This week's guest is Gail Nugent who joins us from Vancouver, British Columbia. Gail is the publisher of The Alchemist, a magazine dedicated to distiller, spirits and cocktail culture. Gail is also the publisher of Vettis, a wine culture magazine. Furthermore, The Alchemist presents the annual Vancouver Cocktail Week as well as the upcoming inaugural Toronto Cocktail Festival.
Gail talks about her career in publishing and how The Alchemist got started, and how the publication has developed over the years. We discussed the launch of Vancouver Cocktail Week and the upcoming Toronto Cocktail Festival, emphasizing the events focus on celebrating local food and drink culture, while supporting the bar and restaurant industry through various activities and events. Make sure you check out the Toronto Cocktail Festival which runs from October 22 through the 26th, and you can find more details regarding all the events and seminars online on Instagram, at The AlchemistMag and on the web, at The AlchemistMagazine.ca slash T-C-F, or check the show notes for all the links. We want to thank Gail Nugent for taking time out of her schedule to join us for an interview and enjoy the show.
Okay, we're back with another episode of The Industry Podcast. I am Kip, and this is Dan. Hey, that's me, how's it going? Great man, how are you doing?
Still awesome. Yep, yep, pretty good. Awesome, all the time. Yeah, it's good.
Well, you know, we haven't had a rant about the LCBO in a while, so are you ready for one of those? Sure, one of those. One should be good. Okay, so your friendly neighborhood liquor rep here has been working with a brand out of Scotland called South Terri Ramalt.
We're trying to bring this awesome product into Canada, into Ontario specifically. And needless to say, getting a little pushback from the LCBO, but this is an amazing product. It's basically, they deal with very small independent distilleries or defunct distilleries, so they might have like one or two cats left to sell, so maybe a couple hundred bottles left to drink this delicious single malt. So we're trying to get in the LCBO.
Well, apparently we missed the deadline to submit in August, which is okay, fair enough. Like I just started working with them, so we didn't, we just finalized the deal. Well, now I can't submit until spring. Oh, Jesus Christ, it's August.
Oh, wow. So can't get this liquor on the shelf by Christmas because I missed a arbitrary deadline in late summer. All right, everyone employees have the finest. Yep, it's fantastic.
So anyway, stay tuned for that. We will get it on the shelves and the LCBO. So Terri Ramalt, look forward to that. In the meantime, you can hit me up for amazing spirits from Laura Distillery.
Let's try some right now. It's the Royal Amber Whiskey. Cheers to you, Dan. Cheers.
We would cheers our guests, but she's on Zoom. So that's the Royal Amber Whiskey. Delicious, no? Tastes very good.
Okay, great. So that's a Laura Distillery. You can hit me up for Whiskey from there or Wine from Malibu or Winery in Beamsell, Ontario. Kipsoners-at-Gmail.com to, if you're a bar restaurant or, you know, just looking for some whiskey or wine or any other spirits for your home, Kipsoners-at-Gmail.com.
If you're in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, come visit my bar at Sugar Run. At Sugar Run Bar on Instagram to figure out everything that's going on down there. And if you like what we're doing here on the show, then you should definitely follow, subscribe, review, you know, leave a comment and tell a friend. Yeah.
And it's the easiest thing to do. Just tell one other person only takes about one or two minutes and just spread the word of the show. It always helps us out a lot and it's a great thing to do. If you'd like to be a guest on the show or provide support for the show, it's info at the industrypodcast.club or you can DM us at the industry podcast on Instagram where the amazing art work from the great Zacana at Zacana.co resides Zacana for all of your graphic arts needs.
And we just want to give another show very quickly to our good friend, Brenda the Podresems, and her amazing project, Flavor Report. You can probably just Google Flavor Report to find out everything that's going on there. But it's basically the first issue is out, it's called Flavors Connection. And it's about 90 pages of Sharp Spirits writing trends and flavor and nerderies.
So check that out. We love Reese, we love this project, it's really quite an accomplishment, so check it out if you can. And you know, the other thing you should be checking out all the time if you're in the service industry or not is of course our good friends at ambibile. Tell us all about ambibile.
All right. Well, today's episode is in partnership with ambibile. The visual cocktail app built by bartenders for bartenders. Every classic recipe in ambibile has cross-referenced against 75 plus cocktail books with detailed notes on variations and origins.
