Browsing “Local Business”

Competition was fierce at the 1st Annual Battle of the Bartender Beer Cocktail Competition at the Clough Club for Vancouver Craft Beer Week.

Beer-Cocktails were made by:
Shea Hogan – SilverCity VIP
Donnie Wheeler – Clough Club
Evelyn Chick – UVA
Mike Mitchelll – Heather Group
Joey Donnelly – Granville Room
David Bain – Clough Club
Julia Como – Keefer Bar
Mark Smolinski – Max’s Burgers
Tarquin Melnyk – RTL Yaletown

Find out WHO THE WINNER WAS after the jump and to check out photos from the Neighbourhood Gig at the Biltmore with Portage and Main, The Sumner Brothers, and Raleigh!!!

…READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

Another evening of delicious beers…this time we were hosted by Biercraft on Cambie Street for the Belgian Showcase. Still lots of Vancouver Craft Beer Week happening…see you at the Battle of the Bartenders and the Neighbourhood Gig at the Biltmore tonight…

For now check out the tasty beers below! (Full disclosure, I did NOT consume all of these beers, I dont know if that is humanly possible!)(The list was even longer!) There was also some ridiculously good food, including this lovely miso gravy one pictured below:

1) Mongozo Premium Pilsner (Organic, Fair Trade, Gluten Free!) + the Miso Poutine!!!
2) Townsite – Charleston Tripel
3) Biercraft – Pilsner
4) Unibroue – Trois Pistole …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

Hoppapalooza III…there are no words. No wonder this VCBW event sold out in hours!!! I did my best to keep track of what beers were in what photo and I’m 99% sure this is correct.
Below are only a fraction of the beers you could have tried at the party the Alibi Room threw… and after the jump there are some party photos including the 3 different kinds of chili they had for the craft beer lovers.

Taken from the Hoppapalooza guide pictured below:
I. You’re awesome.
II. Beer is awesome.
III. Brewers are awesome.
IV. The Alibi Room is awesome.
V. Rich Hope is awesome.
VI. VCBW is awesome.
VII. If anybody else is feeling like they should be called awesome & were forgotten. You’re awesome too.

Vancouver is Awesome, thinks that’s awesome. :)

CLICK THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE! 

1) Parallel 49 Brewing – “Seed Spitter” Watermelon Wit
2) Iian Hill of Yaletown Brewing – Framboise Sour Raspberry
3) Central City Brewing – …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

Opening night of Vancouver Craft Beer Week was this past Friday…and boy did it deliver! So many kinds of beer from so many amazing local breweries. Check out the photos below and then check out the event listings…there are still tickets to a LOT of amazing pairings, tastings and showcases!

…READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

DINNER WITH… pairs interesting Vancouverites with top notch restaurants. We want to showcase the minds and menus of some of our favourite people and establishments.We’ll pick their brains, while they devour their dinner, and hopefully YOUwill come away inspired, enlightened and hungry…

Another week, another meal and this time it’s…

DINNER WITH… KAREN PINCHIN!

Karen Pinchin, is one busy lady and she sums it up pretty well on her website: write. edit. cook. tweet. repeat.

As you might gather from that statement, Karen is a jack of all trades…she writes, she cooks, she tell stories…you may recall a little thing called Rain City Chronicles?! I’m sure you know by know that she’s one half of the brilliant team that created this wonderful event that happens so frequently in our city.

Well she ALSO just finished her Culinary Diploma from Northwest Culinary Academy, and whipped out (pun intended!) some fancy cooking words at dinner that I had to write down and google later…

Well those are the basics on my dining partner…now onto the dinner at Che Baba on Kingsway. Your mouth is about to water…be prepared.

Wonderful wine to start the meal off… …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

What if you didn’t have a network? No inner circle to lean on? When faced with a life challenge, we most often turn to our personal networks of friends and family for help.

But what if that network is stretched across the country? Or what if it’s too much energy and too disorganized to reach out to everyone one at a time? In such cases we can feel alone and overwhelmed when dealing with some of life’s biggest challenges. Vancouver’s own Tyze offers a solution.

