Episode 132

Tomatillos are those little green tomatoes with the papery husks on em that you see at the grocery store, and I personally love them for their tangy, slightly smoky flavor. To make that tomatillo juice, you just need to throw 2-3 pre-husked tomatillos in a blender with an oz or two of water, and blitz em up until they’re smooth and liquidy.

Throw that tomatillo juice along with the other ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice – give em a good, hard shake, and strain into a collins glass over ice. Garnish with your favorite bloody mary accompaniment, and enjoy it at your next booze-free brunch.

To celebrate dry January, all the ingredients in this drink and all the other mocktails we’ve featured this month will be 10% off over at ModernBarCart.com – and this includes our bamboo and stainless steel straws by Jungle Straws – because we don’t drink bloody marys like barbarians. We sip them.

During this episode, you’ll hear stories and flavor advice from the five bartenders who competed in this battle to raise money for their respective charities and nonprofits. And then at the end, I’ll give you a quick rundown of everything I’ve learned by observing, organizing, and even emceeing several cocktail competitions in the past few months.

How to Run a Cocktail Competition

Our past two episodes have been completely dedicated to cocktail competitions, the people who run them, and the bartenders who compete in them. Now, we’d like to offer a condensed bullet point list of some of my our takeaways from these two experiences and from others that we’ve had in the past.

1. Get Organized – When you run a cocktail competition, things are gonna get crazy. There’ll be bartenders slinging drinks, guests enjoying themselves, music playing – essentially, all the chaos of a bar, but with different rules. So if you’re not organized right off the bat with things like an ingredient inventory, a run of show, and a set of written bartender bios and introductory remarks, then you’re gonna sink as soon as little or big things start to go wrong. So do yourself a favor and have plenty of documentation and structure to support the event.

2. Set Creative Constraints – One of the difficult parts of running a cocktail competition is finding that happy middle ground between too many ingredients and too few. In the case of Catoctin Creek and McClintock – we were pretty lucky. Each of these distilleries offered both gins and rye whiskies, as well as one or more other bottles for bartenders to choose from in each round. That’s plenty of spirits to choose from – so in the case of the Bar Room Blitz, what we did was really focus on mixers, herbs, and citrus. We got great feedback from bartenders about the options they had in this situation. It was enough to feel like they had options, but not so much that they were intimidated.

3. Play to the Strengths of your Space – While the Catoctin Creek Battle of the Bartenders was held at a bar, the McClintock Distilling Bar Room Blitz was held at their distillery. Two VERY different spaces, each with unique pros and cons. For example, at McClintock, we didn’t have great access to ice, which is something we had to actively troubleshoot at the last minute. On the other hand, because McClintock hosts so many weddings, they’ve got a great sound system, which made it really easy to get the crowd’s attention and keep the show moving. Most importantly, you’ll need to consider what will happen when you put a crowd INTO your space. Crowds, like liquids, will move to fill whatever container they’re placed in, so make sure you have a very clear vision of where you’d like the crowd to be at any given time during the program and how you plan to accommodate them in that location with things like seating, trash cans, water dispensers, and food. If this is beginning to sound complicated to you – you’re right. It is.

4. Format is Everything – As you’ve seen, there’s a number of ways you can set up a cocktail competition. You can rely on the crowd or on judges to help make decisions regarding which bartenders advance through the rounds. You can (and probably should) have some sort of secret challenge or ingredient to keep things engaging and insert an element of surprise into the proceedings. But whatever format you choose, make sure you commit to it fully, inform your bartenders thoroughly ahead of time, and make sure the audience knows exactly what role they should be playing at any given time. If there are any question marks about what the rules are, the event could have a somewhat awkward feel to it, so keep it simple, and keep it seamless.

5. Prepare Your Judges – First of all, you should try and tap judges who have a decent amount of experience in the spirits and cocktail world – or at least folks who can speak well about flavor in front of a crowd. And to help them out, you should be really explicit about the judging criteria you’d like them to use. We created some really simple cocktail scoring sheets for the Bar Room Blitz to simplify the judging process and determine which cocktails were the most successful according to the categories we told bartenders they’d be evaluated on. I’ll include a copy of that scoring sheet on the show notes page so you can see what it looks like.