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Welcome back, sir. You've been missed! As the new thread gets going I would like to put even more emphasis on the wealth of knowledge that is the old thread. Like most rookie bartenders, I tried to absorb as much as possible from every source of bartending information that I could get my hands on. Books, magazines, blogs, bartending forums, you name it. But nothing really compares to the old thread. Having observations and answers from so many different bartenders who work in so many different styles of venue is magic. It adds up to be less "How to.." guide and more insight into the depths of this industry and what it's really like being a bartender. Now then, maybe we'll actually get questions to answer instead of discussing the complexities of ice or waving our fists at the mojito!
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Aug 9, 2012 02:26
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Nth Doctor posted:Am I a loving weirdo for drinking the Old Fashioned? Well over half the time, the bartender looks at me like I grew a second head. Around a third of they time, they lack either bitters or sugar. No, you are not a weirdo. You are probably just in the wrong type of bar. Most bars lack both the proper ingredients and a bartender with the knowledge to make an Old Fashioned correctly. You have a good chance of finding a bar that has a bartender with the knowledge but he is stuck working with inadequate ingredients and he really, really doesn't want to make you the half assed Old Fashioned that he is limited to. But sometimes you get a bar that has the proper ingredients but they've got some Mr. Boston's studying, convinced he knows everything there is to know about cocktails but really needs to be beat upside the head with a bottle, makes you an Old Fashioned with this muddled slush at the bottom of your drink which you can't decide if it's fruit or slime mold, and he is down right offended if you don't think it's a work of art. Best way to judge if you're in the right bar for an Old Fashioned, is your bartender wearing suspenders? If yes, does he ask you what type of whiskey you'd prefer? If neither, order something else. Baboon Fiesta posted:What exactly is a mixologist? Google doesn't really go into much more depth than 'they are basically bartenders but sometimes engage in cocktail-alchemy'. poo poo Mixologist is a term that got thrown on bartenders who became focused on bringing back the cocktails that were the foundation of what we're doing now. These are bartenders who have dug up books from the 20-50's, studied every incarnation of a particular drink with the intention of finding the original recipe, annoyed the poo poo out of their distributors trying to buy the ingredients bartenders were using eight decades ago, and have ultimately revitalized the cocktail concept. It's evolved to where any cocktail bartender gets lumped into the mixologist classification. In my experience, most of them loving hate it. Every single cocktail focused bartender that I know put in years as a high volume or regular Joe bartender. But instead of continuing on with that, they shifted their focus to making traditional cocktails. And good for them! But they are still loving bartenders. They've never claimed to be mixologists. They don't want to be called mixologists. They're loving bartenders. So, yeah. Mixologist is a bullshit term that we'd all like to fade away. There are some pretentious fucks that glorify it but it's because they have no business calling themselves bartenders to begin with.
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Aug 9, 2012 12:51
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isomerc posted:As far as watering down liquor goes, is this and industry accepted practice, or is it just reserved for lovely bars? Is this something that's more common than we believe? It is not an accepted practice. It's illegal as gently caress. In my state I'm not even allowed to marry two near empty bottles of the same liquor into one, let alone put anything else in a bottle. It occurs at only the shittiest of bars run by the most unscrupulous of managers/owners. I can't speak with certainty as to how common it is but I'm willing to bet it is even rarer than you think. It's illegal. It's bad for business when people eventually figure it out, and they will. And it will run off the bar's better bartenders because none of us want to work in a bar that is trying to gently caress over customers like that. If I heard about a bar doing it I would assume they are a few months out from closing their doors for good.
