Event Pick: Literary Libations Week

Various Locations

August 14–18

Name a more iconic duo than booze and books. I’ll wait. Wine soaks the lyrics of ancient Greece. To the medieval Norse, poetry was nothing less than a kind of mead. And as Hemingway famously didn’t say, “Write drunk. Edit sober.”

From August 14 to 18, two dozen bars and restaurants across Texas will continue to celebrate this age-old marriage of alcohol and literature in the second annual Literary Libations Week, hosted by the Texas Book Festival. Intoxication stations in Austin, San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas will offer cocktails inspired by literary luminaries and their works. In town, for instance, The Dogwood will offer up “A Cocktail of Two Cities,” a boozy concoction of gin, elderf lower liqueur, champagne, and bitters. It’ll be the best of times and it’ll be the best of times.

Literary Libations Week is an early event in the lead-up to the Texas Book Festival, which takes place November 4 and 5 this year. The participating pubs will each donate a percentage of the profits from their bookish potables to help fund Austin’s seventh annual Lit Crawl, an epic night of literary revelry which, on November 4, will transform unlikely venues throughout Austin into happening hubs of bibliophilic excitement. With the Lit Crawl months away, however, it is a truth universally acknowledged that we’re all in want of a nice drink.

_{Read more from the Makers Issue | August 2017}