Tales of the Cocktail

by Phillip Collier

August 01, 2013

Hurricane Katrina forced me to take a part time hiatus from my business. I was driving back and forth from Daphne, Alabama to New Orleans during those first few months after the desvastation to get my family’s life together, and I was not able to return to work full time until late 2005. When I finally did, I discovered that Ann Rogers, founder of Tales of the Cocktail, was working out of an office on the same floor as mine in Canal Place. She was only three years into her annual New Orleans event, which would soon grow to be the world’s largest cocktail convention (this July, the 11th annual, five day Tales of the Cocktail convention attracted over 25,000 visitors to the city). I approached her about letting me redesign her logo and design all of the graphics associated with her event, and she agreed.

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The new logo started what would become an eight-year relationship with Ann and Tales of the Cocktail.  My designer, Dean Cavalier, designed all of the advertising materials, website, and interior graphics for the annual convention in New Orleans and for traveling Tales of the Cocktail events in Vancouver and Buenos Aries. We used the talented retro artist, Derick Yaniger’s, illustrations to set the mood for this largest resurgence of the craft-cocktail movement.

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Since 2003, Ann has taken a group of 100 or so cocktail connoisseurs and enthusiasts meeting for a few hours in the Carousel Bar of the Hotel Monteleone, and turned it into an international happening – drawing the world’s best bartenders, cocktail book authors, famous chefs, and distillers to New Orleans for a week each year to treat attendees to special drinks, spirited dinners, workshops, and lectures on the craft of mixology. I’ve met bartenders at Tales of the Cocktail from as far away as Australia and Moscow. It’s a swirling mass of slightly inebriated locals and visitors of our city that starts in the lobby of the Hotel Monteleone and the Carousel Bar, and spills onto Royal Street and into famous restaurants and watering holes all over the French Quarter. If you’ve never been, I strongly suggest you take part in the world’s premier cocktail festival that Ann Rodgers Tuennerman, known as Mrs. Cocktail, has brought to our city and now to the world.

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