Katie Loeb, Mixologist, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Katie Loeb has become a fixture in the Philadelphia beverage industry. Her innovative and handcrafted cocktails often win competitions and make headlines. Katie grew up in northern New Jersey, but moved to Philadelphia to attend college. She worked in restaurants in her twenties, eventually working her way up into management positions and then beverage director. What started as a fascination for wine, evolved into a curiosity and admiration for craft cocktails.
During the early 2000s, Katie served as the beverage director for a four-property restaurant group in Philadelphia that spanned across different cuisines from seafood-centric to Italian to New American to French bistro. She assembled the individual wine lists for each property along with creating original cocktails. Katie then went on to open up James Beard Award winning chef Jose Garces’ first iconic Spanish restaurant, Amada. Katie crafted a cocktail list to match the Andalusian tapas food menu. Her red sangria remains one of the most popular drinks at Amada. She then worked behind the bar at Chick’s Cafe & Wine Bar where she created unique cocktails based on variations of some of her favorite classic drinks. Katie also competed and won several cocktail competitions, establishing herself as a respected member of the beverage community.
Katie uses the Perfect Purée’s purees and blends frequently in her cocktail recipes. She loves the versatility of the purees and says adding fruit to any classic cocktail like a daiquiri, margarita or tall drink, like a gin and tonic, gives it that added depth of flavor. For example, she combines The Perfect Purée Carmelized Pineapple Concentrate in her margaritas to add nuanced tropical flavors.
Katie has become known for handcrafting her own syrups and purees, but The Perfect Purée is the only line of premade purees she’ll use because of their consistency in flavor and texture, made with no artificial ingredients. As a huge fan of the organic farm-to-bar movement (she wrote a book called Shake, Stir, Pour: Fresh Homegrown Cocktails on the subject), The Perfect Purée is right in line with her approach to fresh, natural tasting ingredients.
The purees also allow her to extend the seasonality of her cocktails or add hard-to-find ingredients like prickly pear. The purees are more cost and labor effective than making them in-house. Katie also says that, with some fruit, flavor can vary with the seasons; like a raspberry can be tart or sweet, depending on when it’s picked. The Perfect Purée compensates for this inconsistency in the natural fruit flavors and creates products that taste the same year round. And because the flavors are so concentrated, a little goes a long way, like with her Highland Sour, made with scotch, fresh lemon juice, simple syrup and The Perfect Purée Apricot Puree.