Take the fizzy new cocktail subculture. Mix with gobs of booze-company marketing money. Add hordes of earnest hipsters, 17,000 limes and 23,000 pounds of ice. Pour it all into the lovely old punch bowl that is New Orleans.
That’s the recipe for the heady concoction called Tales of the Cocktail, the increasingly-popular convention that just ended in the Crescent City.
They call it Sundance for bartenders, but even people who have never held a muddler are flocking to revel in five days of tastings, seminars and endless parties in the nation’s most seductive city.
“I don’t think I’ve had this many drinks for free in my life,” said Cameron Getto, a Michigan lawyer sipping an 18-year-old Japanese single malt on a balcony overlooking Bourbon Street, normally home to foot-long plastic beakers of grain alcohol.
At the ninth annual gathering last weekend, the Big Apple dominated the Big Easy, with New York sweeping six of the top 10 awards at the final night’s ceremony.
Winners included World’s Best Cocktail Bar (Employees Only on Hudson St.), Best Restaurant Bar (Eleven Madison Park) and World’s Best Drinks Selection (Employees Only, again.)
Two New Yorkers tied for American Bartender of the Year: Kenta Goto of Pegu Club in SoHo, and Sam Ross of Milk & Honey on the lower East Side.
“Personality wins. Great drinks are only part of it,” said Ross, an Australian who says his real ambition is to one day throw out the first pitch at a Mets game.
“I think it says a lot about New York as a hub that the two bartenders recognized are from strange, foreign countries — Japan and Australia — but we’re New York through and through.”
New Orleans is always a big party, but the convention, held at the stately 125-year-old Hotel Monteleone, ups the ante.
Porn superstar Ron Jeremy was wandering around hawking his new Ron de Jeremy rum (insert your own joke about long finishes). A truck drove around dispensing boozy sorbets made with mango, chili and Leblon cachaca. People actually went to a seminar about making perfect ice.
The “world’s largest Negroni” — 30 gallons of Campari, gin and vermouth — was mixed in an ice vat by Italian bartenders wearing handlebar mustaches, an homage to the concoction’s creator, Count Camillo Negroni.
The Long Island Ice Tea, the too-sweet, too-complicated libation long hated by bartenders, was declared dead and given a rousing jazz funeral procession through the French Quarter.
More than 20,000 people attended — a reflection of the explosive new popularity of fancy drinks served in elegant faux speakeasies. Thirteen new products made their debut, including cupcake-flavored vodka, a basil vodka and a black rum.
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