But unlike dusty bar manuals, you can search by flavor, share recipes via QR codes that work without app downloads and scale proportions instantly. It's the knowledge of a cocktail historian in the phone you already carry. Here are the details in episode 216 of the industry podcast. See why it was featured by Bon Appetit, then hit number one on the App Store when it launched.
The free download gets you 500 plus recipes and all core features with subscription options for individuals and businesses to unlock advanced tools and connect entire teams. Once again, that's ambibile. Check our show notes for all the links as always, but everything we talk about. You've heard us mention ambilia every week for several weeks now and there's a reason for it.
It's an invaluable tool whether you're a professional bartender or just trying to make some cocktails at your home and you were trying to up your cocktail game, maybe you're hosting a party, maybe you just want to drink better at home instead of just. Drink it more. Swilling stoli out of the freezer. It's not so bad.
Yeah, not saying don't do that too. But you know, maybe you want to make a cocktail that you, a classic cocktail from like the 20s or 30s, they're all on ambibile. There's a cocktail that exists on that app. And it's definitely true.
John Marcus, something else. He's awesome. Yeah, shout out to John Marcus, to ambibile. And the other thing that you've heard me promoting recently on the show, if you are a loyal listener, which I hope you are, is of course the Toronto Cocktail Festival.
And the reason I'm not doing a specific ad for that today is because we are lucky enough to have the founder of the Vancouver and Toronto Cocktail Festival with us. It's Gail Nugent. How are you? Hi, nice to be on the show with you.
Yeah, thanks for doing this. Nice to talk with you. We appreciate it. We're super excited because I was lucky enough to attend your launch event in Toronto a few weeks ago and it was amazing.
Lots of world-class bartenders there. It was super cool. And I got to meet you there. So right away, we got to make this happen on the show so you can tell our listeners all the work.
This show is basically your target audience. So it's perfect timing. So let's start by telling us a little bit about yourself. How did you get involved in Cocktail Culture Spirits and the service industry in general?
Yeah, well, my career in publishing shifted about 10 years ago when I launched a bunch of small targeted unique little publications. I started with the Growler when Crap Beer was taking off about 12 years ago. And then after that, got into publishing the Alchemist magazine, which is Spirits Distilling and Cocktail Culture. And after that, then Vittis the Wine magazine.
So all the booze all the time. But today with the Alchemist, the Vancouver Cocktail Week and Toronto Cocktail Festival has spun from that. And so the Alchemist presents those festivals. We're going into our fifth year in Vancouver about our first year in Toronto and we're super excited to launch there.
So you say your publishing has shifted towards these sort of niche magazines that are in the Spirits and Distilling World Brewing, obviously as well. What prompted that? Like, did you feel like there was a vacant space in the area that needed to be filled? Or your interests personally shifted?
Or maybe the combination of the two? Yeah, definitely a combination of the two. When we launched the Growler, our province has only had about 50 breweries, and now we're up over 200. And so that was just when, what is this Crap Beer all about?
And then quickly we dove into Cocktail Culture right after that and launched the Alchemist in 2015. And boy, we've come a long way. We're elevating the timeless ritual of enjoying a Cocktail. That's for sure these days.
Yeah. Talk to us a little bit about the Alchemist. Like, what the magazine represents, what you're trying to get across to your readers and sort of the journey from like, well, I guess it's been going for 10 years now. So you're processing and starting it and then how it's developed over the years.
Yeah, I think it's developed into starting out as a very local, let's help our local distilleries get going. And now, you know, many of them are set and doing very well and making a very good product. And, you know, we have so many Whiskeys now in Canada. It's amazing.
And then it sort of just kept growing. And it's, you know, we started NBC. We expanded to Ontario. But now really we're Canada-wide.
We're international with our coverage even. The world became a bit smaller in that sense. And we really wanted to do it. Yeah, supporting local, but also supporting our passionate and talented bartenders, you know, who are really working hard to change how we think and drink for the better.
We cover, you know, drink trends, educational columns, news, recipes for your home bar. And so it's just an area that people have really been become interested in. So this show tends to get a little insight-based, but with this whole, with everyone that we talked to. But so I'm very interested in like the sort of the process behind starting a magazine such as this and developing it.
