• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Taste and Tipple

Food, Drinks and Lifestyle

  • About
    • Contact
  • Recipes
  • Lifestyle
    • Ottawa
  • SHOP

Passion Project: Tropical Sour Beer + Tequila Cocktail

Skip to Recipe

Before I tell you about this incredible bright and tropical beer cocktail, I’d like to encourage you to nab one of the very few remaining tickets for my first in-person cocktail class at Chef’s Paradise here in Ottawa, this Friday, June 24 from 6:30-8:30 p.m. The theme is “Tipple’s Tea Party” and we’ll be shaking and stirring three original cocktails made with different varieties of Sloane Tea and the talented Chef Walid will be preparing three delectable food pairings to complement each drink. Tickets are $146 and include 2 hours of hands-on instruction, all ingredients and tools to craft 3 original tipples, and 3 food pairings.

Get Your Ticket for Tipple’s Tea Party

The Passion Project is the final instalment of my recent series of beer cocktails and the third of those which appeared in my latest article for Ottawa Magazine. This shandy (a blend of beer with any nonalcoholic beverage) is made with the Even Downtown Pink Guava + Passionfruit Sour Ale from Ottawa’s own Spark Beer. I’ve leaned into the tropical flavours of this fruity ale by combining it with passionfruit juice, freshly squeezed lime juice, a spicy Thai chili syrup, reposado tequila, and a bouquet of fresh cilantro for garnish.

I’ve come to learn, thanks to many queries from my most avid followers, that passion fruit juice can be somewhat hard to come by. Rubicon makes a delightful option which seems to be available for home delivery via Instacart and I’ve had luck finding some locally at the Massine’s Independent Grocer at Bank and Somerset.

I had the opportunity to shake this up on my latest in-studio appearance on CTV Ottawa Morning Live and you can watch the action from start-to-finish in the clip embedded below.

Since this cocktail is called “Passion Project”, I thought I would share a little update on my passion project, Taste & Tipple. I still have my day job as Vice President, Sales & Marketing at a national market research firm and continue to find that work both stimulating and fulfilling. As you may have guessed, it is a bit of a juggling act managing the demands of my 9-to-5 with the commitments I’ve made to my audience, my brand partners, and myself in regularly creating beautiful, accessible, and informative content on my blog and social channels.

I am coming up on the 5-year anniversary of Taste & Tipple this September and that is kind of hard to process. If you have been following along closely, you may have read or heard me say that I was pretty close to throwing in the towel on the entire enterprise just before the pandemic. In February 2020, I’d been blogging for 2.5 years, I had yet to make a single dime off my efforts with Taste & Tipple, growth on Instagram was stagnant, and I wasn’t sure if the content I was producing was resonating with my audience.

Lo and behold, a global pandemic made landfall in Canada a few short weeks after I began to consider whether or not to continue with my passion project. On the first day of lockdown in Ontario, March 13th, 2020, I decided to host an impromptu cocktail tutorial on my Instagram Stories, demonstrating how to make a simple three-ingredient cocktail with items I thought many folks would have tucked away in their liquor cabinets – the El Diablo (tequila, cassis, lime, ginger beer).

On that fateful night, several folks made the cocktail and shared it to their own Stories, tagging me. A few kind followers sent me messages asking me to keep it up, and so I did. I began hosting Virtual Happy Hour six nights a week until I hit 100 episodes in July of 2020. I’ve since tapered back to a more manageable schedule of twice weekly – Tuesdays and Fridays at 5 p.m. Eastern. If you’d like to watch some of those early episodes of Virtual Happy Hour, I’d recommend subscribing to my YouTube channel.

Just two months after launching Virtual Happy Hour, I received my first paid partnership offer. Shortly thereafter, I started working with a business coach, my friend and fellow female entrepreneur Amanda Chen, founder of Salty Paloma. Though six months of working with Amanda, I learned how to better organize my time, pitch brands, articulate my unique value proposition as a creator, and take my business to the next level.

