Transcript

Hi, I’m Chris Cardone and I want to talk about what it takes to become a flair bartender. There’s a lot of different ways to do this. Some people simply go to a bar, see it happen and say, ‘I want to learn how to do that.’ Other people go online to howcast.com or other sites and learn how to do it that way – by learning by watching it on TV. And some people just pick up bottles and start practicing and learning it that way.

I’d rather tell you how I started to become a flair bartender. I was working at a very small little pub in Long Island, not really much going on and the bartender I was working with showed me how to take a beer bottle off the bar. So somebody finished their beer, and instead of just picking it up and saying, ‘hey, would you like another beer?’ it was a simple, ‘hey, would you like another beer?’ And I found that my tips started to increase and people started to come when I was working and people started throwing twenty bucks on the bar and say, ‘do that again!’ or, ‘do it with your left hand’ or things like that.

And so I started kind of getting into it, and then I saw the movie Cocktail and I watched Tom Cruise and literally studied every single move and every single thing he did and memorized that. Then from there I started watching movies from the Flair Bartender’s Association and watching more and more people with better skills doing more and more moves and kind of learning their things. And then I started to compete, and when I started to compete I went down to the Cayman Islands and saw the fraternity, the really tight group of flair bartenders that took this stuff really seriously. And from there they showed me the difference between working flair and exhibition flair. They showed me how to actually do spin tens and to actually manipulate bottles and really work them around your body and kind of make it look smooth and really kind of just understand the concept of flair bartending.

Then, I learned about the flair bottle. The flair bottle is the bottle that you use to practice. It’s unbreakable and it’s shatter-proof. So, if you hit your head, it hurts, but it doesn’t break and smash over your feet. I have scars all over my fingers. I have one big broken bone in my eyebrow from practicing and bottles breaking over me or bottles hitting and kind of clunking into my head and things of that nature. So it takes a little bit of practice and it certainly takes some pain to learn how to do this stuff, but to become a flair bartender you get the tools of the trade and you start to learn how to practice them.

The other thing is, there are no set rules and no set moves that are standard. It’s an art form, so you can do whatever you want however you want to manipulate. Some people like to juggle bottles in the air three and four at a time. Other people use contact juggling and use them along their body. There’s a whole bunch of different ways to do flair bartending. You got to kind of find your style and the way that fits your personality and kind of make it your own. That’s why if you watch the best of the best, they don’t look like each other because they all have their own way of doing things.

But, to break it down, the way you learn flair bartending is to practice, practice, and practice and take the bumps and the bruises with the success. And that’s how to become a flair bartender.

Transcript

Hi. I’m Chris Cardone. I’m a bartender in New York City. I’m also a flair bartender in New York City. I’ve been bartending since 1998. Sometimes it pains me to say that but that’s how long I’ve been bartending for. I’ve been flair bartending since 2000. And basically I got into the business because I wanted to make a lot of money, pick up chicks, and it kind of grew from there.

I started bartending at a really small, little Irish pub on Long Island and learned some flair bartending moves. Started competing in 2001. My first competition was the Grand Cayman Islands. I took 12th out of 25th on that one and something just clicked in 2003. Started make top ten world finishes and my best one I ever did was 5th place in the world. And basically now I train and judge and get involved in all sorts of bartending competitions and flair bartending events and things of that nature. And I also work down in the West Village at Beatrice Inn.

It’s 285 West 12th Street. You can learn more information about how to flair bartend at barflair.org, which is the FBA or the Flair Bartenders’ Association official website. You can learn how to flair and practice with a flair bottle you can buy on barproducts.com. And now I’m going to show you all you need to know how to learn flair bartend or master flair bartending.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Chris Cardone from the Beatrice Inn. I’m going to teach you how to garnish with flair.

Garnishing is so important because it’s the last thing the customer’s going to remember. It’s like the climax of the movie, it’s the final straw right before you give the customer the drink, and it’s going to leave a lasting impression. So to do all this crazy bottle and tin work, make all these crazy drinks, and then you just drop a lemon into their drink. It just kind of loses, and it’s anti-climatic, and it’s not that much fun. So I’m going to show you how to garnish with flair.

So we’ll pretend that this is a full drink of something, whatever that may be, and we’ll take our lemon. Now the way we’re going to do this, you’re going to take your lemon, you’re going to squeeze it into the drink, and then we’re going to throw it from behind our back and catch it in the drink or in our other hand. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to take our lemon, we’re going to squeeze, we’re going to bring it around our back, we’re going to throw it over our left shoulder, and into our drink.