So when you decide, okay, this is a whole that needs to be filled in originally, I guess, in the Vancouver area and then you expand to Toronto. When you start out, was it a free magazine at first? And then you tried to, how did you envision monetizing it, I guess, from the beginning? Like, was it was an advertiser-based model?
And then how do you go about finding the advertising? Yeah, it's definitely advertiser-based. It's a free publication. And so we distributed it to the bars.
We distributed it to the distilleries, to barwear stores, gourmet grocers, barwear, homewear stores as well. All the events that we can get to, we bring it, it's there, we sponsor a lot of events, and also subscribe to. So we have a large subscription base. Really broad, actually, since doing these cocktail festivals, we draw people coming from around the world.
So we have people attending from Japan and China and UK and Mexico, and you name it. And so it's quite a neat, like I said before, it makes the world seem a lot smaller when you're in this industry sometimes. Yeah, well, I mean, that's certainly something we find out by starting to do the show. We started interviewing people we just knew.
And now it's grown all over the world. But it's the power of technology in this situation, right? Like, I mean, I learned those where we would have been without Zoom with the show, right? So, you got to ask in the early days for distribution, how did that work out?
Was it a lot of just like personally driving around and dropping off copies of magazines? Or do you work with like a third party firm like the studios? I've always wondered about that. Yeah, yeah, we did.
When we first started, we personally drove them around. Our small team, we just had it out. It was a good way just to be in front of everybody to build it. But then after that, we did always have a distributor and he had the best for many years distributing newspapers before these magazines.
And so he has been with us and still is. And so he drives them around and delivers them cross-province. Oh, wow. And how many employees does the magazine currently have?
It's a lot of freelance based in the sense that people are living everywhere. So we have writers out of Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver, you name it. And so I would say we probably have a dozen people moving on it. Yeah.
And that's just writing or you're holding. Writing is probably eight. Yeah, okay. And then we've got our web manager, social manager, accounting.
Do you have like a dedicated sales team? Yeah, we've got our sales. Yeah. So I'm just super interested in that.
It seems like a massive undertaking to launch something like that. But you obviously had published an experience before, which clearly helped in that endeavor. Yeah, I published an urban weekly called the West Ender in Vancouver for many years. So those urban weekly entertainment papers were quite fun back in the day.
So that's kind of like a what's going on in downtown Vancouver, where to go to drink or eat or see music. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. That's a pretty tight deadline to keep it updated all the time back then. Yes. Oh, yes.
That was pretty fun though. Okay. So now I mentioned, so the magazine grows and then at some point, did you start doing the Vancouver festival or Vancouver cocktail week? I guess it's called right.
Did you start doing that before you launched the magazine in Toronto or did the magazine launch happen and then the cocktail week? Yeah. So we launched Vancouver cocktail week just out of COVID. And so it was a perfect timing actually to get people back in the bars and it worked brilliantly.
It really did. And then we launched the magazine in Toronto a couple of years ago now. And now we're just launching our first annual Toronto cocktail festival this October. So magazine first and then festival.
So we're working with a lot of the same national and international brands and a lot of local wanting to support the local distilleries in Ontario and the bars, of course. So you mentioned before we started recording that you had sort of worked at a Toronto kind of at the same time that you've been based in Vancouver for many years now. Is that why you felt like it was an easy sort of transition to also launch these projects in Toronto? Yeah, absolutely.
I've always worked in and out of Toronto over my whole career. So, you know, originally from Halifax, actually, that's where I grew up. Yeah, it's a great city to play in. I mean, you know, the culture there, the culinary cocktail creativity is over the top with all the award-winning bartenders.
And now we're pairing cocktails with food and it's just come a long way. So, you know, those are my loves food and drink. Yeah. And so we're going to back to it.
But just while we're on that topic, do you have ideas or plans to launch in other Canadian cities as well? Well, we're looking into Calgary actually. You know, there's a little group of us brainstorming on that. And so we'd follow the same model and it's not announced yet.
We're not breaking any news yet. So, but just to know, it seems like there, I mean, Toronto and Vancouver are obvious, right? But then the other cities that you would think about in Canada would be Calgary, Montreal to do sort of the same thing. But Montreal might be tougher because they kind of have, they tend to be a little more insulated in doing their own thing.
But who knows? Maybe that's just what I have to break into at some point. Yeah. Okay.
