A Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On: What to Expect at the 2023 Arizona Cocktail Weekend

Fans of fancy drinks will congregate March 11 through 13 for the 11th annual Arizona Cocktail Weekend, a celebration that features one major event each night and a smattering of alcohol-focused activities.

With dozens of events slated throughout the three-day extravaganza, organizer say the key is not to overdo it.

“You don’t have to finish every drink,” says Chanel Godwin-McMaken, lead bartender at Little Rituals and administrative coordinator with Arizona Cocktail Weekend. “Have a couple sips to appreciate it, or do the swish-and-spit.”

Arizona Cocktail Weekend began as an entire week, with events centered at Hotel Valley Ho in Scottsdale and spilling out across the Valley and into the rest of the state. But after 2016, the partners who organize it — Ross Simon of Bitter & Twisted, Aaron DeFeo of Little Rituals, and Damon Scott of cocktail events company Rattle & Rum — decided to take it easy.

“We’d get to Tuesday and everybody would be spent,” Scott says. “The first three or four days were so much.”

They reworked it to keep it small and entirely downtown for the past few years. This year, it’s opened back up to other businesses throughout the Valley and state to produce events independently, but under the umbrella of Arizona Cocktail Weekend.

It also shifted to March from its usual dates on Presidents Day weekend thanks to the Super Bowl and Phoenix Open, which made it difficult and expensive to find venues and hotel rooms for out-of-town guests.

The three major events are the Cocktail Carnival on Saturday, Top Bars on Sunday, and Last Slinger Standing on Monday.

The Cocktail Carnival will take place at Walter Where?House, which Scott describes as a “gigantic indoor adult playground."

The event has a carnival theme and at least 37 brands will pour samples of creative cocktails and engage with customers. A DJ will spin until the band Red Giant Project goes on around 10 p.m. Food trucks will be parked outside. Last year, about 1,200 partiers attended the carnival.


On Sunday, Top Bars takes over The Croft Downtown and showcases pop-ups of renowned watering holes from around the world. A list online includes dozens of bars from Hong Kong, London, Mexico City, New Orleans, New York City, and more. Again, expect over 1,000 people.

The Last Slinger Standing contest is “like Chopped, but for bartenders,” Godwin-McMaken says. She won in 2019 and says the rounds get harder and harder as they winnow the contestants.

“You get whatever they tell you has to be in the drink,” she says. “Maybe they tell you it has to be stirred. Maybe it’s blended. One year we had to bang out coconut drinks. I’d never opened a coconut in my life.”

And the judges are formidable. They're “people high up in the industry who have made a mark on the cocktail industry,” Godwin-McMaken notes. “They’re people whose opinions do matter. These people do know what they’re talking about.”

Some events taking place during the festivities are geared toward beverage professionals, with leading names in the industry making appearances. For instance, Sazerac PHX is hosting a seminar on using sherry and Little Rituals will teach about sustainable cocktails.

“There’s so many classes and opportunities and networking,” Godwin-McMaken says. “There’s so much going on.”

True, some fads can be ill-founded and ill-fated, such as the hype over adding tobacco or activated charcoal into drinks. But Godwin-McMaken is on board with the trend toward nonalcoholic or low-alcohol cocktails, and she’s intrigued by cheese foams, even though she’s lactose intolerant: “I want to make it approachable to people who can’t have dairy but retain those flavor profiles,” she says.

And it’s essential for bartenders to continue learning and pushing boundaries, she adds, in order to keep guests’ attention.

“There is a difference between someone who is just following a recipe and someone who wants to be creative and branch out and lead the industry,” Godwin-McMaken says.