Now the key to this is the release point. So when you come around your back, you want to go to your opposite butt check, and you’re going to release, and you’re going to kind of throw it up towards the sky. That way it has kind of a target to go up and it will go in your drink. So one more time to show you, we’re going to squeeze it, throw it around, catch it in our drink, and give it to our guest.

Now, if you’re wondering about those friendly health department people, they always expect you to have tongs, so no sweat. We throw it behind our back, we catch it in our drink, and now the health department’s happy with us, too. And that’s how we flair with the garnish.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Chris Cardone, I’m the north east United States representative of the Flair Barton association, and I’m going to show you how to do a behind the back to a forearm stall.

Now the forearm kind of takes up all of this, right, so what we’re going to do is we’re going to end up catching it on the back of our forearm here.

So it’s not a bad idea to just practice stalling like this, just to get comfortable with the actual feel of the stall, and actually holding it here.

That’s part of the battle.

Once you get comfortable with that, the next part is to learn how to actually do the throw and the release.

So what we’re going to do is you’re going to take your bottle that you’re practicing with, and you’re going to bring it around your back.

Now I find that you can do it either like this, where you pull your arm in and then bring your arm up, but I find it’s a little easier to try to throw it between your body and your arm here.

That way it’s already kind of in position to catch it and let it come up, and then you’re going to catch it right on your forearm.

Now the key to this is to actually have the release and the rotation correct, so you want to just kind of get used to throwing it and letting it just … get comfortable with the throw, that it lands flat like this because again it’s going to eventually land flat on your arm.

Another thing that’s really important is I find that it takes time for the public to understand what they just saw, so landing it on your arm and letting it fall off really quickly doesn’t give the impact of keeping it up there.

So get used to stalling that bottle like this for a while so that way people can catch up to what they just saw and really be impressed by it.

So quickly, it look like this.

And that’s our forearm stall from behind the back.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Chris from the Flair Bartenders’ Association, and I’m going to teach you how to do an over the shoulder stall.

The over the shoulder stall involves two things. First, learning how to stall a bottle. The best way to learn how to stall a bottle is to just holding the bottle on your hand. At some point, it’s nice to bounce it on your hand, or to move it all around and just get comfortable with it landing. Because when it comes over your shoulder, it’s going to land on your hand. So, you have to get comfortable with the feel of a bottle sitting on the back of your hand.

The second part of this is an over the shoulder throw. The way you do this is it’s actually going to come over your shoulder, but you’re going to sort of bring your hand up to like, as high up as you can get it, and then use your finger to push the bottle over your shoulder. So, you’re not starting down here and trying to do it. You’re kind of bringing it up here, and as you can see on the motion, it’s going to fly over my shoulder. It takes a few bumps in the head to get kind of use to of exactly where to bring it up to, but you’re going to kind of release it over your shoulder, and then it’s going to fly over. That’s the second move.

So, the first move is just to get comfortable with the stall. The second move is just getting comfortable throwing it over your shoulder. Now, you can do this with one rotation very soft, but I find that two rotations gives my body and my mind and my eyes a little bit more time to learn exactly where the bottle needs to go, and where my hand needs to go to catch it. Doing it with one rotation, you feel kind of rushed, and like, you have to do it really quickly. So, by sending it over with the second rotation, it gives yourself a lot more time to adjust to what’s happening to it.

So, what we’re going to do is we’re going to take your finger. You’re going to bring it over, and you’re going to release, and you’re going to stall onto the back of your hand. So, one more time, we’ll show you, and that’s how you do a behind the back, over the shoulder into a stall.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Chris Cardone from the Beatrice Inn in New York City and I’m gonna
teach you how to catch a beer bottle behind your back. It’s a great move.
The reason I like it so much is that it’s a very low risk move. When
somebody’s done with their beer, there’s nothing really there except their
five cent deposit so if you drop it or it breaks behind the bar, it doesn’t
really cost the bar owner any money.

No one’s really gonna care except for you maybe, being a little
embarrassed, so it’s a really, really nice way to start learning how to be
comfortable flaring behind an actual live bar. The technique behind it is
really actually quite simple. It looks like it’s going over your shoulder
but it’s actually not. It’s actually going off to your side. When you
practice, you start with a tin. You take your tin and you place it to your
side.

