of those applications where vodka works really well, because when you want to bring in some heat, you can use it in conjunction with more flavorful spirits – like rum – without making a drink muddled.

Once you start mixing other elements with Jaeger, you’d be surprised at how much flavor comes out of it! We know it’s usually a “club drink” but it made us think that it might be more versatile than we realize. Also, we were big fans of the Mixwell mixers.

We’re throwing this last photo in because we missed the mixology demos this time around (went to watch Ludo Lefebre instead!). Last year, our friend Tricia Carr did a great demo on using local/seasonal ingredients in your cocktails. There are staples in tiki, but it always helps to get a fresh, seasonal element in the drinks to make them pop!!

We’ll raise a glass to coming back next time around and bringing you more coverage from the event!