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" Jacob Grier, 30MetroVino Portland, Oregon How&amp;#039;d you get here? I moved to Portland from Washington, D.C., about four years ago. I was working in a think tank in D.C. I had worked in coffeeshops and decided it was time to check out the West Coast. I drove out here, landed a job at a great cocktail spot called Carlyle, really fell in love with cocktails, and ended up finally at MetroVino. Your Web site says you&amp;#039;re also a magician. I&amp;#039;ve been doing sleight-of-hand magic since I was ten years old. So during the summers, I go and perform street magic at various street fairs around Portland. Any similarities between bartending and magic? They&amp;#039;re both interactive. Doing close-up magic, you have to be able to read a customer, and know what kind of interaction they&amp;#039;re going to want and how they&amp;#039;re going to respond. Your Brewing Up Cocktails events focus on beer cocktails. What first got you into them? Beer is my first love. I make my living creating cocktails, but when I go out, beer is what I drink. Beer is a really flexible cocktail ingredient. Pretty much any element that you can taste you can find in a beer and bring that into a cocktail. What makes a good beer cocktail? It depends on the beer, but I think it&amp;#039;s all about understanding the beer that you want to work with. One thing I like to use frequently is just a little bit of IPA to add bitterness to a drink. Would you say Portland is a beer city? We have this reputation as a beer city, and we have an incredible amount of breweries doing an array of styles. But we&amp;#039;re also right next to Willamette Valley, a world-class wine country, and we&amp;#039;ve got a distillery row in town now. Would you consider yourself a drinking geek? Absolutely. I&amp;#039;ve got twenty different bottles of bitters on my counter at home. Do you have a philosophy of drinking? For me it&amp;#039;s a great way to be constantly learning and exploring new products and techniques. But it can be just as nice to relax with a pint of good beer. It doesn&amp;#039;t have to be geeky all the time. What do bartenders know about drinking that the rest of us don&amp;#039;t? Hopefully, they know how to control drinking a bit more through experience. And if they don&amp;#039;t, then they&amp;#039;ll hopefully learn soon. What drinking trends do you approve of? I do like the recent trend toward big ice cubes being available. I do like having a big cube if I&amp;#039;m drinking a spirit neat. And disapprove of? Absurd candy-flavored vodkas. Whipped-cream vodkas, cotton candy. It seems like there&amp;#039;s a new flavor every month now. When a customer says &amp;quot;Surprise me,&amp;quot; what do you make? The go-to is called The Last Word. The drink was revived by a Seattle bartender named Murray Stenson, and it&amp;#039;s equal parts Chartreuse, gin, lime, and maraschino liqueur. It&amp;#039;s just a great, balanced drink with really interesting flavors. PLUS: Read More Bartender Questions on Eat Like a Man &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/bars/interviews/a16392/metrovino-bartender-portland-14022181/>