So, okay. So I do want to talk about the launching of the festival. So you said, Vancouver, talk to a week. You start coming out of COVID as a way to get people back into the bars, which I think is an amazing idea, probably so great for the city at that time.
Like, what, talk to us a little bit about how you started the planning of that event and what goes into launching such a huge event. Like, I mean, you have to, there must be so many things to coordinate in a situation like that. Yeah, there is actually it quickly grew. We were planning on the first one being a four day and it quickly went into five and now it's eight.
The second year already it's a Sunday to Sunday. It's helpful to have, you know, programming on a Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Wednesday, when it's a little slower for the bar activations. And we do have on the weekends, we have our gala of cocktails, which is our main event. These events are for industry and consumer.
And so the gala is the main event in Toronto as well. It's on Friday, October 24th. And then we close with every year, both cities with a brunch and it's a cocktail paired branch. It's a five course.
And so that's tons of fun. And the neighborhood crawls are a lot of fun as well. We do three bars in a row. We have three neighborhoods selected in Toronto.
And so that's those are sort of our signature events. We call them our highlights that are actually up on the website currently. And then the bar activations will follow in September. We launched those and those are, you know, the tasting events and parties and master classes.
So that'll all be going up early September. And so planning all of this does take months of work. It it because of, you know, the excitement of the bars and their passion and then the brands supporting it does come together nicely that everybody in the industry works together to make it happen. And so then having, you know, the outcome is drive the consumer that's already really interested in cocktail culture understands what goes into the making, how much work goes into making one of these cocktails that we're seeing today in bars and enjoys quality as geeky wants to learn about it and taste and, you know, expand their, their palate and that kind of thing.
So it comes together. It comes together really nicely. We market it really well to get the word out. Thank you to you guys.
Of course, is that something you found that like the sort of bar and restaurant industry in Canada really comes together to support things like this and makes it easier for you? Yes, it's really, really a great feeling. Everybody supports each other. You know, you could say there's competition, but I don't know, even when they're competing for at an event for an award, I mean, they're helping each other out.
It's really incredible. Yeah, I would always felt that way myself, just like in bar ownership or whatever that like the sort of rising tide lifts all ships method of this is like what makes our industry go. But I've really discovered it as well since we started doing the show of all these people we've met all over the world and how interconnected everybody is through like cocktail competitions or whatever and how sure everybody who enters like a say a cocktail competition tends to be a competitive person and wants to win more so they find that the whole experience is just meeting these new people and then kind of everybody trying to lift each other up at the same time. Yeah, it's actually a really nice camaraderie that way.
And there's quite a few competitions that happen and it does bring a city together or a country together, absolutely. And they work really hard to win these. Yeah, it's not easy. You know, you're kind of, you know, stressed watching it happen for them because just so much steady had to go into it and so much practice.
So yeah, it's incredible to see. So when you're putting together an event, like say, let's go back to Vancouver or cocktail week when you first started doing that, talk to us a little bit about the logistics of setting the whole event up. How do you select bars that are going to be involved? How do you decide on the events on the classes, everything?
Just give us as much details again. Yeah, I guess, you know, you just know, or I knew instinctively, personally, I guess, and then through the magazine, you know, which bars had a cocktail program in place back then when we started was called mixology. It was like this new term. It's not used as much now, but you know, they needed to have that mixology concept to be part of it.
And they had to have a bar manager in place and someone that was being creative and coming up with the bar menu. I mean, back then places didn't even necessarily always have a bar menu. So, you know, in this case, they needed to have that bar menu. And so at the time it was, it was taking off and, you know, almost every restaurant even needed to have that cocktail menu.
And so the timing was right to start it. They needed to market that they were, you know, that they had these menus and that they're pairing with food and that was something new to think about for the consumer. And then the brands, you know, of course came into play because they're supportive of these restaurants and bars that are buying their product. And so they would support these festivals that promote that promote to getting people into the bars to try it.
And it just goes hand in hand, really. And then the concepts of these master classes and tasting events and parties, you know, it's a combination of brainstorming between myself and the brand and the bars really, like it's a group effort to come up with these concepts. And so you're reaching out to obviously like some of the larger brands who love to get involved in situations like this. Do you reach out to like an agency or a brand specifically?
How does that work? Yeah, a little bit of both. Sometimes it's brand direct and sometimes it's through our distributors. And so each province has, you know, their own distributors as well.
