Dolce Vita was a raging success tonight with a sell-out crowd showing up for the 20th anniversary event. As far as crowds go, the Tipsy Texans entertained a sizable line of party-goers in the Scotch & Cigar Lounge, which was a $20 upgrade to the regular ticket--a steal, in my opinion, because that means you get to drink high-proof hooch instead of just wine.

We originally planned to do the Debonair Cocktail but there appeared to be a shortage of scotch, so we switched gears after the first hour and focused our attention on the case of Paula's Texas Lemon that they'd given us to work with. Tipsy came up with a refreshing Port punch.

I didn't get a glamour shot of the Debonair but Jennie Chen managed to catch me drinking one

Paula's Porto Punch
2 oz Paula's Texas Lemon
3/4 oz Port
3/4 oz Fresh Squeezed Lime
Angostura bitters
Shake all in a cocktail shaker and strain into a bitters-rinsed glass

We were also fortunate to have a guest barista at our table, none other than Dan Streetman of Cuvee Coffee. He brought his La Marzocco espresso machine and did some great coffees. We debuted a new coffee cocktail that I have been working on, a brown butter-infused Macchiato with Strega and absinthe:

The Brown Witch

The Brown Witch
1/2 oz Brown Butter
4 oz Whole Milk
1 oz Espresso
1/2 oz Strega
Barspoon (scant) St. George absinthe
Pour spirits into a demitasse. Steam the brown butter and milk, pour artfully into demitasse. Serve.

Time is running out to submit recipes for the second annual Tipsy Texan Drink Local Cocktail Contest. The contest takes place Sunday, December 6, as part of Edible Austin Magazine's Eat Local Week. Last year's contest featured some of the best talent in the state, with Bobby Heugel (Anvil, Houston) taking the gold. Who will take the top prize this year? The contest is open to professionals and amateurs alike, as long as you follow the rules.

Contest Rules are adapted from the United States Bartenders Guild official contest rules, and follow the jump.

Today is the deadline, midnight Central Texas Time. Send in recipes for Drink Local Cocktail Contest or watch some douchebag with a crappy drink rake in all the prizes that could have been yours.

Get to shaking! Complete rules and directions are here.

The results are in for the first round of this year's Drink Local Cocktail Contest. The judges expressed great difficulty in selecting just five contestants and an alternate. Here are the finalists in no particular order:

Jeff Boley (Paggi House)
Bill Norris (FINO)
Lara Nixon (Boxcar Bar)
Benjamin Craven (Perla's)
Garret Mikell (Some place that hasn't opened yet. What's it called?)

Alternate:
Nate Wales (La Condesa)

The contest takes place this Sunday, Dec 6 from 6pm-9pm at Palm Door, 401 Sabine in Downtown Austin. The event is open to the public. A suggested donation benefits Urban Roots.

The Tipsies and some of our mixological colleagues will be hosting a Beignet Breakfast at Frank on Friday morning, 9-11am March 12. We will be sampling some new and classic Chartreuse cocktails. Event is open to the public but it is advised to get there early, as when the Chartreuse stops flowing, it's over.

This Chartreuse neon sign is the only one of its kind, and hangs on the wall of the Texas Chili Parlour. Although we will not have this neon sign at Frank on Friday, we will have plenty of Chartreusey treasures that they do not have at the Parlour: Chartreuse and Chocolate; Chartreuse Bloody Mary with Chartreuse-pickled veggies; and the Green Witch--Brown butter macchiato with Chartreuse. Mmm! Compliimentary cocktails and beignets from 9-11am, first come, first served.

NY Times food columnist Amanda Hesser has taken a tipsy time travel through that paper's considerable archives and excavated a whopping 40 pages of drink recipes for her new book, The Essential New York Times Cook Book. If this book is true to the form of the Craig Claiborn-era Times cookbooks, it will have a thousand+ recipes and be approximately the size of a major city's phone book (speaking of time travel). Even in that context, this is an impressive showing.

America has never quite settled the question of whether it’s a wine- or beer-drinking nation, so our liquid preferences have always been a free-for-all. Wine for the erudite. Cocktails for the adventuresome. Beer for the mainstream.

(...And all three if you're a Tipsy Texan.) So begins the chapter on Drinks, Cocktails, Punches and Glög. Hesser notes that the Times began publication a decade before Jerry Thomas's game-changing 1862 manual on cocktails, and has borne witness to the codification and mainstreaming of American mixed beverages.

Apropos of its nickname, "the newspaper of record", the Times has also witnessed other major milestones in American history, like, oh, the Civil War, for example. Which is why it pisses me off when intellectual lightweights attempt to slander the Times as "liberal media", irrespective of the fact that it pre-dates our contemporary understanding of such distinctions, and will hopefully outlive it. When I was a fledging journalism major at the University of Texas, I took the intro class from Dr. Stephen Reese, a legend in his own right. The A Section of the Times was required daily reading, and we had to subscribe to the print edition as part of the course. On the first day of class, a girl asks the professor, "If we live in Austin, TX, why do we have to read a paper from New York?" Dr Reese seemed a little surprised by the question (one would think an aspiring Journalism major would be able to differentiate between the Times and the Statesman, or worse, the East Bumblefcuk Reporter), but responded kindly, "The NY Times is one of the finest journalistic institutions in the world...". The paper still shows up on my doorstep each morning, along with the local rag.

Hesser will be in Austin for the Texas Book Festival, and will be doing a book signing event at Rainlily Farm on October 16, 7-9pm, where the Tipsy Texans will be proudly demonstrating cocktails from the venerable newspaper's past. (And, one may hope, sampling a cocktail or two). Tickets available at the link above. Thanks to Marla Camp of Edible Austin magazine for help with coordinating this event.

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