Tammy Coxen of Tammy’s Tastings: From Census Data to Craft Cocktails

Tammy Coxen

Cocktail Enthusiast, Entrepreneur, Teacher

What's the weirdest thing in your tote bag?

A bright pink Sharpie marker that I use to check off my shopping list when I go shopping for neighbors who don’t want to risk the grocery store.

Last time you were surprised by anything?

See my gift answer below!

Best gift you gave or received?

For my birthday this year, some of my cocktail class regulars (eight people in five households across two countries!) teamed up to make a frame-by-frame copy of a video I use to demonstrate shaking versus stirring in my classes. At five minutes long, it’s the sweetest gift I’ve ever received.

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Shaken and Stirred: Tammy Coxen, Cocktail Enthusiast and Entrepreneur

I grew up in Southern Ontario and moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1997 to marry an American boy. I bounced around jobs for a bit before spending nearly 15 years doing research and writing for Corporation for a Skilled Workforce. While that may not seem well-connected to my current career, I learned a ton of transferable skills like group facilitation, managing sales pipelines and how to tell an engaging story. And it’s way easier to make cocktails interesting than Census data!

I had always been a foodie, and learning to make cocktails was a part of that. A restaurant near me had a great craft cocktail menu organized by decades. Drinking my way through it over eight months gave me a great education in the classics, and I started hosting cocktail parties at my home. At the time, Tammy’s Tastings was about tasting events and artisan chocolates, including teaching people how to make chocolate truffles. I figured people would be interested in learning to make great cocktails at home too, and lucked into an offer to teach at a local bar on a night they were closed. Things just grew from there, until I could turn my side hustle into my main job.

I’ve learned so much about history from cocktails! Alcohol has been with human beings for a very long time, and played a big role in so many pivotal events. One of the things that inspired the American Revolution was the Sugar Act, directly intertwined with the price of rum. And rum was an engine of Triangle Trade, driving the horrors of slavery. You can also tell a lot about what went on in society by what people drank. In the 1970s, tons of cream and sugar-filled drinks accompanied the disco era. In the 1980s, drinks reflected women’s increasing sexual liberation; Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” on the radio, drinks like Sex on the Beach in listeners’ glasses. Today, drinks focus on high-quality ingredients from across the globe, much like our food culture. 

Like others in hospitality, I worried when my business dried up overnight due to the pandemic. The key to pivoting was thinking about what drove my in-person success and considering what moving virtual could give me, not take away. While my customers enjoyed tasting cocktails made in class, they’d shared for years that they most valued my stories about the history, the people, even the science behind the drinks. Those things translate really well online, where my classes are now filled with engaging images and videos that help me tell those stories. The other thing people loved about my in-person classes were the friendships that often sprung up between people I’d randomly seated together. So I’ve kept my online classes purposefully small, with lots of interaction among participants. Finally, going virtual vastly expanded my market! Now, people from Ireland and Amsterdam regularly participate in my public online classes, and I’ve been doing private corporate events all over the US. It’s been the busiest year yet for my business.

As an extrovert, having this regular interaction with people has been really key to keeping my spirits up these long months in lockdown. And I hear that same message from my customers too—I have one regular going through chemotherapy, so he and his wife have to be extra careful about COVID risk, and they were just so grateful to have this way to socialize safely. I love that I can bring joy into people’s lives in this dark time. 

Sparkling wine cocktails make every day a celebration, and doubly so on New Year’s Eve! The Winter Blossom is a simple but delicious recipe to make the evening extra special. 

Winter Blossom

1 oz pomegranate juice

1/4 oz St. Germain (or other elderflower liqueur)

1 dash orange bitters

4 oz sparkling wine

Garnish: lemon twist (express oils and discard) and pomegranate seeds (optional)

Combine ingredients in champagne flute. Garnish. 

(To make this a mocktail, use 1 oz pomegranate juice and 4 oz ginger beer with the same garnishes)