So it's a mix. It's, you know, a lot of people involved in putting on the festival. I can't even imagine. So like, this is what I get super interested in is when I love talking to people like you doing events like this.
Like, there's got to be a point where it seems like you're starting this out and it seems like, well, this is a good idea. Let's get people back in bars. And next thing you know, you're up to your ass and like dealing with several different personalities and bars and brands and trying to set up classes, trying to figure out what would be an entertaining quote unquote event during your cocktail week or festival. Like, talk to us a little bit about, I guess, just about that process and how and if you found it overwhelming.
I think you can get overwhelmed when you're coming up on some deadlines to meet the marketing promotions that we have in place. A little bit of herding cats here and there. Especially in this industry. Not everybody's sitting around on their email waiting for him to answer me.
But, you know, it's, I guess, yeah, you need spreadsheets. I mean, Google Docs are my best friends. I guess I'm just really organized and try to keep everybody on track. I think they're thankful when I remind them, you know, up to three times on deadlines.
But, you know, so, but it comes together and everybody's happy in the end because it worked and it was successful. So it's just, yeah, it's, I guess I have a passion for it just as they do behind the bar. Well, and clearly you're a very organized person so that must help. And like, you just, in some fashion, your brain has to work a certain way to be able to pull something like that off, right?
So, you know, you're the one to do it. But talk to us about how Vancouver cocktail week developed over time. Like, obviously, it probably started as one, this idea. Let's get people back in bars and to where it was 10 years later or whatever.
Talk to us about some of the changes that developed along the way. You know, a lot of change hasn't happened, especially, you know, there's never a shortage of editorial stories. It's just, it's such an interesting industry in that sense. I think we became more international in our stories.
I mean, behind every bar are international brands and these characters travel and they do bar pop ups and they visit from other countries. And so it makes it really exciting. And with the festival, we haven't had to change the programming. Really, you know, we've added the neighborhood cocktail crows since the beginning, but we've always had the gala of cocktails.
We've always had the closing brunch. We've always had the master classes and cocktail pair dinners and tasting events and in Toronto, there's going to be a couple of parties because I've learned that Toronto parties a little harder than Vancouver. Is that right? I honestly don't know.
I spent time in both cities, but I'm usually hanging out in bars. Everybody parties. But is there any way for you to judge the metrics on how many people are attending something like the Vancouver cocktail week or Toronto cocktail festival? Like, how would you know, for instance, how many people are coming to set event?
Like, are you ticketing or? Yeah. Yeah. So we ticket almost everything.
The only things that aren't ticketed really are just the pop ups that happen in between the ticket events. And so, you know, the master classes and tasting events, the gala, the brunch, they're all ticketed. So I can tell through, we use Eventbrite actually, I can tell through my reports where people are coming from, where they live. And that's how I knew how many people were coming from, you know, across Canada and around the world.
It was so interesting to get those reports way more than I even knew. Of course, the bulk are from, you know, the local. It'll be from the GTA, for example, but then there's going to be people from everywhere. And so, yeah, those reports through ticketing and, you know, the numbers of seats at each of the events.
So we kind of figured we'd probably have like 15,000 people through the festival. It's amazing. Yeah. Why don't I accomplish my congratulations?
That's like, it's amazing. And like, what a celebration of the, you know, the Canadian version of the service industry. Like, that's unbelievable. So you must be good about that.
Canada. Yeah. So I wanted to, we'll get talking specifically about Toronto Cocte Festival in just a second, but I do want to backtrack just for a second and talk about alchemist. Over time, have you, I guess the way I'm trying to ask this is, well, I'll just ask you directly, how much can we talk about the service industry in a magazine?
Cocktails and bars and distilleries. Do you find that you're running out of sort of content or is it endless? No, it's really endless. Honestly, like, there's always something like at the beginning of the night, we start out with bar bites and it's sort of like newsy tidbits of what's happening and event listings and that kind of thing.
And, you know, awards, who's won awards around Canada, but there's gadgets. The recipes are super popular. I mean, during the pandemic, people were making cocktails at home. It became a thing.
So the recipes are super popular. And then, you know, we have a column called at the bar. So we have writers that will go set at a different bar for each issue and talk to the bar manager and do a little interview. And it's these characters that are so interesting to read about.
