Transcript
Hi, I’m Chris Cardone, and I’m the United States East Coast representative of the Flair Bartenders’ Association. Today I’m going to talk about the tools use can use when you flair bartend. You could pretty much flair with any item behind any bar any day of the week, but we’ll go through some individual items. Most of the time you’re going to start with a glass, so you can certainly use a glass for flair bartending. You can also open a beer with flair. You can simply take your bottle opener and you can spin it around and pop it open and open a beer with some flair. You can use a coaster with flair. So if somebody comes into your bar, a nice way to greet them is dropping a coaster on the bar using some flair bartending techniques.
Maybe you’re going to pour a drink. Now we can do this two ways. We can take our bottle and we can simply pour it into a glass or a tin. Or, for those of you guys who like the jigger pour, jigger pouring is certainly an option for flair bartending as well. So we can use a jigger while we flair bartend. Make sure our pours are proper. You can use muddlers while you bartend. A lot of times when I’m at work I’ll muddle my drink up and then I’ll take my muddler, throw it behind my back, and drop it back onto my bar. Another time I might be using a strainer, so maybe I’m going to strain my drink out of a tin, and I want to really make a scene and show them how I can flair with my strainer. Again, some people will say that simply using a bar spoon in a really nice way and just spinning it in your hands technically is flair bartending especially if you can do it really quiet and nobody can hear the ice. That’s considered elegance behind the bar and that’s another item of flair bartending.
So the concept is, you can pretty much use any item behind a bar whether it’s a glass, a beer, a coaster, or napkin, a bottle, and a tool that you definitely want to use behind the bar, excuse me, not behind the bar but when practicing flair is a flair bottle. These bottles are unbreakable and that way if you drop it on the ground it’s not going to shatter all over your hands or over your face. If you throw it in the air and it hits another bottle or a tin, it’s not going to break. So this is definitely a tool that you want to use while practicing and learning flair bartending. It’s probably the item of choice for all flair bartenders when learning a new move or practicing an old move or something that they’re not ready to go to glass with. It’s also a really good confidence booster for somebody who’s just learning how to do this stuff.
And those are the tools to use when you flair bartend.
