Greetings,
New here, I searched but didn’t find anything; if there’s a post that already covers this let me know and I’ll head there. Also, being new if this kind of inquiry isn’t allowed I apologize in advance.
That being said, I’m looking to better myself in this industry (part of why I joined this community in the first place), and I’m wondering if there are any recommended sources out there for bartending training, preferably online? As of right now price isn’t an issue, but I wanted to pick the experienced brains of this community to see if there are any entities out there that are better to go with for good quality training (or conversely, ones to avoid)?
Any advice or guidance is well appreciated & valued! Thanks in advance!
Ok, I’ll bite.
The people with the most investment in this forum tend to have a historical approach to spirits—many are accomplished writers with little to no professional bartending experience. To be sure, there are also professional bartenders and mixologists, who appreciate this historical approach.
As someone who is a cocktail hobbyist with only occasional “semi-pro” bartending experience, I’d say the seminal educational resource is David Wondrich’s book “Imbibe!” which is nominally a tribute to the first published bartender, but is also the first and best overview of cocktail history from the perspective of our contemporary (and probably waning) “cocktail renaissance.”
For me, the other core resource has been Martin Doudoroff’s “New and Improved Index of Cocktails & Mixed Drinks from the First Golden Age of the American Bar,” which is an iOS app. Martin has several other electronic resources to which I have not devoted nearly as much time.
Most will probably agree Wondrich and Rothbaum’s encyclopedic “Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails” is indispensable, along with the EUVS online library which was recently linked in another thread.
Apart from these landmarks, there is probably little agreement on what constitutes an essential cocktail education. As far as I can tell your focus is more practical and contemporary than mine, and I can’t speak to the many valuable resources in that area, but the above will give you an unassailable foundation in history and theory.
Indie Bartender - if you make an account has a downloadable version of the match groups bar manual from 2008.
Some additional reading in the area would include:
Meehans bartenders manual.
Morganthalers bar book
Liquid intelligence
Cocktail codex (for a more adavanced breakdown od regans cocktail families.)
This forum is more history oriented for sure, but there’s a myriad of books that purpose themselevs towards how to of service amongst the other parts of their contents around recipes and drink making.
Unfortunately our job as bartenders isn’t all theoretical. As far as i’m aware, there’s no book around the philosophy of bartending nor is there one that talks about how the way you move in a bar having any importance to the quality of a drink, though it is discussed and anyone who has sat at a bar and watched a good bartender build a 6+ round with incredible flow understands that premise.
If you’re trying to better yourself in terms of service i’d begin by asking yourself what you need to improve first, is it your speed, is it your drinks knowledge, is it your customer service, or how clean you are in the bar, or is it your techniques around drink building and how you use your tools?
I’m in the camp that bartending and mixology can be separate things that often go together but do not have to.
Mixology isn’t necessarily a profession, and it’s only a small part of some bartender’s job (tiny to non-existent for some).
I’m no bartender, but bartending seems to me to be a very hands-on sort of profession that mainly follows some variant of the apprenticeship model and advances through observation, rumination, experimentation and practice. So much of bartending is social skills—dealing with customers and coworkers. So much of bartending is practical skills (organizing and cleaning things, managing inventory, troubleshooting on the fly, unclogging drains and other such joys). Consequently, I would be concerned that online bartender training would run a high risk of just being a bunch of generic bullshit compiled to separate you from your money.
For recipe retention and some aspects of technique, I always recommend that our trainees try step-by-step Visualization, either solo or with a partner. Of course everyone’s brain is built differently, but for some the simple act of picturing the same cocktail being made over and over works wonders (in concert with reps and research).
When I started to get into cocktails, De Groff, Regan, Haigh and early Berrys were key. Of those books from ten or twenty years ago, I would still very much recommend Imbibe and Punch. The others are still great but probably not as important for someone starting now.
For me, if you’re making a go of it professionally today, you should go for Morgenthaler / Meehan and Arnold. Those books are already getting old, which sort of underlines a problem we’re having right now.
For history, go for the Oxford and Berry’s Potions of the Caribbean.
And then the apps: above all Martin’s Index for easy access to the classic corpus and Attaboy’s Bartender’s Choice, for how to actually balance many of those classic drinks.
And that’s it, really. No digital resource is any good. We’ve mostly left education in the hands of brands, and their actual support for it is not quite unwavering (when a brand supported platform is good, it tends to disappear anyway, as soon as there are changes in the advocacy department).
Thanks everyone for the replies! All of the details mentioned, even regarding the general nature of this forum, are very valuable and much appreciated!
Popping in to second Armin’s recommendation of his bar vademecum site. For those who don’t know it, it presents (in German and English) a most thorough historically-based examination of the drinks it focuses on, with exhaustive excerpts from original sources. Maybe more of an advanced-level resource, but there’s definitely nothing like it.
