Bartenders, professional history and media culture

Bars & Bartenders
1

A colleague pointed out to me this recent VinePair podcast (skip ahead to 5:10) in which a couple somms and a periodical editor discuss a survey conducted by “a major liquor company” that indicated young bartenders weren’t interested in the history of their profession and didn’t feel it was important. To a significant degree, the three hosts of the podcast agreed.

It seems we don’t have access to the industry survey in question, so we don’t know much about it other than—reportedly—a lot (?) of young bartenders don’t know who Dale DeGroff is and don’t care. I was more struck by the blasé ignorance of the somms than these secondhand survey results.

The podcast is a weird, appalling listen. While the trio use the word “history”, they mostly talk about individuals—DeGroff, Sasha Petraske and Toby Cecchini (whose name they repeatedly butcher)—and the subtext seems to be more about rejecting what passes for “celebrity” culture amongst professionals than professional history per se. The hosts—ostensibly expert professionals—do not seem to understand the distinction.

I don’t even know where to begin.

3 Likes
2

Didn’t listened the podcast yet.

But you are right, having access to the survey (the questions asked), would make it more clear, to understand the situation.

I must admit, I have seen, since few years, a decrease of interest about bar culture in general, with some young professionnals.

It might be due to the fact, the answer is at their fingertips - if someone ask for something, they will google it… (and unfortunately, we know how bad the web can be, sometimes, regarding bar history).

3 Likes
3

So, this “modern cocktail renaissance” started around 25 years ago, correct? Meh… maybe it’s just the natural, next generational shift. Back then, did anyone really care that much about who invented famous 70s and 80s drinks like the Screaming Orgasm or the Fuzzy Navel? No, the goal was to completely change and replace the existing drinking culture. Yeah, it was based on history, but a fuzzy, long-dead history. And especially at the beginning, it was misunderstood, misinterpreted and overly romanticized until it actually created a groundswell of enough bars, liquor producers and drinkers to make it into something worthwhile and sustainable instead of just… new.

But now it’s grown to the point where it’s become SO dense and codified, perhaps it’s off-putting to the young. Maybe new bartenders who weren’t even born when it this renaissance started and have no personal connection to the long, hard work it took to get here… maybe they just want to start over again, like we all did back then. Rejecting the existing status quo is how new things start. We didn’t just want to continue and make a better Cosmo or Tequila Sunrise, we wanted a Martinez, we wanted a Paper Plane.

This reminds me of an interview I often think about of Ad Rock where he explains this shift from the perspective of rap music, just from the opposite side.

2 Likes
4

As a cocktail writer, I can attest that this is a problem on the media side of things as well.

3 Likes
5

This is a pretty common phenomenon: when people, and in particular young people, reach a certain basic level of mastery in a craft they have a tendency to protect their pride in their accomplishment by writing off as irrelevant or out of touch anyone who reminds them that they have barely scratched the surface; that those flashy riffs they learned so painfully are just the ABCs. If they choose to pursue the craft more deeply eventually they come to the realization that history and the individuals who helped to shape it are a priceless resource to be engaged by conversation and understanding, not a source of competition to be walled off.

I suppose that’s not always true, but I’ve seen it often enough and I hope, for selfish reasons, I’ll see it again. There are a whole lot of new bartenders since pandemic who can make the drinks on their lists plus a couple of modern classics but have never mixed a Rob Roy and don’t know how to balance a cocktail or what a Daisy is–or, just as importantly, what Constante Ribalaigua, Harry McElhone or Donn Beach can teach them about building their brands.

5 Likes
6

I’ma just leave this here:

https://www.devinhahnfilms.com/2010/08/10/periodista-tales-bartenders-breakfast/

3 Likes
7

Apt.

[And here are the rest of the 20 characters one must have here for a post to register, plus a few more.]

1 Like
8

Robert, from your own 2017 Imbibe article on Brother Cleve…

"… drinking cocktails was the most punk-rock thing you could do in the ’80s, because nobody did it,” Cleve says. “Doing all these old-school cocktails was an act of defiance against society.”

And David, there was an interview somewhere with you where you talked about being in your 20s, in punk bands, drinking in old man bars and trying to find dusty bottles of Old O.

Can anyone really fault the kids for wanting to do what nobody else is doing or (at least in their youthful inexperience) what no one else has done? For defying society? It’s what they do. It’s what we did, but… we’re just old now.

