Ask a Bartender!

[gentleben]

Just to get things rolling again (I still require help procrastinating for my contract law and criminal law finals) here's the cocktail of the month from Club Suntory (The Australian Bartender's Club).

The Citrus Sling

Highball Glass
45ml Licor 43
15ml Lemon Juice
Dash of Bitters
Top with cloudy apple juice
Garnish with lemon or apple slice

 

[smokeybearsb]

Do you know how to make a BMW, and if so, do you think it's good?

Baileys, Malibu and Whiskey. Not really my thing, but reminds me of a drink we used to make when we were younger - Vodka, Malibu, Kahlua and Milk which would kick you square in the face.

I didn't know anyone would put milk in a drink like that. I imagine it has the same effect as putting milk in coffee?
I was talking to my friend about "Screaming Orgasms" (which sound amazing, imo-the name is part of it) and she said that they had milk in them.

 

[gentleben]

Do you know how to make a BMW, and if so, do you think it's good?

Baileys, Malibu and Whiskey. Not really my thing, but reminds me of a drink we used to make when we were younger - Vodka, Malibu, Kahlua and Milk which would kick you square in the face.

I didn't know anyone would put milk in a drink like that. I imagine it has the same effect as putting milk in coffee?
I was talking to my friend about "Screaming Orgasms" (which sound amazing, imo-the name is part of it) and she said that they had milk in them.

Quite a lot of drinks have milk in them (White Russian - Vodka, Kahlua, Milk/cream; Screaming Orgasm - Vodka, Amaretto, Kahlua, Baileys, Milk; Toblerone - frangelico, kahlua, irish cream, honey, chocolate syrup, milk), and I wouldn't really equate it to putting milk in coffee. I used to just drink vodka and milk straight up, I loved it. Just don't go adding milk or cream to anything though. Anything with a soda in it shouldn't have milk in it as well.

 

[smokeybearsb]

*snip*

Quite a lot of drinks have milk in them (White Russian - Vodka, Kahlua, Milk/cream; Screaming Orgasm - Vodka, Amaretto, Kahlua, Baileys, Milk; Toblerone - frangelico, kahlua, irish cream, honey, chocolate syrup, milk), and I wouldn't really equate it to putting milk in coffee. I used to just drink vodka and milk straight up, I loved it. Just don't go adding milk or cream to anything though. Anything with a soda in it shouldn't have milk in it as well.

I was going to actually try milk in vodka, but due to my having absolutely no knowledge of or experience with alcoholic drinks, I figured something bad would happen. Despite this, recently I really have felt like I want to go try and be a bartender at some point.

 

[gentleben]

Any liquors you like above the others?

Hmm ill try just about anything really, the only thing that doesnt really catch my fancy is those strange herbal liquors, jager is good though. Over all anything with tequila or vodka.

Guessin' you've had Brave Bulls, Tequila Sunrises and Kamikazes then?

If you like Jager, try Chartreuse Green. Just like Jaeger, except it's over 100 proof.

Morne

I don't know that I would say Green Chartreuse is "just like jager", I find that it has quite a unique flavour.

*snip*

Quite a lot of drinks have milk in them (White Russian - Vodka, Kahlua, Milk/cream; Screaming Orgasm - Vodka, Amaretto, Kahlua, Baileys, Milk; Toblerone - frangelico, kahlua, irish cream, honey, chocolate syrup, milk), and I wouldn't really equate it to putting milk in coffee. I used to just drink vodka and milk straight up, I loved it. Just don't go adding milk or cream to anything though. Anything with a soda in it shouldn't have milk in it as well.

I was going to actually try milk in vodka, but due to my having absolutely no knowledge of or experience with alcoholic drinks, I figured something bad would happen. Despite this, recently I really have felt like I want to go try and be a bartender at some point.

If you want to do it, do it mate. I didn't get in to the industry because I wanted to be a bartender, I got in to it because I needed a pay cheque, and in the end I just ended up sticking with it and enjoying it, but if its something you want to do you should definitely give it a bash - it's not like its an industry that you can't get out of when you want to.

 

[Vorpals]

Do you need to go to a bartending school to get a job as a bartender?

If not, how do you get the job?

 

[gentleben]

Do you need to go to a bartending school to get a job as a bartender?

If not, how do you get the job?

Nope, bar tending school is rubbish, learn by doing, you can learn just as much by watching other people do stuff as you can by learning a whole bunch of cocktails that you are never going to use in a real world bar setting. I mean, sure, I know how to make all the classics, and I find that knowing them is great because it allows you to create things in a similar vein, but I could count the number of martinis that I have made in the more than a year that I have worked in a bar on one hand. I learned by doing, I worked my way up from glassy to bar-back, to stock controller to bartender.

In the end, the people who get jobs in bars aren't the people who can make 40,000 different cocktails with names that are sexualized puns, they're the people who are switched on enough to know about everything that's going on around them, know the laws that they have to adhere to, and on top of that is able to serve more than one person at once.

In short, if you want to do a bartending course do it, but if I was hiring I wouldn't give a shit about the drinks you could make, I would just want to know that you could handle the job.

 

[The Salty Vulcan]

whose the strangest patron youve ever served?

 

[gentleben]

whose the strangest patron youve ever served?

I've served a midget before, and a guy who must have had some sort of mental retardation, as it took him about a second to say each word when he asked for a drink. Other than that it's the standard combination of people gurning their faces off, people drunk out of their minds and the odd eccentric who gets in (men in women's clothing etc).

Last Saturday I personally served one guy who decided to pull out a bag of about 15 Es at the bar and asked his mates "does anyone want a pinger?", one guy who was so chopped that he literally looked like he had cerebral palsy of the face, and two girls who bought martinis only to complain after I gave them to them that they "tasted just like straight alcohol".

 

[gentleben]

Here's a drink I made last night as an experiment that turned out really well, a little bit of a twist on the traditional Sazerac with an almond and lavender foam on top.

Ben's Sazerac

45ml Jim Beam Rye
15ml Lemercier Absinthe
60ml ruby red grapefruit juice
1 strawberry
2 dashes Peychaud bitters
splash of simple syrup

- muddle the strawberry with the simple syrup in a Boston glass
- add the other ingredients
- shake and double strain to a chilled rocks glass

Foam

15ml Monin Orgeat Syrup
15ml Monin Lavande Syrup
1 egg white

- Add ingredients to a mixing glass
- shake with the spring from a hawthorne strainer until the right consistency is achieved (30 seconds of hard shaking)
- pour to the top of the drink in the rocks glass

Give it a bash, it will probably be beyond the reach of most home bars (it sure as hell is beyond mine), but I'm definitely going to push it in the next couple of weeks and see if I can work any variations in to it (I'm thinking of getting rid of the rye and replacing it with gin or something - it would significantly change the character of the drink and almost completely remove it from being a Sazerac, but I think it would make it more accessible to a lot of people - not many people drink bourbon cocktails these days).

 

[gentleben]

One month bump!

Got asked by a friend to make her a cocktail for her 21st birthday. It's an African themed party because she's from South Africa, so here's my Dark Continent Martini

30ml Zubrowka (Bison grass flavoured vodka)
10ml Dom Benedictine
15ml Creme de Cacao
Dashes of cranberry and apple juices
Dash of Peychaud Bitters

served in a Martini glass.