Beer & Drink

If you're like me, the whole right-wing effort to defund Planned Parenthood made you want to bang your head against your cubicle, or down a stiff cocktail. Well here's your chance to make good on that notion (the cocktail that is, not head banging). Longtime collaborators Chris Lohrey and Erica Reilly are teaming up with local mixologist and Source columnist Columbine Quillen on a themed party that doubles as a fundraiser for the local Planned Parenthood offices.
The party is a throwback of sorts for Reilly and Lohrey who threw several of these events dubbed “red parties” dating back as far as 2003 at the Domino Room. They threw several subsequent parties at their former restaurant and nightclub, The Grove, usually around Valentine's Day (hence the “red” theme, said Reilly.) The most recent iteration, which the organizers are calling Blush: The Red Party Continues, draws on two popular concepts that Lohrey, Reilly and Quillen have dabbled in recently – the pop-up restaurant and the cocktail-driven gathering. As fans of Lohrey's and Reilly's mobile kitchen, Spork, know, the pair have experimented with one-off dinners at Café Sintra, which happens to be the host for this Saturday night's Blush party. Recently, old friends Reilly and Quillen teamed up on a playful, pop-up nightclub at the matte bar in Tin Pan Alley, which the two transformed into a “password required” speakeasy for a night.

It's probably fair to say that no child has ever answered the what-do-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up question with, “Either a fireman, the president or a bartender.” And fair is fair, most children aren't acquainted with the bartender – nor should they be. Barmen are typically swarthy with acid tongues that can reel off obscenities to a beat. Bartenders are jaded, and our youth, with their chubby cheeks and open minds, are best served if they steer clear of such a population.
But more than a few of America's children will find themselves one day behind a bar, almost all of them without an ounce of any sort of official credentials. It really is one of the last professions learned entirely as an apprentice. Most bartending schools are a joke. They're a scheme to get desperate people to hand over their hard-earned cash just to memorize flashcard recipes of cocktails that no one's ordered in 20 years. Even so, most of their graduates can't tell you the difference between vodka and gin.

Four nights drinking in San Francisco, seventeen bartenders – only one of them with two x chromosomes. Perhaps part of it is that I went to a lot of hi-falutin cocktail lounges where they have unheard of spirits and bitters infused with bug parts. Almost every one of these bars had its version of the quintessential San Fran barman. Think Alferd Packer with cuff garters, tattoos, and skinny jeans – if Packard could have given up man-meat for some absinthe-infested concoction in glass beakers.

There will no doubt be a disagreement this week about what the better man drinks, Jameson or Bushmills. It's a timeless argument that merits some attention in honor of St. Patrick's Day. To wit, it is rare that a Jameson drinker will toss back a Bushmills and I have never seen a Bushmills connoisseur toast with a Jameson. Grey Goose drinkers will drink Ketel One, and Crown Royal drinkers will drink Pendleton, but the Irish whiskey drinker always stays true to his brand.