Muddle, Shake, and Stir: North Point Distillery Cocktail Events

Heather Ricker
Oct 31
3 min read

Unlike beer and wine, spirits, for the most part, aren’t exactly “ready to drink” for the average person. It’s an obstacle that sits front and centre in conversations with our customers on a daily basis as they ask, “How do I drink your spirits?”

For whisky, the answer can be as simple as adding a bit of water or ice, or serving neat at room temperature, but when you get into other spirits, like our rums and gin, the answer can get a little more complicated.

As an example, for our Crosskirk Bay Gin, we always suggest serving it with tonic water, but with a couple caveats:

If you want to taste the flavours present in the gin, an Indian or Mediterranean tonic is best – let the tonic dilute the gin and amplify the flavours.
If you want to enhance the citrus flavours of the gin, choose a citrus tonic, such as Artisan Drinks Company’s Pink Citrus Tonic.

Unfortunately, not everyone is a fan of tonic water. That’s when we move into cocktails, with suggestions like the little-bit-bougie-but-still-easy French 75 (gin, lemon juice, simple syrup, and prosecco/champagne), or for our not-so-amateur gin drinkers, we suggest the tried-and-true Negroni (1:1:1 gin, sweet vermouth, and campari).

But these suggestions could go on and on and on… It became very clear to us that talking about how to drink our spirits was all well and good, but what we really needed to do was show our customers how to drink our spirits.

Enter our Cocktail Events:

We pair up guests across cocktail stations in our Tasting Room. Each station has a cocktail-making kit, glassware, and all necessary ingredients for the cocktails chosen for the event. Throughout the event, everyone is guided through each step to make and enjoy three cocktails: one featuring North Point Pilot Rum, one featuring Crosskirk Bay Gin, and one featuring North Point Spiced Rum.

A simple enough plan, but educating our customers about ways to drink our spirits came with an added obstacle: how do we keep the drinks approachable and easy to make at home? Suddenly, we aren’t just saying, “this is how to make a daiquiri” but also “this is how to make your own sugar syrup” and suggesting household alternatives to cocktail shakers and jiggers.

Cocktails can have a bit of a reputation for being inaccessible to most people. Whether it’s lack of equipment, experience, or ingredients, making cocktails at home can seem impossible and better left to the bartenders and mixologists. What we wanted to do with our Cocktail Events was to make cocktails simple, easy, and accessible.

We decided to keep to cocktails with ingredients easily found at the local shops and with only 1-2 alcoholic ingredients – we’ve found that it’s not very common for most of our customers to have things like green chartreuse, campari, vermouth, and various liqueurs sitting on the shelf at the ready, so the cocktails we choose for these events ensure that if anything needs to be purchased, it’s minimal and readily available.

A fan favourite recipe from our Cocktail Events is our Spiced Rum Espresso Martini – a cocktail that requires only North Point Spiced Rum, simple syrup, cold coffee/espresso, and a coffee liqueur, such as Kahlúa. These ingredients are set up at each station, along with the required equipment: jiggers, shaker, strainer, and glasses. Our team’s Host for the event goes through each ingredient, explaining what it is, where you can get it, and if you can make it yourself (for instance, simple syrup is just hot water and sugar in a 1:1 or 1:2 ratio cooled to room temperature, and very easy to make at home) and then through each piece of equipment, making suggestions as needed for household substitutions.

Because our aim is to make making cocktails easy, accessible, and fun, these events are truly suited for anyone and everyone – whether experienced in cocktail making or not. It’s a class first and foremost, but it’s also a great way to spend time with friends and family, or as a night out with colleagues. Most commonly, the groups that book these events are for birthday parties and holiday staff parties, but we’ve also had hen dos, clubs, and themed nights. It’s a great way for us to share our spirits with the local community while showcasing each spirit’s versatility. We’ve even been known to make a gin drinker love rum and vice versa.