I used points to attend last night's Mixology Class in the Diamond Club. Special thanks to bluestreak for helping me with the points I needed to get a second ticket!
This event was lead by some of the folks from One Eight Distilling. One Eight is located in Ivy City (New York Avenue/Bladensburg Road area). They make craft liquors and source as much as they can locally. Nice guys. Their stuff is for sale at the District Distillers carts in the ballpark. They're named after Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution which first introduces the concept of the seat of the government being in a District no larger than 10 miles square.
There are two bars in the Diamond Club and the attendees were split into two groups, rotating between upstairs and downstairs bar halfway through. Each bar had a station setup for each person, with all the ingredients and tools to make one fancy cocktail.
They also had a small station of light bites, like sliders (which were really yummy), mini hot dogs, mini sausages and little soft pretzels.
The first cocktail we made was a variation on a Moscow Mule. The distillery rep told us about the marketing history behind the drink (basically some bartender out west needed to sell more Russian vodka and ginger beer), the reason why your Dark and Stormy can be served in the fancy copper mugs but your Moscow Mule can't (apparently vodka has higher acidity and causes the copper to leech into the drink, unless you're drinking from a lined mug), and why some drinks are better when you shake them with ice, but shaking others ruins them (dilution from the ice as it melts). Their vodka is REALLY nice just straight, and has a much more complex flavor than you might expect in a vodka, so it made for a really nice pseudo-mule (the pineapple is a non-traditional garnish that works really well with One Eight's vodka).
The next drink was a 1920's cocktail called The Last Word. It was gin, maraschino liquer (which tasted more like sweet honey than the red sugar fake cherry water you think of when you hear the word "maraschino"), chartreuse, and lime juice, which sounds like a gross mess but was actually super tasty. Forgot to take a picture of it... blame gin... One Eight makes two gins and the one we tried was really nice (and I usually hate gin). The distillery rep explained how they make it with rye grains and only soak the juniper for a comparatively short time. The distillery rep also taught us the right way to use a bar shaker, including how to get it to make a seal so you don't spray cocktail all over the wall.
We got to hang out for a while asking the distillery guys questions and "practicing" our techniques by making more drinks. On the way out, we were given some nice Curly W rocks glasses to take home.
Overall, this was a fun event, although I have a few suggestions for ways to make it better; I did think the points value was too high (8000 per person, but I guess that's not horrible for a night of boozing and stuff to eat), and it should be easier to redeem for two admissions. I also think that a little take-home booklet with some recipes would be a nice touch. I also that finding some way to tie the drinks back to the Nats would make it a bit more fun (i.e. rename The Last Word cocktail to "The Doolittle" since he's usually getting the last word in the game). But these are just little details. I did meet the woman who comes up with a lot of these new "experience" type rewards and she asked me to pass along my feedback (I will) and suggestions for other stuff. She's working on a potential Nats Trivia Night next season, held at one of the local breweries, and some other stuff, so being able to talk to her was a lot of fun and a useful contact to have.