3 Likes
9

I don’t expect wisdom from kids. It’s quite charming when they show up with some.

However, I do expect a degree of wisdom from the founder and the editor of an (ostensibly) significant publication (VinePair) and an ostensibly credible somme and “wine educator”. Instead, I got what now just seems like a toxic hot take.

(Which isn’t to say I don’t also find toxic and distasteful what passes for celebrity culture in the bar world.)

2 Likes
10

Something relevant I see is the original cocktail pioneers all had a “cool hunter” personality where they could find the right ratio of digging in the crates and unearthing culture and then also pulling new things from the margins. It is totally a dying breed where exploring a deep cultural richness is traded for “satisfying” and “premiumization”. Some people look back on the cool hunters and don’t understand the motivation. Satisfying doesn’t care about keeping tabs on who set artistic precedents or the rabbit holes of finding who influenced the things you loved until you find yourself simultaneously listening to Lead Belly while watching a Fletcher Henderson youtube video in the wee hours.

A lot of the people that inspired me, like Brother Cleve (I was lucky to be a Bostonian at an exciting time), worked across many scenes. It almost seems like people from the pre internet era could leverage it better than people today saturated in the web and drowning. You pile money on top of that and find that the strivers aren’t really capable of being true cool hunter culture creators. Strivers can sure capitalize on the cocktail seen but I haven’t seen much new culture lately.

It seems like only people trained in a flourishing music scene of influencer discovery were capable of pulling off the cocktail renaissance. What are the kids of today supposed to do when so many formative forces are broken?

When the cocktail scene went a little south, I jumped to other hobby scenes like metal machining. There is/was constant ebay treasure collecting and infinite historical rabbit holes. The community is on the internet, like early cocktail scene, but with those old digging in the crates vibes.

So yeah, I can see why no one young knows or cares who DeGroff is. The art & music scene pedigree has been stripped from the cocktail scene. It is alive in pockets, but not broadly.

3 Likes
11

As a mid 30’s, new bartender, I’m just curious what age ranges everyone is thinking of here? Some terms I’m seeing are “kids”, “young people” & “Young professionals”. …Typically conversations like these are centered around millennials, but now that time has past a lot of people don’t realize that millennials are now pushing 40.
…So do folks think it’s a lot of people in the millennial generation or the next step lower in Gen z? … Or both? :man_shrugging:

12

There’s a good chance you are the youngest person posting in this thread…so it could be all of the above, really :smirk:

1 Like
13

Could just be my perspective, but I don’t think that history is particularly important to most people in regards to most subjects. To think that it would be different in the cocktail world is a mistake.

I personally, and I know most of you do too, care about the history of cocktails. For me the context of everything before is what gives a deeper understanding what you’re doing and why.

One of my personal qualms with drink history is how limited it is to the context of the last 400/500 years while there are examples of humans imbibing across 20k years. I think even this gives more insight to why we drink.

But an example limited to the last 100/200 years: the margarita.

Margarita means Daisy. What’s the first Daisy? What makes it a Daisy? Does that mean it has to have a liqueur/modifier to me considered a Daisy? What’s a Tommy’s? Do you like it better? What do people drink (referring to both era and regional preferences)?

The answer to all of these questions can inspire a plethora of diversified philosophies of drinking. Which is important when understanding yourself as a bartender.

I’ve found it’s important to not only know the specs to a drink, but to have your personal favorite spirit choice or version of it. Do you like a daiquiri with a funky Jamaican rum or dry Spanish style rum or something in between like Charanda? Maybe you have a blend in mind.

And when answering all these questions I like to think about Dave Embury’s The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks. He has his own preference for a sour - 8:2:1 - but he tells you early on (and repeatedly) that these are his opinions and that ultimately the only correct opinion is that of the drinker.

2 more example in my rant on this old post and I’m done…

The Old Fashioned. So many bartenders learn that it used Rye instead of Bourbon so now they use that. Or that it was often a lemon peel. This makes them carry this pretentious air about what they think a proper Old Fashioned constitutes. Yet I’m sure each one of them would be appalled to have a Gin Old Fashioned ordered while completely missing the fact that the OF was not limited to any spirit choice or garnish and that instead that is where we must be discerning and thoughtful as informed bartenders.