In 2020 I managed to get 9 days of my annual Let’s Get Blitzen: Cocktail Advent Calendar sponsored and in 2021, all 24 days were sponsored by a variety of spirits, home goods, and wine brands.

Last year I focused on establishing more passive streams of income by launching my Shopify store where you can purchase unisex t-shirts and sweaters embroidered with my iconography and cute sayings like those featured below:

Shook Unisex Crewneck
Buy Now
Butter Me Up Crewneck
Buy Now
Spicy Unisex Crewneck
Buy Now

I also launched my YouTube channel in hopes of one day amassing enough subscribers to derive ad revenue thanks to a loyal base of viewers keen to consume my cocktail content. I still have quite a lot of ground to cover in terms of subscribers and hours of watch time before I’m eligible for ad income on YouTube – so, please subscribe and tell your friends! I also introduced Google Ads to the blog, while working hard to preserve the user experience and avoid bombarding you with pop-up video ads that would make this site unnavigable.

In 2022, I’ve been lucky to be able to continue working with some of my initial brand partners while cultivating relationships with companies and products I’ve long adored. I’m also elated to have become a brand ambassador for Somm™ and more recently Bodies By Phil – a fantastic boutique gym here in Ottawa. Becoming a contributor for Ottawa Magazine has been a huge honour and I can’t wait to continue authoring stories about the fantastic food and drink our nation’s capital has to offer.

There is also a lot that happens behind the curtain that you don’t get to see, including my ongoing efforts to land a book deal, develop exclusive content for my Tastemade live-streaming hub, get a TV show, launch a line of cocktail syrups, just to name a few. If you or someone you know would be well-placed to help me in bringing any of these larger scale efforts to fruition, I’d welcome your support and would ask that you send me an email at yvonne@tasteandtipple.ca. I am certainly not too proud to ask for help and know that building a cocktail empire takes a village, that’s how the saying goes, isn’t it?

To summarize, I’d like to thank YOU, from the bottom of my heart, for your ongoing support and encouragement. If it weren’t for your comments, messages, emails, I probably would have thrown in the towel on this passion project a couple of years ago. Thank you for keeping me motivated, pushing me and my creativity to new heights, and for raising a glass with me.

Cheers, friends!

Passion Project: Tropical Sour Beer + Tequila Cocktail

Print
Passion Project
Prep Time
5 mins
Cook Time
5 mins
Total Time
10 mins
 

The Passion Project is a shandy made with the Even Downtown Pink Guava + Passionfruit Sour Ale from Spark Beer in Ottawa. Combined with passionfruit juice, lime, Thai chili syrup, tequila and a bouquet of cilantro – this drink will transport you to a tropical paradise at first sip.

Course: Drinks
Cuisine: Mexican
Keyword: Beer, Beer Cocktails, Lime, Passion Fruit, Passionfruit, Tequila
Servings: 1 drinks
Author: Yvonne Langen
Ingredients
  • 1½ oz passionfruit juice
  • 1 oz lime juice
  • ½ oz Thai chili syrup
  • 1 oz reposado tequila optional
  • 6 oz Spark Beer Even Downtown Pink Guava+Passionfruit
  • Garnish: cilantro bouquet
Thai Chili Syrup
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1 cup water
  • 1-2 red Thai chilies minced
Instructions
  1. Add first four ingredients to a shaker with ice and shake until well-chilled. Strain into an ice-filled highball glass.
  2. Top with Spark Beer Even Downtown Pink Guava+Passionfruit, stir well to combine.
  3. Garnish with a bouquet of fresh cilantro. Serve with a straw.
Thai Chili Syrup
  1. Combine ingredients in a small saucepan over medium heat. Simmer for 5-7minutes, stirring occasionally, until sugar is fully dissolved.
  2. Cool to room temperature and strain off solids.
  3. Store in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 3 weeks.

