Liquid

Cocktail Competitions Are Increasing In Frequency — And Winning Fans

Maybe it’s because of Olympics fever, but on a Tuesday night in early August, there’s a palpable sense of anticipation and anxiety, those trusty bedfellows of competition. Dandies, swells, hipsters, and a motley crew of cocktail enthusiasts pour into Green Street. Some carry boxes of glassware and make their way upstairs. Some read to themselves from tightly clutched scraps of paper, glancing up to greet familiar faces. They’ve come to drink, to be sure, but this is to be a night when conversation will intermittently stop and all attention will be fixed. This is mixology as a spectator sport.

More and more, liquor companies are turning to the experts — the worldwide bartending community — and inviting them to apply their fluency in the fundamentals of bartending and innovation to invent a drink, often using a designated product. But more than just an exercise in originality and resourcefulness, cocktail competitions, which are becoming something of an industry standard, provide a forum where the spotlight, which all too often shines most brightly on the finished product, shifts to the execution of intricate techniques and the bartenders themselves. You might call it the Iron Chef–ization of the bar, but talk to enough drink wizards who take the time to formulate new recipes for submission to various contests — and Boston has its fair share — and you uncover a basic fact: when you dare a mixologist to invent a drink, the most indispensible ingredient is imagination.

The fête at Green Street is one such event with a particularly dramatic twist. The Hendrick’s Gin Beantown Bartender Battle is the local installment of a contest that’s happening in several cities around the country. The challenge? Take Hendrick’s Gin, a boutique spirit known for its cucumber and rosepetal notes, and create a cocktail that highlights any one of its many botanicals. Wait — there’s more. Not only does each competitor have to come up with a clever name for his or her clever drink, but after getting 10 minutes to make said drink, each is required to recite an original limerick that describes or captures the tipple. The concept was designed by Charlotte Voisey, a Hendrick’s Gin brand ambassador who’s spent considerable time in the trenches at some of London’s most refined watering holes.

“Whenever I create a cocktail, I always analyze the base spirit first and find something to pick up to showcase,” says Voisey, who’s also one of the evening’s judges. “I wanted bartenders to go back and taste Hendrick’s again, find something in there that they haven’t found before, and use that to create a cocktail. The limerick came in because I wanted to remind everyone that bartending and cocktails should be about fun. It’s important that as we grow, we remember that we’re also in the entertainment industry.”

Throughout the evening, the crowd and judges (full disclosure: I am one of said judges) are introduced to a number of drinks that draw out flavors like angelica, chamomile, lemon peel, and coriander. Chris O’Neill, bartender at UpStairs on the Square, gets the runnerup nod for his simple, classic, Southern-accented Seersucker, a tall sipper sweetened with a simple syrup laced with chamomile and orange peel. First prize, a roundtrip plane ticket to anywhere in the United States, goes to Joy Richard, director of operations at Tremont 647 and founding member of LUPEC Boston, a classic cocktail preservation society. Her drink, Nobody’s Darling, underscores the angelica with angelica-infused honey, yet intriguingly leans toward the savory thanks to celery juice.

At this point you might be thinking Cocktail à la 1988, but with less neon, hair, and stilettos. Not so fast. Just as countless chefs have emerged from behind the stove over the past decade to earn rockstar caliber distinction not only for their cooking skills but for their maverick personas, so too are mixologists taking their place among the culinary elite. Competitions are a chance for committed bartenders to showcase their complicated craft at mach speed. And a cocktail competition has all the characteristics of, say, a figureskating exhibition. Bartenders must exhibit technical merit, balance is critical, they’re up against the clock, and there’s the performance aspect of it all. So it only makes sense for me to invoke my inner Hazel Mae and catch up with some of the heavy hitters after the game.

“I think a lot of people have a competitive spirit,” Richard says. “Here you have something there’s never been an arena to compete in and taking it to a competitive level — and it was really fun! That was the first competition I’d been involved in. I’ve entered a few others, but this was the first time I was side by side with other bartenders and competed live. There’s an adrenaline rush — and it’s nerve-wracking.”

“I wanted to do something lighthearted and fun because of the whole limerick thing,” says O’Neill. “But I was really nervous thinking that I was going to have to stand up and read a limerick and present a drink. I was thinking, ‘Am I really Tom Cruise, the bartender/poet standing up on the bar?’ But I think as far as contests go, it’s interesting because you see people who do bar flair. As far as someone who’s invested himself in knowing what a good drink is, I’ve come to realize that bar flair and bartending are two different things.”

In most cases, simply getting to the phase where one steps up to mix before an audience indicates a certain level of expertise. Voisey, for instance, had the daunting task of selecting the five Hendrick’s Battle contestants from more than 40 entrants who submitted recipes. A competition held by Saint Germain, the relatively elderflower liqueur that’s fast becoming a bartender staple, took place in July at Employees Only, an influential cocktail bar in New York’s West Village. The competitors were the winners of a year’s worth of recipe contests held online. Ben Sandrof of No. 9 Park and Green Street’s Misty Kalkofen were among the dozen who were flown to New York for the threepart showdown, which sounds as though it was nothing short of triathlonlike in intensity. Only the third arm of the contest involved physically mixing the new concoctions; the first part was a written exam and the second was an improvisation exercise with mystery ingredients that competitors had to first identify by tasting.

Sandrof, who clinched the title with his frothy, floral, ginbased Sureau Fizz, says contests elevate the overall profession. “It’s just about making good drinks and tending bar,” he notes. “It’s hard to make a competition around how a drink tastes. If it was only about how it tasted, I could make a drink in a room without anyone in it, but there’s some element about how you act behind the bar, some element of professionalism and technique you use.”

Kalkofen expresses a view others share: competitions are a chance to learn from the greatest. “I think now more so than ever, people still don’t understand the artistry that takes place,” she says. “A lot of us spend a lot of time developing cocktails and putting new flavors together and using fresh ingredients. That’s something that really comes out in competitions. You wanna use trends from the culinary world, you wanna highlight the most recently available spirits to show you’re on the edge of that. Not everyone understands how complex it can be when you’re talking about using eggs or foams or different shakes for different drinks, little things like that.”

But, Kalkofen says, sometimes what’s demonstrated at cocktail competitions isn’t realistic for a busy night at a bar. “Competition leads to showcasing high technique and talented bartenders and spirits knowledge, but one of the points from watching everyone at Employees Only that day was, how many [of those cocktails] can I make when we’re 40 deep at the bar? It’s great and wonderful, but it doesn’t represent day to day.”

Still, contests don’t always inspire drinks that require training in chemistry or physics. Coming up with ace cocktails that aren’t any harder to make than a Negroni simply demands patience, time for trial and error, a knowledge of the tried and true, and avant-garde inclinations.

Esti Parsons, coowner of Radius, among other restaurants, has found competition can spark creativity so effectively that for about three years, each seasonal cocktail menu at Radius has been devised by the restaurant’s bartenders, each presenting a new recipe for consideration. Drinks are judged based on flavor profile, balance, and drinkability. The practice has even spawned a few in-house classics, like the brown sugar margarita.

“Not only is it fun, we end up with great cocktails,” Parsons says. “We’ve had people go home and make crazy infusions on their stove. Then the pastry chef or kitchen will recreate them on a daily or weekly basis. It is pretty impressive that people put time and energy into it, and great for us because we end up with an interesting cocktail list that otherwise wouldn’t exist.”