And we always have like a distillery, local distillery listing, you know, gift guides and things like that. Order from your local distiller. There's always something about a distillery in each issue. There's something about, you know, not just the brands, but the people behind them, the faces behind them.
We do travel stories. So, you know, we'll go to Banff. We'll go, you name it, Hong Kong around the world, even with our writers traveling reporting back Mexico City's been a hotspot lately. We have a home bar column where we have someone that's educating you on how to make certain things at home that will go in your cocktail, how to make your own cherries to go into your cocktails, for example, how to make clarified cocktails, how to smoke your cocktails from home, things like that.
That's been really popular. And then our last call at the back of the book is a bar somewhere in the world. And so local or not, it's, we sort of highlight an interesting bar and what they're up to. That's amazing.
More about a process question here too. So when you're talking about like you have a small group of freelancer writers who work with you at the magazine. So when you have a freelance writer who writes for Alchemists, you're, I guess you get paid by the word or whatever, however that works. If they go to Hong Kong or whatever, how does that work monetarily for the person who's traveling to write for your magazine?
Do you pay for the travel for them? Or is that something they take care of themselves? It was like a trip and then they're also going to write an article for you. Well, sometimes they're traveling on their own.
So sometimes they're on their own vacation. But of course, like all of us, when we're on our vacations, we're going to look for, depending on what we like to drink, we're going to look for those bars or we're going to look for those wineries or breweries. I mean, that's just part of your lifestyle. So it's a bit of like, Hey, I'm going here.
Would you be interested in an article about it? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
And then sometimes on the bigger trips. So they're invited. So they're invited from the country. They're invited from the tourism board.
They're being sent there. So the tourism boards want them to go because they want Canada Canadian magazine to report on it to get people to go and visit. So a lot of that happens as well. That makes sense.
I just think our listeners would be curious on how that whole process works. But it's, it's, and that's cool for you because then basically you're getting pitched all the time by your freelance writers on like this might be a cool article for the magazine. This might be cool article for magazine. Now, you're obviously the editor of the magazine.
Do you have a board or are you making all decisions yourself? I do have a small team that we brainstorm on each issue and then we're online all year round. So it's sort of an ongoing thing. Like you said, we are pitched all the time.
So we sort of, you know, lots of times it's like hands down. Yeah, that's a great idea or we might flesh it out a little bit more. Not very often do we say, no, that's not a good idea because these writers we work with are professionals. They're, they're, you know, trained in distilling, for example, they've studied it.
So, you know, they've been writers for years. So they're, they're proven and read and followed already. And what about photography? Do they tend to do, do you rather tend to do the photography themselves?
Sometimes. And then luckily, you know, some of these brands, most of these brands have brilliant photography because they shoot them for these uses for media and marketing. They have brand shots. So lots of times, you know, that's super helpful.
But yeah, we have for roaming photographers as well. Like if you're going to a specific, if you're highlighting a bar or a cocktail is made at a bar, then that's not going to be done by a brand probably. But yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. The social manager or, you know, what are our festivals we hire? We have photographers shooting at them.
Amazing. I'm sorry. I just nerd out about stuff. I thought I'd find the process super interesting.
But what I really want to talk about now is specifically Toronto cocktail festival. So the date of October 22nd to 26th, maybe you could start by just telling our listeners sort of what is your goal, sort of your mission statement of what you're hoping to accomplish with Toronto cocktail festival and then we can talk about specifically what's going on in these days. Yeah. I think it's like the toast to the art of the cocktail.
It's like again, celebrating, you know, the vibrant culture of food and drink in Toronto. It's all its creativity and the award-winning bartenders that are there. And it's, you know, getting people out enjoying life, you know, eating and drinking is that ritual that will, you know, pass down from the centuries that we want to keep that going and the social aspect and person going. And, you know, these local businesses need support.
They do. And so, you know, if you're going out and you're getting the quality that we're getting from these places and you're enjoying, I mean, you know, you're, it's, it's worth it, you know, to be reminded to get out. And experience it. So it really is in support of these local businesses.
Amazing. Yeah. And like to be honest with you, I love that this whole idea came post COVID and the truth is we talk about all the time on the show. Especially small independent bars and restaurants.
We're not all the way back from what happened during COVID yet. There's a lot of people still paying off debt. The general public's eating and drinking habits have changed. People don't go out as much as they used to.