Then what you’re gonna do is you’re going to gently pull the tin toward
your body and let go. You also wanna slightly angle the tin so you have
more surface area to grab. When you let go, it gonna just fall behind you.
Now, the other part of this is to catch it behind your back. You wanna
create a target with your hand, so you wanna place your open hand up with
your thumb against the small of your back and you want it where your belt
starts, where that line is.

This is your target and this give you an idea of where your tin is gonna go
when you gently release it out and then, you’ll know when to squeeze. The
other thing is when you let go of the tin, you wanna keep an eye on the tin
because you’ll know the timing-wise of when it’s going to actually fall
into your hand by watching the tin drop behind your back. When you look at
it quickly, it looks like it’s coming over your shoulder but it’s really
going over to the side of you.

Eventually, you’ll feel comfortable. You graduate to a beer. It’s really no
different. The beer’s gonna be empty. In this case, it’s full but it’s
gonna be empty. You’re gonna take your been, you’re just gonna drop it
behind your back and and catch it behind your back. That’s how you drop a
beer behind your back.

Transcript

Hi. I’m Chris Cardone. I’m from the Flair Bartender Association and I’m going to show you how to do columns. Now columns is essentially juggling with one hand. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to have two bottles working with one hand and they’re going to be going on a pattern. Now the concept of the pattern is to go out away from your body. So the first bottle’s going to come up and sort of go that way with kind of a gentle release to go that direction.

So it’s going to come up and come down. And as that one comes down, it’s out of the way of the next one to go. And it just kind of goes in that pattern of coming up, coming up, and coming up and just over and over and over again but it’s one-handed juggling. The other thing is how to start it. You basically are just going to hold your bottles in what was known as a lobster grip many years ago, kind of because you have three fingers, and you basically are going to grip the bottle like that. You’re going to release the first bottle with a snap of a wrist.

So you’ll hold it basically like that and snap your wrist to release the first bottle. And then when the bottle hits its apex and starts making its way down that’s when you release the second bottle. When you’re done, you’re going to essentially catch them in the same way using those three fingers. So you’ll catch the first bottle and then the second bottle will catch the same way essentially. So to give you an idea of how this works we’re going to throw this up and just go in that pattern. And that is how you do a two bottle column.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Chris Cardone. I’m the Northeast United States representative of the Flair Bartending Association and I want to talk about sequencing. Sequencing when it comes to Flair Bartending is so important to make yourself look smooth and make the Flair Bartending aspect quicker and more precise. So when it comes to sequencing it’s taking a bunch of moves, putting ’em into what’s called a sequence and making it look smooth. It’s an art to it and a science to it.

So the first thing you have to do is figure out what moves you want to put in the sequence. So for today we’ll just say, I want to take a bottle pass through. I want to take a bottle exchange and also a bottle pour and put ’em together. So I want to think about how I can take these three moves and put ’em together in a sequence to make it look smooth. So if I’m gonna do an exchange I wanna figure out that I’m gonna start by holding my bottles in the exchange position where I can take the bottle and swipe it through the other one.

Now the next move is gonna be an exchange behind my back. So I can take a bottle and I can throw it like this and catch it or I can think about after I do the swipe through where I want to go. And I’m gonna go behind my back so why change my position when I can simply throw it behind my back. Then I have to think about pouring the bottle like this. So how do I take catching a bottle behind my back and putting that together with a pour. Maybe instead of just pouring it I’m gonna take it and throw it behind my back and catch it like that to a pour.

And then when I want to put it all together, I think about my moves, I think about my hand positioning and I make it all look smooth like that. Make it all into a smooth sequence of moves instead of trying to do one move at a time. It makes the bartender look smoother and it makes a quicker action. So now I’m pumping out my drinks faster. And that’s how you put a sequence of moves together.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Chris Cardone I work at the Beatrice Inn in New York City and I’m going to teach you to do a two tin capture. When you’re capturing an object, it’s basically you’re swiping it or stealing it out of the air. You can do this with garnishes. You can do it with bottles. Do it with a lot of different objects behind the bar, but today we’re going to focus on the two tin capture.

So what we’re going to do is, you’re going to bring your first tin, you’re going to hold it with the mouth facing down, and you’re going to hold it where you feel most comfortable. Some people feel more comfortable in the middle, I feel more comfortable at the bottom of the tin to give myself that swiping motion. The only way you can’t hold it is like this, It just won’t work.