Okay last one! Rickeys. I love me a Gin Rickey with a float of bitters. And Rickeys are now mostly Gin versions, yet they came from Joe Rickey which enjoyed his with Bourbon + lime + soda. I tried this. It is abrasive to say the least. It befuddled me that he enjoyed this…UNTIL!!! I learned that present day limes haven’t been around for all that long and likely weren’t the limes used in his. It was likely Key Limes. I tried this… WOW! SO MUCH BETTER. Makes so much more sense to me now.

Without context… we’re just getting people drunk. With context… we’re getting them drunk on information. The hangover might be the same, but the satisfaction is unique.

2 Likes
14

A while back Punch commissioned me to delve into some of these issues. Here, after many drafts, is what I came up with. I could have gone on far longer (and did, before sensible editing got to it).

8 Likes
15

Great article Dave!

I wonder what the ages of the “classic” bartenders were when they perfected their craft. Jerry Thomas, Ada Coleman, Tom Bullock, Harry Craddock, et al… Were they in their early 20s as a lot of people breaking into bartending are these days, or were they more established and chose it as a career rather than a temporary stepping stone to a 9-5?

It certainly seems as if age has a lot to do with flavor preference. The younger you are, the sweeter you want your drink to be. That explains the youth revolution in the 60s pointing toward breakfast cereal flavors, the 70s with fruit flavors, and the 80s with candy flavors.

Another thing that is sadly lacking today is training for bartenders. Owners spend more time teaching POS systems than drink ratios. BarSmarts was brilliant and came along at the right time.

One last thought. People Like Dave Arnold are genius and deservedly so, but thankfully they are few and far between. When the processes required to make a drink exceed the means of most bars or mixologists, a resigned sense of never measuring up comes into play. So people have to come up with something even more outrageous and innovative. Sometimes to the detriment of the customer. Dry ice in drinks? Charcoal cocktails? Even the venerable Blue Blazer is more of a dangerous novelty than a drink that will be the hit on a modern cocktail menu. And by the way, great analogy of Be-Bop taking a classic and restructuring it to the point of unrecognizability.

Cheers!

16

Thanks, Blair!
In the days before community college and the G.I. bill bartender was a good career for a smart person with ambition and no money (you have to be smart to be a good bartender, or at least a good cocktail bartender, because of the demands of the job). There was no I’ll-just-bartend-for-a-bit-and-then-start-my-career. Bartending was the career. All those folks you named started quite young. Jerry Thomas even gave up his intended career, as an artist/illustrator, for bartending.

And yeah, training has fallen by the wayside, replaced with YouTube videos and podcasts and an ever-shrinking handful of standard texts, none of which are systematic or holistic. It’s all just dribs and drabs.

Good call on that feeling of having to measure up; that drives a whole lot of desperate wheel-spinning.

2 Likes
17

I love that quote from Cleve. Such an interesting way of looking at cocktails back then.

18

P.S. Just remembered to my intense embarrassment that “I Got Rhythm” is by Gershwin, not Berlin. Oy. Let’s see if I can correct it.

1 Like
19

Who could ask for anything more?

4 Likes
20

Yesterday, I tried out Schmuck in the East Village. The staff are almost pathologically friendly and welcoming, the (hip-hop) music wasn’t too intrusive, the space has some fun lamps, and an impressive custom stainless steel bar. The drinks are aggressively bizarre. My first cocktail was terrible and I didn’t even finish it, and the “Martini” I retreated to had been augmented with this and that and was obviously no longer a Martini—perhaps still Martini-inspired and basically drinkable, but also less than the sum of its parts. My companion’s drinks were less challenging, but nothing either of us would seek out again. The food appears to all be aggressively twisty, as well—the fried potato option is served with peanut butter and pickled garnishes (OK)—but we didn’t actually try enough of the food menu ourselves to really judge. The joint is energetic and loud, full, and there’s a line right out the door and halfway down the block. (We snagged third place in line by queuing up 20 minutes before opening.) The rest of the customers seem delighted to be there. I felt like a stranger in a strange land.

All the evidence of success—my personal experience aside—suggests that Schmuck is doing everything exactly right.

What they are doing seems to have only similarities to what I think of as cocktails and cocktail culture. The forms are there, but it’s like a parallel universe. (I have always felt much the same about Mace and its European antecedents.)

5 Likes