an Abundance DIY Sustainability Workshop with Gary Phillips and Dr. Colbey Reid
Sunday, September 7, 4am-7pm
Located at the Plant at 220 Lorax Lane, Pittsboro, NC.
For directions, click here.
And another brilliant idea from ancient Greece: their drinking parties, called symposia, designed to encourage conversation among citizens. We tend to think of parties as private acts, and as opportunities for escaping thought. But the Hellenic symposium was once an important social institution, where the act of drinking- together acted simultaneously as a kind of religious and civil ritual designed to promote playful thinking and provide an opportunity to try out ideas on others.
The Fair Game Drink n’ Thinks revive the ancient Hellenic practice of using drink as a tincture for exploring new ideas and testing them out in gamesome conversation with others. Citizens of the Triangle are invited to gather and…
• learn about aspects of western drinking traditions that have been suppressed, but still have value, in our own time
• learn to mix—and taste!—featured cocktails made with locally distilled spirits
• renew the ancient practice of using cocktail consumption to promote conversational communion.
These Drink n’ Thinks will explore the art and rituals of distilling, fortifying, blending, and aging. They will also explain specific religious and civil traditions that inform American, and southern, attitudes toward spirits. We’ll use these sessions to figure out how taste literally functions as social glue, sampling wines, spirits, and cocktails and investigating the range of lost cultural contexts that have, historically, shaped the simple act of mixing drinks.
Fair Game Beverage Company is committed to making quality wines and spirits from local feedstock in a way that supports local farms, local businesses, and local people. Each sip of the Company’s NC-grown and produced wines, ports, cordials, brandy, and sorghum cane spirits allows visitors quite literally to taste and absorb something of the beverages’ place of origin.
Fair Game is part of a long tradition of American wine- and spirit-making evolved from highly specific regional religious, family, and community customs. And yet, the moment we mix a Brazilian-style Caipirinha using NC sorghum cane rum, concoct a Sidecar with local brandy and French Cointreau, or mix a Manhattan using North Carolina spirits, we are acknowledging the amenability of local spirits to global mixing. Cocktail mixing is at once a way to imbibe the characteristics of local lands and even local people, on a global stage and in surprisingly cosmopolitan combinations.
Come explore the local-global paradox swirling in your cocktail glass! Learn how what appears to be the most modern, secular, and cosmopolitan of acts—drinking a cocktail—catapults us back into bygone traditions, over to far-flung lands, and deep into places and people both strange and familiar.
Register online:
Pre-registration is required.
SOLD OUT
Gary Phillips took up an interest in alcohol when he was seventeen and was trained as a bartender in 1979 at the Ambrosia Bar in Amherst, Massachusetts. In Chapel Hill he tended at the Pyewacket, Orient Express and Aurora, plus occasional gigs at various dives. He loves dives and will probably own one someday. Over the years he has invented several cocktails of note for special occasions, such as Persimmon Martinis For The Masses, which were served to hundreds at the Piedmont Bio-Fuels Plant in 2011 during a celebration for the Dogwood Alliance.
Dr. Colbey Emmerson Reid is a professor in the Poole College of Management specializing in consumer culture at North Carolina State University. Reid has over 16 years of teaching and research experience in literature and writing as well as experience creating and overseeing study abroad programs and an interdisciplinary research and lecture forum. Reid has also chaired an institutional grant-awarding committee to promote faculty development at York College, where she was formerly Associate Professor of English.