So you’re going to hold it wherever you feel most comfortable with the mouth facing down and you’re going to make a swiping motion. Your other tin, in this case, is going to sit on an angle that you would bring the tin down to. So it’s going to sit like that. If the tin’s like this, all you’re going to do is hit it and it’s going to fire into your body. So the tin has to be on an angle to work with the other tin to come down and capture it.

Now the best way to practice this move, is to simply keep your tin here, come down, and get your hand out of the way and steal it out of the air a few times. Once you get comfortable, you start here, you toss your tin up, and then you capture it out of the air and when you get really comfortable with it, that’s when it becomes a smooth motion of, as this tin goes up, this tin comes up at the same time and then it comes down.

You don’t have to kill the tin. A lot of people just try to, as hard as they can. Generally, that causes you to lose the tin or bang the tin somewhere else or, it’s not about that. It’s about the motion of how you’re bringing it down and the timing of it.

So again, this tin sits onto an angle. This tin comes up and comes back down and as you capture it, you want to finish it with tilting this up, because if you capture it and just hold it like this, the tin will never stay and it will fall out. The garnish would fall out, the bottle would fall out. So it’s really important that after the capture, you’re always finishing so that the object’s facing up so the tin will hold it in.

So one more time. It looks like this. And that’s how we capture two tins.

Transcript

Hi. I’m Chris Cardone from the Flair Bartender’s Association. I’m the northeast United States representative, and I’m going to teach you today how to do an arm roll with a tin. It’s a really really easy move once you understand the concept behind it and the way it works, but it’s something that a lot of bartender’s like to start a routine with, so whether they’re competing or working in a bar, it’s a really nice way to just get things rolling.

So the concept behind how this works is, it’s all about the tin’s spinning. The tin has to be in motion. If it doesn’t it’s just going to land here and it’s not going to go anywhere.

So to start it, you have to take your wrist, you bring, basically, your wrist inside and then you snap the tin out. And you’ll see there’s a rotation to the tin when you’re snapping it like this. Then, once you snap it, you’re going to simply place your arm out. The tin is going to hit here and, because it’s rolling already from the snap that you’re doing, it’s going to hit your hand, roll down your arm, and when it gets to your elbow, that’s when you’re going to set your other hand, basically chest high, sitting here waiting, for the tin to come and fall into your hand.

So you’re going to roll it down, right into your hand, and that is the move in general.

Now again, the key to this is how hard you snap it. If you snap it really hard it usually doesn’t work so well because it will hit and roll off and things like that.

The other thing is how you angle your arm. If you angle your arm backwards, it’s going to roll down and it will fall behind your back, leading to another move, which is an arm roll, catching it behind your back. But when you’re first starting you want to slightly tilt your arm to your left or inside your body, and you’re going to let it fall into your hand.

So again, it comes down and rolls in. And then if you tilt your arm out, you’re going to roll it down and catch it behind your back. But either way, the concept is a snap of your wrist, and then catching it. And that’s how you do an arm roll with a tin.

Transcript

Hi. I’m Chris Cardone from the Flare Bartenders’ Association and I’m going to teach you how to do a two bottle column with a swipe through.

And the concept of this move is to simply do a column with one hand. A column is just juggling with two bottles with one hand as the pattern goes up and comes back in. Now the second hand is going to take a bottle and swipe through the bottles as they are going up and down. So as the first one comes up you are going to go in and then the second bottle comes through that.

Its kinda hard to explain so I should probably just show you. So you’re gonna take your two bottles, you’re gonna throw them in the air in a column and then you’re gonna come through with your other bottle. Just like that.

And that is how you do a two bottle column with a swipe through.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Chris Cardone. I work at the Beatrice Inn in New York City. And I’m going to teach you how to pour with flair.

This is a very, very, very easy trick to do. It’s something that pretty much anybody on the planet can learn to do really quickly. We’ll start with the practice bottle and then we’ll show you how to do it live with liquid. But it’s really, really simple as soon as you learn how to hold everything.

So you’re going to start holding your bottle in what’s called a reverse grip. So you have your bartender grip, and then you have a reverse grip. You’re also going to hold your tin in the same way. Two reverse grips to start. What you’re going to do is you’re going to bring the bottle underneath your arm and bring it up to a pour. At some point when you feel like you’re getting close to being done, you’re going to spin the two underneath your arm, back around, and then you’re going to continue to spin the tin a little bit more, and then you’re going to bring your bottle down and that’s it.

