B.Y.O.C East *

If you’re looking for an awesome place to take a date, then look no further! B.Y.O.C is such an awesome concept where you Bring Your Own Cocktail… kinda! You take a bottle of your favourite spirit and your dedicated mixologist will create wonders with your bottle! You pay £25 on the door and are escorted down the stairs to a secret library…

I took a friend of mine along, and we took a bottle of Bumbu rum and a bottle of Archers to really test our mixologist! For the fee you pay on the door, you get two hours work of cocktail mixing which is about 5 cocktails, so plenty of drinks! Our mixologist, Patrick, was great, he was knowledgeable and certainly brought the banter.

Our five drinks were all awesome, and I even remembered to note down some of the recipes too!

We started on a Rum cocktail that was made up from 2 shots of rum, sugar syrup, cherry syrup , a little chilli and a little lime. It was served in a speakeasy style champagne glass and it was so good. The rum is already quite sweet so the chilli really complimented it!

We then went in for an Archers cocktail, and it was so much better than we had thought they would be. We had two shots of Archers, passion fruit, pineapple, ginger, and soda water with a tiny hint of lime. For me, Archers reminds me of being just 18 and drinking it all summer so it brought back so many fun memories.

We then swapped back to the rum… talk about mixing drinks on a week night! This was made up from two shots of rum, vanilla, lime, egg white and soda water. This was my favourite drink of the night and it went down a right treat. It seems I’ve become quite the rum drinker recently!

Back to the Archers for the next one… two shots of Archers, berries, lychees, cranberry, lemon and a hint of sugar syrup. It was at this point I appeared to be too interested in drinking it then photographing as I didn’t get a snap of this one, but it was dark in colour in one of the speakeasy bowl style glasses that I love.

Our final drink came in two parts; a double shot of rum with chocolate and raspberry, followed by a coffee martini style drink with 2 shots of rum, some caramel and coffee.  The shot didn’t leave an awful after taste as a lot of shots do so that was a winner for me.

The atmosphere of the bar is awesome, it’s got quite a buzz yes still feels dark and intimate. It’s not too noisy that you can’t sit and have a chat without hearing each other or the fear of being heard by everyone! The staff are super interactive and really make you feel at home.

I think this is one for taking Mike back to for sure!