Fan Favourites

Midsummer Gin Dream | Taste and Tipple

Midsummer Gin Dream

By Taste and Tipple / March 5, 2020 / 9 Comments
Montenegroni | Taste and Tipple

Montenegroni

By Taste and Tipple / December 12, 2017 / 0 Comments
Chinese Fizz | Taste and Tipple

Chinese Fizz

By Taste and Tipple / September 27, 2019 / 3 Comments
Best Happy Hours Downtown Ottawa | Taste and Tipple

Best Happy Hours Downtown Ottawa

By Taste and Tipple / July 23, 2019 / 0 Comments
Marrakech Mule | Taste and Tipple

Marrakech Mule

By Taste and Tipple / May 11, 2018 / 8 Comments
Elderflower Rosé Sangria | Taste and Tipple

Elderflower Rosé Sangria

By Taste and Tipple / June 22, 2018 / 9 Comments
Raspberry Whisky Bramble | Taste and Tipple

Raspberry Whisky Bramble

By Taste and Tipple / December 2, 2018 / 1 Comment
Rhubarb Sour | Taste and Tipple

Rhubarb Sour

By Taste and Tipple / June 2, 2020 / 6 Comments
Earl Grey Sour | Taste and Tipple

Earl Grey Sour

By Taste and Tipple / March 19, 2020 / 0 Comments

Coriander and Ginger Martini

By Taste and Tipple / September 29, 2017 / 0 Comments

Recent Posts

Scout's Honour - Whisky Beer Cocktail | Taste and Tipple

Scout’s Honour – Whisky Beer Cocktail

Call your father, better yet, make him a drink. Friendly reminder: it’s Father’s Day this Sunday, June 19th and you don’t want to disappoint the man who taught you how to drive stick, came to all your T-ball games, and still doesn’t *really* know what your job is. This whisky beer cocktail that I’ve named…

Read More

Hibiscus Rum Mimosa

It’s recently come to my attention that I have little dog energy. You know when you go to a dog park and you see a teacup chihuahua absolutely terrorizing a German Shepherd? It’s obvious the chihuahua has absolutely zero self-awareness about their relative size but they have convinced themselves that they are the biggest dog…

Read More

Pink Fuzz, Purple Haze – Grapefruit Wheat Beer and Rum Cocktail

I’m baaaack with the second of three beer cocktails from my first published article in Ottawa Magazine. This particular concoction is called the “Pink Fuzz, Purple Haze”. The Pink Fuzz is the namesake of the Grapefruit American Wheat Beer that steals the show in this shandy – hailing from Ottawa’s own Beyond the Pale brewery….

Read More

A Rousing Performance – IPA & Aperol Shandy

In some personal news, I am now a regular contributor to Ottawa Magazine. This recipe was featured in the Spring 2022 edition of the magazine in my first published article titled “Shake up a shandy” alongside two other beer cocktails I created for the issue. You can purchase the full print issue here. As a…

Read More

PREVIOUS TASTINESS →

Primary Sidebar

Hello friends, I’m Yvonne! I mix drinks with equal parts education, comedic flair, and style to take the intimidation factor out of cocktails and help you approach your home bar with more confidence.

About Me →
  • Bloglovin
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Never Miss a Recipe: Subscribe to Our Newsletter

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL

Taste and Tipple

Taste and Tipple
How to Build a Charcuterie Board
YouTube Video VVVuVmh4aGhWZncwWG5OLWQ5MW5DU09BLnp0Zk1KYVI4dVpv
Hibiscus Whisky Sour
YouTube Video VVVuVmh4aGhWZncwWG5OLWQ5MW5DU09BLjFNRUtKeG9nSGsw
Inspired by the flavour of children’s penicillin, this riff on the classic Penicillin cocktail swaps out ginger liqueur for banana liqueur and uses Demerara in place of honey syrup. Perfect for whisky lovers.
Bananas in Pajamas Cocktail - Penicillin Riff
YouTube Video VVVuVmh4aGhWZncwWG5OLWQ5MW5DU09BLjktcU1PZWRPZ1pv
Load More... Subscribe

Copyright Taste & Tipple © 2022 · tasteandtipple.ca ·

 

Loading Comments...