So we’ll do it one more time slow. Take our bottle and our tin, both in a reverse grip. Bring it underneath our arm. We start to pour. We spin the tin and the bottle. You continue to spin the tin a little bit more, and then you bring your bottle down, and then you would pour that into your drink. And you’re done.

So, to see it live with a bottle. Reverse grip. Reverse grip. You bring it underneath. You start to pour. You spin out. You keep spinning. You’re done. And then you would pour that into your drink. And that is how to pour with some serious flair.

Transcript

Hi, Chris Carone from the Beatrasin in New York City. I’m going to teach you how to do a shadow pass. I’m not really sure where the name came from. It might have originated from a guy who was working at the Shadow Bar in Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas but regardless, it’s a no-look pass behind your head from one hand to the other.

It definitely takes a lot of practice and it’s going to take some clunks to the head. I promise you. But, the general concept of the move is to take the bottle, throwing it from one hand to the other. Except, instead of in front of your face, it’s going to go behind your head. So, you’re going to have a little bit of a rotation. You’re going to start with your bottle in sort of a juggler’s grip, how a juggler would juggle bottles.

You’re going to take your bottle and you’re going to throw it across your body, catching it with this hand. Now, a good way to practice is to not look at it as it comes around because you’re not going to be able to look at it as it goes behind your head. You take your bottle. You throw it and you catch it behind – on the other side of your head with your other hand.

At some point you’re going to graduate to going behind your back. And that’s a shadow pass. Like that. You’re going to kind of release it and just have to know where that hand is going to go. When I first started doing this, I remember watching myself in the mirror so I would know when to squeeze. So, it’s a good little trick, a good trick-er, to learn how to do a shadow pass is to look in the mirror so you can learn when to squeeze the bottle.

Part of it is to look at the bottle and follow the bottle as it is coming behind you because you can kind of gauge where to put your hand based on throw. You’ll know by looking at when it comes passed you where to grab. But, I promise you – when you first practice this, use a flare bottle and get ready because this is going to get clunked a few times. Eventually, you will graduate to your glass bottle and you’ll take it and we’ll throw it behind our back to do a shadow pass.

And that is how you do a shadow pass.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Chris Cardone from the Flair Bartend Association and I’m gonna teach you how to do a stall. A stall is just taking any object behind a bar and landing it anywhere on your body and keeping it there. The most common stall that you see is one on the back of someone’s hand where the bottle sits back here, but you can do it on your forearm, you can throw it up and stall it on the opposite side, you can pretty much stall it anywhere on your body. I’ve seen people do it on their legs, on their chin, on their head, but we’re gonna start with a basic stall which is just on the back of your hand.

The way you practice stalling, the way I practice stalling is you basically place the object on your hand and get it comfortable. At that point, you want to start to move it around because the bottle’s not just gonna land flat so you wanna get a comfort level for whether it goes this way, or this way, or up or down and you just kind of get comfortable moving it all around. At some point, I like to practice actually going down to pick something up and then coming back up and making sure it’s still there. And again at some point you’re gonna just say, okay, I can keep this thing on my hand. Then, what I like to do is take the bottle and just drop it on my hand and get a feel for the weight and get a feel for how it’s gonna feel to land.

The other thing is when you’re stalling you don’t want to create an impact, you want to make a cushion. So you don’t want to hear it smack your bones on your body, that doesn’t exactly feel good. So you want to kind of bring it down with the stall. So as you bring it down, it kind of create cushion for it. And that kind of softens the ability to kind of keep it on your hand or your body part.

Then at some point you’re gonna feel very comfortable. You’re gonna take your bottle and throw it up to a stall. And that’s pretty much how you do it. You take your barbel, you just do a quick rotation up and you land it kind of bringing your hand down to create a cushion, landing it on a comfortable part of your hand and that is how to do a stall.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Chris Cardone from the Beatrice Inn in New York City and I’m gonna teach you how to do a flat behind the back. Now the forward flat just means an object going behind your back and not rotating. And the reason for this is that certain times you’ll have a full bottle behind the bar that you can’t rotate otherwise it’ll spill so you have to use something flat. Now you could practice this with a tin and learn how to do a flat behind the back with a tin and then eventually you can graduate to a bottle.

