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Jenni

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Jenni is a blogger and marketing professional in Portland, Oregon. A Well Crafted Party is a blog about all the little things to celebrate in life. Follow Jenni or A Well Crafted Party with BlogLovin, RSS feed, Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest.

Birthdays are celebrated in my group of friends. We love a good excuse to get together to enjoy each others’ company, good food, and great drinks. My friend’s Brandon’s birthday was no exception to this very fine rule we all live by. His wife had the idea to throw together a whiskey tasting party and build our own steak salad bar. The food was epic… as always. The drinks… well, lets just say, we enjoyed some mighty fine whiskeys!

Disclaimer: This post is not sponsored. As with all my posts the opinions are my own. This post is intended for readers of legal drinking age. 

 

Whiskey Tasting Party from A Well Crafted Party

 

How to Throw a Whiskey Tasting Party

There are a couple of different routes you could go to throw a whiskey tasting party:

  1. Purchase all the whiskeys yourself and get a good variety of styles and brands. PRO: This way you know you will get to taste different things and you can even try different styles. CON: It can get expensive FAST.
  2. Give each guest a style of whiskey and let them bring a bottle. PRO: You will get to taste different styles of whiskey. CON: Guests may worry about costs of the certain style of whiskey given or may not know a good brand to bring.
  3. Ask guests to bring their favorite whiskey. PRO: You know you will get whiskeys your guests enjoy. CON: You may not get a good selection of styles of whiskey.

Our lovely host asked us each to bring our favorite kind of whiskey. (Note: She offered for us to just show up and enjoy the evening if whiskey wasn’t in the budget. She is cool like that.) Those who knew what they were going to bring shared the name of the whiskey in a Facebook Event so that we wouldn’t double up bottles. We ended up having all bourbon styles of whiskey except for one Irish Whiskey… but, all of them were tasty and everyone found at least one whiskey that they loved.

I seriously cannot stop sharing images from this amazing night. Our tenth anniversary party was absolutely an excuse for us to celebrate our marriage with the people that we’d gained over the last ten years—the people who are our support group now (and always). It was also an excuse to eat ridiculously good food and drink some delicious beverages. Andina Restaurant in Portland, Oregon provided the perfect venue and menu for our little shindig.

(Please note that this post is not sponsored in any way.)

Andina's Party Menu for special occasions from A Well Crafted Party

We chose Andina restaurant in Portland, Oregon as our venue for four very good reasons:

  1. We loved the food there and had one of our most memorable post-marriage date nights eating a delicious meal there.
  2. They had a GORGEOUS space that fit our party’s numbers.
  3. Andina’s team of people that helped me secure the space, view it, try foods, and plan my party were so very helpful. I am a tad anal with events (spreadsheets are your friend!) and they were nothing but gracious hosts.
  4. It was affordable. I mean, it wasn’t inexpensive… but, I wanted a GREAT meal. A great meal was certainly had. Don’t believe me… let me show you:

(Amazing photos by Mary Boyden of Mary Boyden Photography)

 

Andina's Party Menu for special occasions from A Well Crafted Party

Andina's Party Menu for special occasions from A Well Crafted Party

 

Party Menu at Andina Restaurant in Portland, Oregon

There were several different choices and price points to create the party menu that we wanted. We chose to do a four course meal along with Tres Salsas Con Pan (breads with salsas/dipping sauces). My favorite part was being able to let my guests actually peruse the menu and select items that they wanted. I have done every style of dinner party there is from family style to buffet to plated… but, getting to have choices really made me feel like I was able to treat my guests. For our menu guests were able to choose from three selections of each of the courses. We chose those three selections prior to the day, but the guests got to choose their own items in the moment. I created the pictured menus because I wanted the menus to match the rest of the paper goods. The restaurant will make menus for you based on your selections if you aren’t as particular as I am. ::wink::

October never, ever fails to be my busiest month of the year. Even December’s crazy schedule doesn’t quite come close to the amount of things packed into October. After two weeks of traveling for work I am starting to finally catch up with things like housework, meal planning, and blog posts. Of course, my next two weeks of work promise to be even crazier… so, hopefully I don’t lose ground on all the other projects in the works.

Onto the fun stuff… every October we have four MUST DO events each year. We go to the pumpkin patch. We attend the Portland Apple Festival. We have a craft night to prep for our annual Halloween party and then we have our annual Halloween party.

Last weekend we got to enjoy the pumpkin patch with friends. This weekend we painted the pumpkins to get them ready for our comic book themed Halloween party.