On Friday night we hosted some very special guests, Kendall and John Antonelli of Antonelli's Cheese Shop. This meeting has been trying to happen for several months. Quite some time ago I suggested to the Antonellis that we host a cocktail/cheese pairing event, but we could never figure out exactly how to pull it off. I actually wasn't even convinced that a cocktail/cheese pairing was a very good idea, but John and Kendall were hip to it. We batted around some ideas, and managed to synch our busy schedules for just one night, and so it happened that this weekend we made cocktails and they brought cheese, and cocktails and cheese happened.

As Joe and I cranked out the cocktails, Kendall and John started to make the rough pairings. Then we sat down and tasted them as a group. Some very obviously belonged together--before I even tasted it with the Fig Daiquiri, the Cabot Clothbound Cheddar had a distinctive rustic figiness. The "brown, bitter, and stirred" Prefect Cocktail was paired with the Caveman Blue from Rogue Creamery, because they are both big and bold in their own respective ways.

We started with ten drinks and ten cheeses, with the idea of narrowing it down to half of that, since nobody needs ten cocktails or ten cheeses (at least not at the same time). However, since we can't really help ourselves, we nudged it up to seven cocktails--two will be short portions and served simultaneously as two interpretations of the same drink, the other will be an "amuse" before we get started--and seven cheeses.

No date has been set yet for this event. Please email tex at this URL if you want more info, since the comment feature on this web site stopped working long ago :(

Thanks to my fabulous Tipsy Tech interns for the photos