Now, obviously we wanna start with something that’s unbreakable like a flair bottle and then we’ll work our way into glass and then we’ll work our way into full bottles. But the concept behind a flat is you take your bottle, you bring it around your back and you’re gonna release it and push with your finger so that way it stays flat. So to look from behind it basically comes around, your release point is your opposite butt cheek and you push with your finger. And when you push with your finger it keeps the bottle from rotating and just keeps a flat behind the back.

Once you get comfortable with a practice bottle you can then move into a little bit of liquid or an exhibition flare bottle where you bring it around your back and you do a flat toss to your other hand, like that and there’s no spill. Now at some point you’re gonna get comfortable that you can do this at work no matter where the setting of the bottle is because you’re obviously at work when you’re getting busy. You can’t say, “Oh, let me do this trick with only bottles that are a quarter full”. So you want to be able to do it with any bottle.

No matter the weight change, it doesn’t change the move at all. You come around your body. You get to your opposite butt cheek, you push with your finger and release and no drops come out of the bottle. It’s a spill-less move. And that’s a flat behind the back, coming around, catching it and then you pour it. And that is how you do a flat behind the back.

Transcript

Hi. I’m Chris Cardone from the Beatrice Inn in New York City, and I’m going to teach you how to open up three bottles with flair at the same time. Now most people know how to open a beer. You’ll take your beer opener. You’ll place it underneath the cap. Pop it off. But we want to do it a little bit more exciting. So the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to learn how to open up a beer with flair by taking our beer bottle opener. You’re going to place your pointer finger inside here, and you’re just going to kind of swing it like this. You’re going to come around the back of the beer and kind of use that to pop off the top of it.

Now to hold three beers in one hand at the same time to do this, we’re going to take our first beer and our second beer between our thumb, pointer finger, and our middle finger. The two beers are going to be held by those three fingers. Then we’re going to take our third beer and place it using our pinkie and our ringer finger to squeeze that one together. So now we have three beers in our hand. Then you’re going to take your beer opener, and you’re going to come around back like this, and we’re going to open them one, two, three.

The idea is, by doing this we can open up three beers really, really quickly with a little bit more of a show and kind of give the guests a little bit of an experience of flair bar tending while we’re speed bar tending at the same time. How many times are you going to open up one beer at a time when you have three or four people who are going to say, “Can I have three or four beers?” So we want to be able to do this really quickly. So let’s do this in full motion. We’ll see how it looks. You take your first one, your second one, and your third beer. You come around, and you got three beers opened with some flair very quickly.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Chris Cardone from the Flair Bartenders’ Association, and I’m going to teach you how to do a two tin split into a stall.

So what we’re going to do is we’re going to look at the moves separate first. A stall is just basically landing any object on any body part. In this case, we’ll say a tin on a hand. And you have to get comfortable holding a tin on the back of your hand or on your forearm or anywhere else you want to stall it, but the concept is just getting comfortable holding that there. That’s a stall. Now a two tin split is where you have two tins, you place your hand inside one, and then you use your thumb to separate the two tins. What you’re going to do then is you’re going to bring it around your body and when you get to here, you’re going to push your tin out and let the force of gravity release the tins. And that’s called a two tin split. It looks like this.

So what we’re going to do is put two moves together and make it a two tin split into a stall. So we’re going to have our tins come around and we’re going to stall the tin onto our hand, releasing the other one and just catching the one. Again, to kind of slow it down, it looks like this. Release point, opens up, and we stall it on our hand. Quickly, it looks like this. And that’s a two tin split into a stall.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Chris Cardone. I work at the Beatrice Inn in New York City and I’m going to show you how to pour from over your shoulder.

What you’re going to do is take your tin and your bottle. You’re going to hold the bottle in whats called a reverse grip, and you’re going to bring it along the side of your body. What you’re going to do is you’re going to use your finger to push the bottle to make create rotation, and you’re going to kind of bring the bottle over here at your release point.

That way, the bottle can come over your shoulder verses hitting your back. If you do it down here, where, you kind of doing it like that, it’ll hit your shoulder. It’ll hit your head. It’ll hit your back. So, you want to bring it up like this and release it at the same time.

So, it’s kind of off to your side, comes over your shoulder and then you’re going to hold your tin in your other hand to allow yourself to pour. So, breaking it down it kind of comes around like this, throws it over, and you catch it and the bottle is in a pour position and you just practice throwing it over, like that and you can do one rotation or you can snap a little harder and do two rotations, which is completely up to you.

