Saturday night, 10 local mixologists took the stage at Deer Valley Resort’s Silver Lake lawn to compete in the finals of the second-annual Mountain Mixer cocktail contest.
The event, hosted by the Park City Area Restaurant Association, is a chance to showcase the culinary talent of the group’s members and is the latest evolution of its long-standing summer cocktail competition.
Last year was the first return to an in-person format after years of operating as a month-long online contest, Savor the Cocktail, where people could vote for their favorites. But after some voting fraud, the association went back to an in-person contest with judges from the beverage industry determining the winners.
The first Mountain Mixer was held in Silver Lake Lodge, and one of the biggest changes for Saturday’s event was the decision to move outside onto the lawn, said Ginger Wicks, the executive director of the restaurant association.
“It was really loud and cramped inside, and we’re very limited in the number of people that can attend when it’s inside,” she said. “As long as Mother Nature will always cooperate with us, I think moving it outside is great.”
And she did, holding off the monsoon thunderstorm until just after Dos Olas Cantina’s Adriel Danan was crowned the winner and given a $1,000 check. Instead of fireworks, his victory was celebrated with a lightning show.
The other major change, which came directly from guest feedback, was the inclusion of a bar serving all 10 of the finalists’ cocktails.
Due to Utah’s liquor laws and liability of licensing, Wicks said it’s not possible for the mixologists to make and serve their own drinks. So last year they decided not to serve the concoctions so as not to risk compromising the drink’s quality.
With high demand from attendees, organizers decided to give it a go and contracted Top Shelf Professional Bartending Services to work with each competitor to efficiently recreate the cocktails.
It wasn’t quite efficient enough in the end, though: The biggest issue this year was the drink line, which had upward of a 40-minute wait throughout the three-hour event.
Bartenders work to make all 10 finalists’ cocktails at the Mountain Mixer event. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record 
The line to order drinks holds strong through the entirety of the Mountain Mixer event. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record 
Guests could read about each of the 10 finalists cocktails, and order sampler versions of them during the contest final. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record 
Top Shelf bartenders worked with competing mixologists to recreate their cocktail entries for the Mountain Mixer. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record
“While I think we took a really great step forward in letting guests taste the drinks, and having the ability to buy additional tastes of those drinks if they wanted, we didn’t probably execute the best way to allow that process to go quickly,” Wicks said.
She said that’s the biggest takeaway for planning next year, and organizers are already thinking of ways to fine-tune the experience like having multiple bars or having bartenders focus on just two of the 10 drinks at different stations.
“No event is perfect. We’re always learning and growing,” Wicks said. “I’m very hard on myself as an event person because I want everybody to have a really good experience.”
But even the ability to sample the drinks was a huge step up from last year, said judge Ben Usen, founder of Installation Coffee and regional sales director for La Colombe. He was the only returning judge and was impressed with the effort that went into the event.
Judge Casey Metzger, founder of Top Shelf, said the same. He remembers early iterations of the Park City Area Restaurant Association’s cocktail contests, which were in person in the early 2000s, and said the Mountain Mixer is a higher caliber than those events.
“I’ve been a judge in it before, but it was on a much smaller, more grassroots level,” Metzger said. “I think the partnership between Deer Valley as a venue and the resources that they bring to the table, that they leverage, it has a recipe for success.”
From the judging perspective, he said he was flattered to be included alongside Usen and the third judge, Charles Joly, who is a global cocktail champion and James Beard Award winner in Outstanding Bar Program for The Aviary in Chicago.
The three were placed on a smaller stage facing the main stage, where each contestant created their cocktail while explaining each ingredient and the story behind the drink. Judges chose the top three winners, but the audience was given a wine cork to manually vote for a favorite drink.
“You saw every type of cocktail that you can imagine here today, from spirit-forward to light spritzes, locally inspired ingredients to things from around the globe, culinary influence, things that were very personal to our bartenders,” said Joly.
