City and State – Memphis Flyer

It’s that time of year when no one wants to admit that it’s too hot to sit on a patio and drink all day. Enter the drinks of summer.

Jameson Slushie

Slider Inn has an amazing patio — now with misters — and the absolute best way to enjoy it is with a Jameson Slushie (or two). The slushie consists of Barritt’s Ginger Beer, house-made lemonade, delicious Jameson Irish Whiskey, and bitters. Depending on the glass situation, it either gets served in a branded Mason jar or a pint glass. (The latter is obviously the better deal.) At $9 a pop, Slider is selling upwards of 300 each week — the hotter the weather, the higher the sales. They are very drinkable, probably too drinkable. I can’t imagine summer without them. I won’t!

Justin Fox Burks

Slider Inn’s Jameson Slushie

Frozen Lemonades

The newly opened Mac’s Burgers, which is out east in part of the former Dan McGuinness, is also selling freshly squeezed frozen lemonades — some with alcohol, some without. The virgin options include blueberry, strawberry, mango, peach, pomegranate, and pineapple — all made with freshly puréed fruit. Their spiked varieties ($8 to $11) include a Jameson Slush (sounds familiar!), Arnold Palmer Freeze (Tito’s Vodka, lemonade, and iced tea), and Frozen Bellinis (peach lemonade with an inverted champagne split).

Boozy Milkshakes

Staying cool downtown requires a boozy milkshake. Oshi has six to choose from, and they are also available without alcohol, but where’s the fun in that? Even the most lactose intolerant would be foolish to pass up the Kentucky Head Hunter. It’s made with bourbon, apple brandy, vanilla ice cream, and bacon dust. Yes, bacon dust! It mostly tastes like frosty bourbon, which is awesome if you consider how much bourbon it takes to outshine the ice cream. Other popular shakes are the Malt Shoppe (vanilla ice cream, malted milk balls, bourbon) and the Godzilla (crème de menthe, Godiva white chocolate, vanilla ice cream, Oreo pieces). They’re $10 a pop, $6 without booze.

Beer Floats

Beer drinkers need not feel left out. Hammer & Ale is serving beer floats ($6). Genius, right? There’s only one flavor of ice cream — vanilla — but the choice of beer is up to you. (There are 24 to choose from, however, a dark or a sweet beer is recommended.) So far the most popular picks are the Gotta Get Up To Get Down Coffee Milk Stout from Wiseacre and the Illusive Traveler Grapefruit Shandy. Now that they serve food, you could have a beer float for dessert or just have one as a treat between regular beers. (Mexican soda and ginger beer are also available for teetotalers.)

Justin Fox Burks

Hammer & Ale beer float with Wiseacre’s Gotta Get up to Get Down.

Coffee Soda

And because we need a different kind of buzz on occasion, City & State is now offering house-made carbonated coffee sodas. Say it with me: coffee soda. The first, the Hampliner, is a carbonated iced coffee with pomegranate syrup, fresh lime, and maraschino cherries to top it off ($4.75). The second, the Purist, is carbonated iced coffee with simple syrup, lime juice, and lime slice for garnish ($4). The Hampliner is rich but not too sweet. It feels decadent, which is what summer is all about. Beware, the Purist may give you a grown-up feeling since you’ll pat yourself on the back for being so smart and ordering it.

City and State is a shop full of things that demand to be touched. Waxed canvas bags and creamy porcelain bowls; Navajo blankets and end grain butcher blocks. Founder Lisa Toro says she planned it that way.

“We’ve gone so far into digital, but we need the tactile,” says Toro. “When you’re online, you’ve got four senses that you’re not using.”

Toro ought to know. In 2007, she co-founded Rocket Fuel, a Memphis-based web development and design firm. For almost their whole professional lives, she and Luis Toro, her husband and business partner, have been sitting in front of computers.

While we talk, Toro makes me a cup of coffee. City and State is half café, half dry-goods store. She’s using the pour-over method, which involves carefully weighing your ingredients and brewing by hand over a period of five minutes.

Folgers, it ain’t. But when she serves me a cup ($4) — presented on a silver tray with a pretty glass carafe — I suddenly don’t mind the wait. The coffee, a Colombian Tres Santos from Intelligentsia, is fragrant and well balanced. It’s naturally sweet, and if you squint, it kind of tastes like cranberries.

“I think we’re living through a shift in consumerism,” says Toro, blowing on her coffee to cool it. “Increasingly, it’s about craftsmanship. It’s about knowing who made this – where, with what, and how.”

City and State represents a new direction for the digitally inclined Toros. Both the name and logo are meant to evoke a frontier trading post, a place you go to get things you otherwise couldn’t. That lines up pretty well with City and State’s mission: to take artisan goods that are local to other cities and give them visibility here.

On the food side, that includes things like paleo chocolate bars from Hu Kitchen in New York and hand-crafted nut butters from Big Spoon Roasters in Durham, North Carolina. There are also local offerings like Memphis-based Shotwell Candy and Paper & Clay ceramics.

Although City and State plans to launch an e-commerce site next month, I recommend that you visit the store. The aesthetic is appealingly Instagrammable: spare and modern, littered with interesting trinkets, warmed by natural light. And anyway, you’ve got five senses — why not use them?

Justin Fox Burks

Pyramid Vodka: robust and smooth

Most people conceive of craft brewing and distilling as passion projects. They think of beer nerds in garages, boiling malt in smelly kettles. So it’s interesting that brothers Alexander and Winston Folk, scions of Folk’s Folly and founders of Pyramid Vodka, say they never set out to make booze.

They set out to start a business.

“We wanted to create jobs,” says Winston. “We wanted to do something that would bring young people back to the city and get them excited about living in Memphis.”

What drew them to vodka was the way it features fresh, local ingredients — things like field corn from Wilson, Arkansas, and fresh water from the Memphis Sand Aquifer. Because vodka is not barrel-aged or otherwise flavored, it allows the sweetness of the corn to come through in the finished product.

Last week, the Folks cut the ribbon on their production facility in North Memphis. In an emotional speech, Alexander acknowledged that getting here has been a long and difficult journey.

But the fledgling distillery is off to a promising start. Since its launch in November, Pyramid has gone from two full-time employees to five. It is currently carried by about 75 liquor stores and 100 bars and restaurants, including the Pyramid Vodka Studio in FedExForum.

The Folks credit their success to fresh ingredients and a craft distilling technique they learned from “an old moonshiner in Walnut, Mississippi.” The corn for Pyramid vodka is ground and fermented in-house. It is then distilled 51 times and filtered through at least 24 feet of activated charcoal.

You’ve heard of farm to table? Well, this is grain to glass. Pyramid turns out just 160 cases a week, and there’s a person involved in every step. In a moving demonstration, Winston showed the assembled crowd how a bottle gets labeled: A human being pulls a sticker off a sheet and carefully applies it.

So how does it taste? Really good, actually. Robust and smooth, with a hint of vanilla in the nose and a nice, clean finish. The kind of vodka that you could drink straight or with a splash of soda. Other people seemed to agree.

“In the beginning,” said Schuyler Dalton, who attended the ribbon cutting, “I wanted to support Pyramid because they’re local. But now I can support them because it tastes good. It tastes really expensive and nice.”