Things have gotten more expensive for everybody. That's part of it. But also the lockdown's taught you that you could stay at home, watch Netflix, drink a bottle of wine, get Uber Eats and it's cheaper than going out. So, and people got kind of used to it.
So we're not as much as like everyone's back open. It's years removed. We're not all the way back yet. So I think something like you're doing in Vancouver and in Toronto is super important and helpful to the small independent little cocktail bars that are still trying to make a living, you know.
So kudos for that. Let me just start by saying that. And then let's talk about exactly what's going on. So the festival runs October 22nd to 26th.
If people want to attend it, what do they expect? So right now we have marketed up on our site the signature events, which are the neighborhood crawls, which start on the 22nd on Wednesday, the 22nd. There's another one on the 23rd and then the 24th on the Friday evening is the gala of cocktails, which is the main event and it's held in the event space upstairs at Water Works. And so we're expecting to have a couple dozen bars up there.
Each brand hosts their own bar. We have food. We have entertainment. It's elevated in the sense that it's a tasting event.
It's for people that want to taste and learn, test their palette, discover new spirits. We have some local bartenders manning those bar stations with those brands. There's some celebrity characters there. We have our world class, D'Azure Bar Tenders, working their bars stations.
And so you'll see some media flashing photos as you go through the industries invited that's involved with the week as my guest and then the consumers to come and enjoy. We have a DJ dancing usually happens the last hour. Year one, I didn't plan on that, but it happened ever since. But it's a nice crowd.
The Alchemist does draw. The readership is someone that is geeky in that sense that likes quality wants to talk to a brand ambassador about their spirit and taste new and different things. And then we head into tons of bar activations each day as well, which is including master classes and seminars, usually late afternoons into the early evening. There's some tasting events in the bars where they will pair a spirit with some food bites and perhaps it's three cocktails with three bites or there's going to be a cocktail pair dinner.
So a nice sit down dinner. There's a menu that's put together paired with cocktails. And then there's a couple of evening parties, some pop-ups, bar takeovers later on in the evenings. And then our closing brunch, which is at Rain and the Fairmont Royal York.
And so that's a five course brunch from 1230 to three. And it's going to be an amazing menu that we'll be posting up first of September. So a lot of these activations will go up first of September as far as the bars are concerned and menus and things like that. So stay tuned for that first week of September second on is when a lot of the events will be posted.
So for the bar crawl specifically, how does that work? You just lay out a certain, and obviously we're not going to announce that yet because you haven't announced it. But there's a certain number of bars that have been designated as part of the crawl. They're in a certain area and people just go from bar to bar to have a cocktail that other works.
For example, the first day, it's the Trinity Bellowids area. And so we start at 4pm. Empress Jin is sponsoring and we'll start at Crybaby at 4. And then we had to Compton at 5.
And then Bar Mardi Chi at 6. And so just under an hour at each spot, but you get a beautifully made cocktail with a bar bite. And it's a really nice evening. Amazing.
Well, the whole thing sounds unbelievable. We're excited to promote it and keep promoting it. We're excited that you're doing it. And basically everything you do is what we've been trying to promote in the show the whole time.
So just super thankful to everything you do. Yeah, like from Alchemist to the other magazines you're involved in to promoting these festivals in Vancouver and Toronto, you're doing it in a cross-country situation, which is amazing. I don't know how you have time to do it for this interview, but we appreciate you coming on to talk about it and tell all our listeners what all the information they need, social media, websites, whatever is probably going to be a long list, but go for it. Yeah, yeah.
So it's for social media, it's at the Alchemist Meg. And so the website to look up the the events for Toronto Cop Festival, it's the alchemistmagazine.ca slash T.C.F. I just got to say, if you listen to the show and in religiously or occasionally, this is literally right up your alley. The Toronto God, again, I imagine anyone listening to the show wouldn't think this would be a good time.
So thanks so much for everything you do, Gail. Thanks for coming on the show to talk about it. We'll keep promoting it on our end. Yeah, get ready.
September 2nd is when the announcements start rolling out and October 22nd to 26th. Yes, thank you so much for having me on. Thanks very much. And I'll put all those links in the show notes so we can check everything out and hopefully it's on the events.
Yeah, thanks Gail. Thank you, take care. Thanks.