You’re going to bring it around your body, like that, to pour. You’re other tin is going to be here and you’re going to practice to make sure you catch it where the bottle is directly over your tin so that you’re not spilling it. If you catch it like this and then bring the tin over, the floor is going to have a really good time.

So, you want to make sure when you’re practicing, you’re practicing with glass and wet. You throw it over, catch it, and you’re pouring. When you’re done, you bring your bottle down and you set your tin or your glass or whatever you’re using onto the bar. So, we’ve thrown it over our shoulder to a pour and that is how we do and over the shoulder to a pour.

Transcript

Hi. I’m Chris Cardone from the Flair Bartender’s Association, and I’m going to teach you how to flair with ice.

So we have a glass that we need to fill up with ice. But we don’t want to just take an ice scoop, scoop the ice, and put it in, although that can certainly work. We want to do a little bit more for the guest. So what I generally think is you want to start off with an empty glass with no ice in there, and do one little ice cube move, and then finish it by scooping the ice into the glass. Reason being is, if you have a glass full of ice, it’s harder to catch the ice in the glass when it’s full than when it’s empty. I guess that’s a whole philosophical discussion though.

What we’re going to do is, we’re going to take our ice with our tongs, because we don’t want to use our fingers in someone’s ice. We’re going to throw it behind our back, and catch it in our drink, and then we’ll ice up the rest of the drink. And then we’ll make our cocktail. But the concept is very very simple.

We’re going to take our scoop, or in this case, our tongs with our ice. We’re going to bring it around behind our back. We’re going to release it right by our opposite butt cheek, and we’re going to throw it up in the air and catch it into the glass. Ice is a really cool way to start things because customers just are not expecting to see ice going flying in the air. You certainly could just throw it in the air from just in front of you, but it blends a little bit more excitement if it goes behind your back.

So one last time. We throw it up. Catch it in our drink. Put it down. And we make our drink inside our glass or our tin, for that matter.

Another way to do a little bit of ice flair is to take our ice scoop, or our tongs. We take our ice and we can capture our ice by throwing it in the air, and taking it like that. And now we have ice in the tin to make our drink into there before we make our cocktails.

So you can ice your glass. You can ice your tin. But you can certainly use ice to increase the guest experience as well.

And that’s how to flair with ice.

Transcript

Hi. I’m Chris Cardone from the Flair Bartenders’ Association and I’m going to show you how to open a beer with a sort of beer hanging trick.

So what we are going to do is we’re going take the beer we are using and you’re going to take your bottle opener and this is called a flat iron bottle opener. The concept behind a flat iron is, one, you have a hole for your finger and then you have a hole for your bottle opener itself.

What we are going to do is you’re going to take your beer and you’re going to take your bottle opener and you’re going to kind of wedge the opener underneath the cap of the beer. Then you’re going to use the cap to kind of hold the beer and let it hang in the air. And then you’re going to kind of, you can kind of spin it around a little bit and things of that nature. But basically you want to get to a point where you manipulate it however you want to put it. And then you’re just going to simply kind of get it into your spot and then pop it open.

So it kind of, you know, you can of kind of take it out of an ice bucket and then kind of like bring it all the way up in front of your guests, and as it’s hanging you’re just gonna pop it open. Put it back on the bar.

And that’s kind of how to open a beer with a beer hanging trick.

Transcript

Hi. I’m Chris Cardone from the Beatrice Inn and the Flair Bartenders’ Association and I’m gonna teach you how to do a figure eight with a bounce cut.

Now, bounce cutting is important because you have to be able to finish your pour without spilling it all over the bar and wasting the product from the bar or restaurant that you work at. So a bounce looks like this. Where you simply bounce it and when you bounce it the liquid kind of hiccups in the pour spout and doesn’t spill anymore. So you are going to pour it, bounce it, and that cuts the pour for a very quick second, enough to kind of cut down with your pour.

So then when you do a figure eight what it looks like is your going to pour, come down, bring it around and then bounce your way out of it as well. The concept when you’re doing it all in one smooth motion sort of looks like a figure eight as you bring the bottle around. So you’re gonna take your bottle and your tin, you’re gonna bring it up, bounce it out, bring it back around and then pour it and bounce it back down and that is how you do a bounce cut with a pour precisely.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Chris from the Flair Bartend Association, and I’m going to teach you how to do a thumb roll.

Thumb rolling is a really easy art, once you learn how to do it. You have to basically use your thumb and push the tin. When you push a tin, the tin is going to then roll around your thumb, kind of coming back around, and then you’re going to squeeze it.