Tyze helps people help each other. A Tyze network is a set of online tools that makes it easy for people to form personal networks of support. Practical tools include things like:

A private way to communicate
A message and shared calendar system
Ability to assign and accept tasks
A way to share pictures and stories
A way to securely store and access files

It’s all completely secure and private. It removes the hassle and time of emailing and calling everyone one at a time. And it takes just moments to set up.

For Christabel, a young woman caring for her mom who has cancer, mobilizing a support group on Tyze has been “a godsend.” Christabel’s mom’s network has about 14 people in it and when they were all gathered together online, life got easier. “I only had to send messages out once,” says Christabel. “For example I’d put out a message saying, hey, mom needs a ride to the doctor tomorrow, and someone would always step up. I can’t imagine those kinds of results over email alone.”

Christabel and her mom

For another member, John, Tyze was used to coordinate care for his dad who lived in another country. “Dad was aging and we weren’t able to track his condition well from afar. Once we set the Tyze network up, we could view photos taken by neighbours and see what he was up to every day. One neighbour we invited in said she was so relived to be asked to help since she’d wanted to pitch in before but just didn’t know how.”

People use Tyze in a myriad of different ways, from coordinating support after a cancer diagnosis to scrapbooking priceless family memories, “future proofing” by having all their care preferences and legal documents saved in the vault, communicating with a small group of friends or a team and much, much more. To see how Tyze could benefit you, you should sign up for a free 30 day trial at Tyze.com.

Wow! Vancity went all out in producing this video about our friends at Save On Meats in conjunction with the release of the credit union’s ANNUAL REPORT. It gave me chills. YOU MUST WATCH IT!

A few months ago I caught wind of an incredible project launched out of BC where a company is taking the manure of cattle and turning it into electricity by way of giant, artificial stomachs (“anaerobic digesters”) which process the methane in cow poop on commercial farms and turn it from being something undesirable into a renewable energy resource. It’s called Cow Power, it’s brilliant, and you can learn more about HERE.

It was Cow Power that I immediately thought of when I heard about Urban Stream Innovations Inc, an emerging Vancouver greentech company that looks to harness not rural cow poop but the food waste of us, we herds of urbanized humans, and turn it into something much better than smelly waste in a restaurant’s dumpster.

Wes Regan, who is the VP of Urban Stream and a recent graduate of one of SFU’s co-op programs, joined me for coffee yesterday afternoon and gave me the rundown on this super interesting project that’s in a pilot phase right now.

The meat and potatoes of Urban Stream involves a heat and nutrient bioreactor that Wes has developed with his business partner, Nick Hermes. Patents are pending on this complex piece of machinery and the one thing that my tecnhically-challenged brain understands is that it’s going to help reduce the amount of food waste that ends up in our landfills. It takes food waste from restaurants and composts it in 2 cycles.

Another thing that’s easy for me to understand is that this system they’ve developed not only processes food waste and composts it but it also produces food in a super exciting (to me and other local food nerds) process that involves aquaculture; live fish or prawns that exist in a closed system where their waste, along with the food waste/compost, gets turned into nutrients to grow leafy greens and other vegetables! Above are a portion of the blueprints for the complete system, which will be made available to local organizations and restaurants, as well as the simple composting machine on its own which will help them reduce the amount of waste that goes to the landfill. Eventually it’ll be illegal for businesses to send it there, and creative entrepreneurs like Wes will hopefully be filling needs like this in places we didn’t know imagined.

Over coffee, Wes told me about the SFU co-op program he graduated from – the Faculty of Environment Geography – sparked his involvement in the green tech sector, and that this company literally grew out of what he studied along with his co-op placement with B.O.B. (Building Opportunities for Business) from 2009-2011. The course examines how business development can be used as an effective instrument of sustainable community development, and Wesley is a prime example of someone who has benefitted from these programs and is now deeply involved in social entrepreneurship projects.

Wes has promised that as soon as they get one of these machines up and running in the Downtown Eastside that I’ll be the first person he calls to come take a look, so stay tuned! Aquaponics await you with the ghost of blogging future.