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UrbanDrinks April Contest for Portland

2010-04-02T17:59:00Z

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.

Restaurant menus at Unimenu.com

2009-11-12T02:00:00Z

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!

Twitter accounts for each city

2009-10-14T02:27:00Z

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:

UrbanDrinks.com updates

2009-09-12T22:10:00Z

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:

Launched UrbanDrinks.com in Pittsburgh, PA.
Launched our Twitter account (@urbandrinks). Follow us and you'll occasionally hear about great new happy hour finds and other related happenings.
Launched an iPhone-friendly version of the site. See http://www.urbandrinks.com/iphone . It's not an iPhone App, but it has the iPhone look and feel. We'll be working on an iPhone app soon, as well as versions of the site for other mobile devices.
Added a list of top-rated places in each city. Check them out and if you don't agree, you can start rating..

Thanks to all our loyal users, this has been a great year for UrbanDrinks. We look forward to making the site better.

UrbanDrinks.com Adds Phoenix Happy Hours

2008-09-08T18:05:00Z

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.

Great American Distiller's Festival

2008-08-18T22:07:00Z

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).

Red Bull Flugtag 2008 - Portland Oregon

2008-08-03T05:33:00Z

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:

UrbanDrinks.com adds happy hours in Washington D.C.

2008-07-11T05:01:00Z

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.

An Experiment in Cocktail Ingredient Quality

2008-07-09T16:57:00Z

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.

UrbanDrinks.com in the News

2008-06-28T17:03:00Z

Oregon Business Magazine featured UrbanDrinks.com in its article on the “10 Coolest Tech Startups You’ve Never Heard Of”, It’s great that we are getting some recognition, but the article unfortunately under-represented how many visitors we have each month. According to their sources at Compete, we supposedly have only 1,000 to 3,000 visitors per month. In reality, we are doing at least four time better at about 12,000 visitors per month. Hopefully we can prove Compete wrong in the future. Thanks everyone!

Pearl Pub Pedal Highlights

2008-06-15T23:18:00Z

The first Pearl Pub Pedal took place on Saturday, June 14th with a small, but enthusiastic crowd of crawlers. The event started with lunch at the new Deschutes brewery. The tour then continued onto Bridgeport brewery by way of PDX Pedicabs. Luckily the weather was really nice and we could stay outside most of the time. And more girls than guys turned out for the event.

Pearl Pub Pedal on Saturday, June 14th

2008-06-13T22:07:00Z

Join us Saturday, June 14th for the 2008 Pearl Pub Pedal, where we will be visiting each of Portland's Pearl District breweries while enjoying special savings on some of the world's best beer!

The event will begin at 1:00 pm at the new Deschutes Brewery located the corner of NW 11th Ave. and Davis St. We will then continue to Bridgeport for $2.75 pints before concluding the tour at Rogue, where pints will be once again offered at reduced prices.

Please RSVP here: www.urbandrinks.com/pubpedal. You can use the build-in invite system to invite your friends as well.

If this pub crawl isn't for you, go ahead and make your own. Then you can create an event and invite your friends. The events can be either private or public.

So a guy walks into a bar..

2008-05-05T15:00:00Z

In this case, a guy from Atlanta walks into a Portland bar. The bartender asks, "can I get you something?"

"Yeah, can I get a draft?".

"Sure, we have 25 to choose from right over there."

"Oh.. um, how about something local?"

And of course half of those drafts are local...

We sure are lucky to live in a part of the country where making a decision on which beer to get can be difficult.

Pinball In Portland

2008-04-28T06:43:00Z

Whether you are a pro or an amateur pinball player, UrbanDrinks.com offers a comprehensive listing of Portland bars and restaurants where you can find and play pinball. Gone are the days where you walk endlessly from bridge to bridge in search of a late night pinball fix. Simply enter the keyword "pinball" into our search engine and we make the magic happen.

Here is a current listing of where you can find pinball in Portland:

Berbati's; Billy Ray's; Black Cat; Blue Monk; Bonfire Lounge; Chin Yen; Clinton Street Pub; Florida Room; Goodfoot Pub; Gravy; Green Dragon; Hollywood Billiards; Jimmy's Sports Bar; Low Brow; Marathon Taverna; Red Room; Side Door; Slingshot Lounge; and Tennessee Red's

If you know of any locations that we are missing, let us know.

~Cheers!

Christiania Vodka Review

2008-01-17T22:59:53Z

The Urban Drinks crew recently convened to sample a new Norwegian vodka by the name of Christiania. While most of us at Urban Drinks are strongly opinionated about our gin, we nonetheless attempted the impossible. That is, we attempted to distinguish among a selection of four different vodkas in a blind taste test. Monopolowa by Baczewski. Yet, Christiania was obviously more refined and less syrupy than the Monopolowa. It is however unlikely that Christiania would continue to convey its character or similarly dominate these other vodkas if it were mixed in a cocktail, as most people tend to prefer these days. In fact, the Christiania brand claims to have created the first sipping vodka, which is probably the best way to appreciate this spirit. At least some of our tasters agree that Christiania is best served in its natural state, without any mixers getting in the way. While I too enjoyed the subtleties that Christiania had to offer, I'm likely sticking with gin. At least one distiller is finally returning to the proper ingredients for making vodka.