Learnings from bartenders…

My friend and colleague Mikael Ekman www.cocktail-cocktail.nl
is our Dutch bartender champion.
Last year he even became 2th of the world.
It’s really nice to hear his story�s. they are very similar with our barista story’s. I talk a lot with mikael about recipes, presentation and taste combinations. I can recommend it to everybody. We can learn a lot from bartenders.

They are competing much longer then we do. They have seen it all, and they did it all. The big difference between a barista competition and a bartender competition is that our sensorial judges see who’s making the signature drink, and what’s used for ingredients.

The sensorial judges in the bartender competition are judging in a separate room. So they are 100% independent. I think we have to try this in our barista competitions. The reason is that our sensorial judges know who the competitor is. Know his/her history, see how he/she works and �most important� know if he/she is a favorite… I think this has nothing to do with taste, color and optical presentation.

To come back to Mikael�He bought this beautiful Air streamer. He rebuilds it to a unique mobile cocktail bar. And because Mikael does a lot of work for Douwe Egberts, he prepared the air streamer to be used as a mobile espresso bar.

I haven�t seen such a unique mobile espresso bar before, if you did, please sent me a picture?

Jeroen