Posted by Bryan, Fri Apr 02 10:59:00 UTC 2010
Want to win a prize for writing reviews and submitting happy hours? We have three great prizes to offer in the April contest for Portland! All you have to do to participate is submit reviews for your favorite happy hours, rate your favorite happy hours, and submit new places and happy hours. The more you do, the better your odds of winning.
We plan to do more contests in the future for Portland and other UrbanDrinks cities.
Posted by Bryan, Wed Nov 11 18:00:00 UTC 2009
If you're looking for full restaurant menus, look no further than Unimenu.com. The main service is an iPhone/iPod Touch app, but the site itself is useful as well and it's pretty easy to navigate on a mobile device. They currently have menus in menus in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia, and Washington DC.
Check it out!
Posted by Bryan, Tue Oct 13 19:27:00 UTC 2009
We have finished launching Twitter accounts for each city on UrbanDrinks.com--folow your city and get updates when we add or change happy hours. You'll see a Twitter icon at the top of each page in UrbanDrinks, but here are the links:
Posted by Bryan, Sat Sep 12 15:10:00 UTC 2009
It's been a long time since we wrote anything in this blog. Rest assured, we aren't slacking on UrbanDrinks. In fact, we have a lot of great new updates coming soon. I won't go into too much detail here, but we are working on a new site design that should make it easier to navigate and of course make it look better. Here are some of the things we've done in the last year:
Thanks to all our loyal users, this has been a great year for UrbanDrinks. We look forward to making the site better.
Posted by Bryan, Mon Sep 08 11:05:00 UTC 2008
UrbanDrinks is excited to announce our launch of Phoenix, Arizona happy hours! We actually launched sometime last month, but now Phoenix has over 300 happy hours listed, including many suburbs such as Scottsdale, Tempe, and Chandler, so now's the time to find your favorite happy hours and write some reviews!
As always, feel free to send us feedback on happy hours we need to add or update.
Posted by Bryan, Mon Aug 18 15:07:00 UTC 2008
If you're in the Portland area this week, make sure to check out the Great American Distiller's Festival. Here's this week's events:
Monday, Aug. 18: Kick-off celebration at the Rogue Distillery & Public House (1339 NW Flanders St., Portland, OR 97209): Meet the distillers, distillery tours, and spirits tastings.
Tuesday, Aug. 19: “Shot and a Beer” at the Horse Brass Pub (4534 SE Belmont, Portland, OR 97215): Taste beers and whiskeys from McMenamins, Rogue, and Flying Dog and learn of their evolution from brewing to distilling.
Wednesday, Aug. 20: Follow the “Cocktail Trail”: taste craft spirits at local bars with local distillers.
[ Dry Fly at Teardrop ] [ Sub Rosa at Wildwood ]
Thursday, Aug. 21: Infusion Demonstration and Distilling 101 at the Portland Farmers Market at Ecotrust at 6:00 PM; the Cocktail Trail continues: [ Prichards at Teardrop ] [ Dolman at R Palate ] [ Old New Orleans Rum at 50 Plates ] [ Rogue Spirits at Rogue Distillery & Public House ] [ Integrity Spirits at the Green Dragon ]
Saturday & Sunday, Aug. 23/24: 4th Annual Great American Distillers Festival at the Gerding Theater in Portland’s Pearl District (128 NW 11th, Portland, OR 97209).
Posted by Bryan, Sat Aug 02 22:33:00 UTC 2008
In case you missed today's (August 2, 2008) Red Bull Flugtag in Portland, Oregon, you can check out pictures of all 31 "flights", courtesy of esoule.
Here's a few samples:
Posted by mjandri, Thu Jul 10 22:01:00 UTC 2008
On Wednesday July 9th, UrbanDrinks.com added Washington D.C. and neighboring Arlington, Virginia to their list of happy hour cities. Currently the D.C. area has a listing of only 55 happy hours, but this number will surely increase in the near future. The question is whether any city can catch up to Portland who currently has a listing of 373 happy hours.
Posted by Bryan, Wed Jul 09 09:57:00 UTC 2008
Last night I had TearDrop's classic cocktail of the day, the Inca. It was great--perfectly balanced.
When I got home I decided to make one myself to see how it compared. It turned out pretty good, but not nearly as good as TearDrop's. The ingredients I used were all different: I used a low-end, but very good for $12 gin called New Amsterdam (which is a good choice in gin and tonics, by the way) instead of presumably Plymouth gin (but I'm not sure), Vermouth Di Torino Rosso for my sweet vermouth instead of whatever they used, and Ponti instead of Vya dry vermouth. I also used Fee Brothers orange bitters, but I'm not sure if they used that or house orange bitters. I'm assuming they used house bitters since pretty much all of their bitters are house. The sherry I used was also crappy. See a trend here?
Another notable difference is that they used real, house-made orgeat instead of my crappy Fee Brothers fake orgeat. The orgeat is a key ingredient in this cocktail and many others, so I should really try making my own one of these days.
My homemade drink had an overpowering sweet vermouth taste, so I might try it again with less of that, or with a different brand (I have some Martini & Rossi and some LeJon in the cupboard, so maybe I'll try those, even though neither is exactly high end).
So if you want to make a drink, make it right! But it's also fun to compare the results of your own concoction with those of the pros.
p.s., I can highly recommend using CocktailDB.com for drink recipes. They tend to use the most legitimate recipes. The Inca recipe is the same as the recipe from The Savoy Cocktail Book, which is about as legitimate as you're going to find.