The three winners from last year made it to the finals again: AJ Anderson with HANDLE, Katelyn Fraser with Butcher’s Chop House and Charles Vincent Franco with Grub Steak.
Anderson took first place last year with his cocktail Melt, and he returned to the stage with a “funky” approach to his cocktail Bloods Lake for this year’s event. The main shocker was his garnish: freshly grated cheese from Beehive Cheese Company.
The ingredient was inspired by a cocktail he had while traveling through Taiwan at the end of spring, Anderson said. It was more of a savory cocktail, and by including some corn masa in his syrup, he joked he was making a quesadilla for the judges.
Franco returned with another Filipino-inspired cocktail as a nod to his heritage, this time incorporating pandan and coconut into his drink Coco Verde. Fraser’s drink Hive Mind incorporated flavors of orange and honey, referencing Utah as the beehive state.
Other competitors were motivated by travel, too.
Milana Powers with High West’s The Nelson Cottage said her cocktail was inspired by an open-air music festival in the Dolomites that people hike to.
“I love the idea of music traveling through the mountain peaks and fresh air. And I wanted to recreate the same feeling in the glass,” Powers said.
The drink used High West’s Mountain Gin, with flavors of elderflower and rhubarb, and was topped with Dendric Estate’s Dry Cut cider.
Powers won the people’s choice award and “the love of Park City,” Joly said.
Jordan Greiner, who represented the Goldener Hirsch, Auberge Collection, said 40° North was the result of the hotel’s Amaro program and her “recent desire of just selling all of my crap, packing it up into a bag and traveling world.”
The ingredients are all found along the 40th parallel, which includes northern Utah, Greiner explained. High West bourbon was from Park City; Avèze gentian liqueur made with yellow gentian root from southern Europe; Amaro Lucano from Basilicata, Italy; tobacco bitters represented Türkiye; and then back to Park City with a spruce tip cordial.
It was Greiner’s first-ever cocktail contest, and she took home third with 40° North.
Metzger said her performance and concept were especially memorable, but what makes the Mountain Mixer different from other contests is that it’s all about the cocktail, not the bartender. The three judges were asked to rank each cocktail on four criteria — appearance, aroma, taste and finish — so the hospitality skills or competitors’ performances weren’t factors in the winners.
Does the drink have balance? Can every ingredient be tasted equally? Is anything overpowering? Does it make you want to take another sip? Those were some of the questions the judges considered, Metzger said.
Danan’s drink Crimson Smoked and second-place winner Chace Ciulla’s Cucumber & Jalapeño Gimlet stood out the most from the scoring despite being some of the simpler entries, he said.
The winning cocktail, Crimson Smoked, had five ingredients and was the only finalist to use mezcal as the base spirit. For the judges, the smaller glass size was a winning feature, too, because it showed Danan’s awareness of the ratios and prevented the flavors from becoming diluted.
“Part of the simplicity of that cocktail is (that) he used a spirit that brought this strong flavor profile,” Metzger said. “When you get 12 ingredients, sometimes it’s tougher to get that perfect balance.”
Joly agreed.
“It was a drink that was equal parts classic and with a beautiful twist,” he said when announcing the winner. “It goes to show that sometimes sticking to a classic formula, but just absolutely knocking it out of the park with perfect flavor, balance, and a little bit of creativity, infusing a bit of yourself, can get the job done.”
Wicks said it was fun to see a completely new set of winners compared to last year, and for them to be spread around town.
There were 21 entries for this year, which also shows a buy-in from the town’s mixologists, said Metzger. He said events like Mountain Mixer are one of the ways Park City can push itself in the culinary arts.
“We are hospitable. Our tourism and hospitality are at the center of our economy, and we know this. And we should be trying everything we can,” Metzger said. “The bartenders, they’re the first to greet people. They can start that journey.”
All the competing drinks are included on menus at the participating restaurants, she said, so people who didn’t make it on Saturday, or want to sample the winners, can do so by stopping in.
The recipes for all the submissions are also available online at parkcityrestaurants.com/mountain-mixer-park-city, so people can try making them at home.