You also kind of have to move your hand a little bit down, because as gravity goes, the tin’s going to go. It’s kind of starts here, and finishes a little bit lower, not too much lower, but a little bit lower. You also will basically have the feel of the tin on your thumb the whole time, so you’ll know exactly where to bring your hand down on the tin, as it goes.

Quickly, it kind of looks like this; and that’s a thumb roll. Now, the reason that you do a thumb roll, is to sequence yourself into other moves, whether you’re putting your tin down, starting something new, or kind of going into a new move or just to keep something moving in between moves. But a thumb roll is more of a sequence filler more than a move you would do by yourself. You wouldn’t stand behind a bar and go, “Hey, check that out.”

But at the same time, you might do it in between certain other moves, to fill the gaps or to seal things. A lot of times what I start, when I work is, I’ll take a tin off the bar, and then I’ll do a thumb roll, and then bring it around my back and continue grabbing a bottle and moving on. But the thumb roll again, when you break it down, is a really, really simple move, once you master it. It’s just a matter of pushing with your thumb, letting the tin roll around, grabbing with your other hand. Excuse me – with the same hand, like that. And that’s a thumb roll, so we’re going to just push and then follow it with our thumb, and it really never leaves your thumb. It stays on there, the whole time.

And that’s a thumb roll.

Transcript

Hi. I’m Chris Cardone, and I’m going to teach you how to do a palm spin. It’s a really, really simple move. It’s something that you do all the time at your house with an empty beer bottle or a remote control. So, we’re going to do it with a glass. We could do it with a tin. The concept is to just spin the item on your palm. Now, the most important part of this is to spin it on the ball of your palm, not your fingertips and not the end of your palm, but right on the middle of your palm. Right in the juicy spot. You’re going to basically bring your item that you’re spinning, in this case a highball glass, we’re going to turn it in toward our body, and then we’re going to release it, kind of like you release a Frisbee out. We’re going to let it spin.

Now, the problem that most people have when learning how to do this is they only do a 180 because their thumb gets in the way as they spin it, and they can’t get it all the way around. So, the concept and the most important part of this is to actually open your hand and not let your thumb get in the way. So, you release, you spin, and then you squeeze when it gets all the way around for 360 degrees. So again, a palm spin is just you invert your hand, release, let it spin out, and squeeze at the point where a 360 comes around. So we turn like this.

You can do it with a tin. You can do it with your glass. You can pretty much do it with anything behind the bar, with the exception of a bottle. The reason being that when you spin your bottle, the liquid inside is going to spill out of the top when you get to that point. It will either spray across you, making you look silly, or it will spray across your guests, and they’re not going to be too happy about that. So, you want to always use a glass, a tin, or something that doesn’t have liquid inside it. You’re going to take your glass. You’re going to spin it, and that’s how you do a palm spin.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Chris Cardone, I’m the East Coast United States representative of the Flair Bartend Association and I also bartend at the Beatrice Inn in New York City. What I’m going to show you how to do today is how to pour three shots at one time into three separate glasses.

What we’re going to do is, you’re going to take your liquid and you’re going to pour however much you need to pour into each tin. Once you have your liquid in your tins, then the most important part is the ice. There needs to be enough ice in each tin to be basically the same size as a glass that you’re pouring it into so that way it spaces it out on it’s own. So we’re going to put some ice in our first tin and then when you’re first learning how to do this there’s nothing wrong with separating it and kind of seeing if you need to pull your glass out a little bit so that you have the right width. Then you would add ice to your next tin, and again see how it looks. If it looks good, you’re good. If it doesn’t look good, you can always add more ice so that it does look good.

When you feel comfortable and you know that you’re going to have the pour correctly into your glasses, then you would put your tin on top, put your strainer on top, and you’ll strain them. Obviously in a real situation, I would shake these drinks as well, but for the purposes of right now we don’t need to. So we would take our tin, we’ll take our strainer on top, and you’re going to pour the first one, just a little bit to get it started, and then you’re going to kind of work the second one, and then you’re going to work the third one.

And that is how you pour with three tins and the same time into three separate glasses. And you could do this, you know, you could make ten of them if you’d like. You just line them up, you just need enough ice and enough tins and a strainer on the top. Use a little bit of help maybe to hold them but you can pour as many as you want all straining out into them. And that is how you pour three shots into three glasses at the same time.