We’d been won­der­ing for a while where our oth­er favourite McKen­zie broth­er has been at because we haven’t seen him behind the bar at Hooch or Hawthorn for ages, but of course we kept for­get­ting to ask, because nat­u­ral­ly we were too busy ask­ing for anoth­er drink.

Well, it turns out that Justin has been work­ing as 42Below’s vod­ka pro­fes­sor (we hope this means he gets a cap and gown) and he’s been rather busy today with the region­al finals of the Cock­tail World Cup. The three bar­tenders who’ll be rep­re­sent­ing New Zealand will be Auckland’s James Gog­gin from Rack­et and our own Josh Craw­ford from Hooch and Calum Chad­wick from the Mat­ter­horn.

As usu­al, there’s all kinds of fun and games in Queen­stown around the event, but since we’re the Welling­tonista prob­a­bly the bit that you’re inter­est­ed in is that the grand finale is hap­pen­ing in Welling­ton on March 27, fea­tur­ing the world’s best bar­tenders and (I’m going to quote the press release here) “New Zealand’s best rock group ‘Mid­night Youth’ ”, and prob­a­bly quite a few splash­es of vod­ka as well. And we’ve got a dou­ble pass to give away to it!

Along with the invit­ed VIPS, 42BELOW is offer­ing a select num­ber of peo­ple the chance to attend the Grand Final Shake off as vod­ka groupies. Tick­ets are being sold for $42, which includes four cock­tails, food and enter­tain­ment so get in quick for a chance to par­ty with New Zealand’s best music and with the world’s best bar­tenders.

You can buy tick­ets from CocktailWorldCup.com, but if you want to win tick­ets from us, you’ll need to be over 18, for starters. Then we’d like you to come up with your own cock­tail fea­tur­ing 42Below that’s Welling­ton-themed. Yup, we did this before waaaaaay back in 2006 when we were still on blogspot, but damned if I can find the link. So, if you want to win, leave us your cock­tail sug­ges­tions in the com­ments before Mon­day March 8, and we’ll choose a win­ner. Hur­ray!