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Aug 10, 2012 07:43
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Frozen Horse posted:Welcome back, thread and inhabitants. What would it take for you to actually permanently cut off a regular for their own good? Have any of you done so? I wasn't going to reply to this since a couple of the other bartenders got to it before I saw it. But after reading their criteria for barring someone for good, it seems to me that my bar is far, far less forgiving than other bars and way, way more inclined to throw the permanent 86 flag. Examples: - Guy in his early 20's, maybe 120 lbs. soaking wet. Only came in on the weekends. Tried his damnedest to drink just as much as his friends did but just couldn't handle his booze. Four weekends in a row we had to cut this guy off and then, not long after that, kick him out. Always a big production of arguing and yelling. Never anything physical but it would always take a couple of staff members several minutes to finally get him outside. After the fourth time we were just like "That's enough. Guy can't drink, we don't have the time to deal with that anymore, don't ever let him in again." - Local tranny started coming in, never bought a drink, just wandered around the bar. But not just wandering around trying to find someone or getting a judge of the crowd, she was just making laps around the bar waiting for someone to say something that would start a confrontation. Nothing ever really came of it, never escalated past an exchange of words, but after the third time we were done with her being in the bar. (This was five years ago, she tried to come back in the bar a couple weeks ago, had to hustle to the front and inform the new door guys that she was barred for life.) - Guy came in a few years back. His movements were jerky as gently caress, just all over the place, swaying and stumbling. Door guys refused him initially but the more they talked to him the more they realized that he wasn't drunk, something else was wrong with this guy. So I get buzzed up to the door and have a conversation with him. Turns out he'd been in an ATV accident recently and it had left him with some nerve/spinal/brain damage and while he looked drunk as piss he was actually stone sober. I felt for the guy, that's a lovely hand life dealt him, so I let him in and served him. This went on for over a year, I'd see him at the door about to be refused and I'd run up and explain the situation to the staff and wave him in. All good and well. But after awhile he realized that he could get as drunk as he wanted and bank on his disability to keep getting served. It became a huge pain in the rear end trying to judge just how drunk he actually was and after a couple weekends of us having to cut him off I decided it just wasn't worth letting him in anymore. - Older guy, probably late 40's to early 50's, started coming in only on the slow nights. Always somewhat of a dick, but he tipped decently, didn't bother the customers, and left before he got too drunk. However, every time he started to get liquored up he'd go on these long rants about how all of his friends took advantage of him and hosed him over, same with girlfriends and employers. We'd all nod, try to relate, end the conversation with "Yeah man, that sucks.." and do everything in our power to get to the other end of the bar. Then one night he makes a very flagrant pass at the wife of an off duty cop. A cop that works our district, a cop that we all know and somewhat fear. She tries to politely wave him off, he persists rather relentlessly, cop notices and gets his Irish up. We intervene, toss the guy (hard, and rather showy about it) and bar him for life. Guy hosed up one time, but we're not about to have that cop walk in and see him sitting at our bar. I guess the moral of the story is you have to gently caress up pretty bad at most bars to earn yourself a life ban. But at some bars all you have to do is gently caress up in the same way repeatedly or in what we deem to be a big way just once. In the bar industry, we only suffer so much bullshit. But it depends entirely on the bar how much bullshit we'll suffer. Dirnok fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Aug 10, 2012 |
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Aug 10, 2012 11:32
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TwoPair posted:So how does one get into bartending? I've applied a few places, but it seems like every place wants prior experience, and I can't get any experience without getting hired somewhere. It's a real catch-22. Like everyone else said, barbacking is your best bet. Another thing worth mentioning, becoming a regular at the bar you'd like to work at can also help. Coming from someone who has done the hiring at a bar for the last couple years, I've hired far more regulars than random applicants that I've never seen before. I read a really good guide to how to go about doing this correctly but I can't remember if it was in the old thread or a blog somewhere. Either way, I'll try to dig it up after work. Daric posted:James, can we try to get a list together of all the bartenders that post in these threads and what types of venues they're working in? Dirnok: High-volume college bar
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Aug 11, 2012 01:18
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Found that post I mentioned earlier about becoming a regular in order to get a job, it was on Jeffery Morgenthaler's blog. While I wouldn't necessarily follow it step by step, word for word, it's pretty decent advice. This is not going to work in every bar, but I do hire a lot of regulars at mine. Of the 9 people I have on staff right now, 6 of them hung out at the bar to some degree prior to working there. (The other 3, one is my cousin, one was a friend of another venue's bartenders and they put in a good word for him with me, and the last is just some random applicant.)Jeffery Morgenthaler posted:If you’re not a complete idiot, you can get a job in a bar with no experience, and for half the cost of a bartending “school”. And I’m going to show you how. navyjack posted:Speaking of being management...there goes the last of the Jim Beam Devil's Cut that an overly optimistic distributor dropped by awhile back. Time to hit up the "what the gently caress is this poo poo" section of the liquor room again. Every time I see the bottle of Bacardi Oakheart cluttering up my shelf I mentally revisit my very detailed plans on how to murder all overly optimistic sales reps. But with you on the beer. Had a freebie bottle of Newcastle's fall seasonal tonight when I got home. Not bad, like it just a little bit more than regular Newcastle, but not terribly impressed. But free beer is free beer, and the more free beer the better. My GM though, I'm convinced he is loving with me when it comes to having me taste new products. He'll give me several things, I'll drink them and tell him which ones I thought were good AND WOULD SELL. He will then order cases of the ones I thought sucked and wouldn't move. And then they don't move. After years of this the only plausible explanation for these actions is that he is simply loving with me and playing some long game where the end goal is driving me absolutely bat poo poo loving insane. navyjack posted:ps. being a manager sucks don't do it ever. This. A million times this. While my ego absolutely loves being in charge, gently caress if I didn't have a lot more fun just being a bartender. My drinking was a lot more in check back then too, come to think of it.
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Aug 11, 2012 13:05
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To the guy sitting in front of the well asking me "What's that?!" about every single thing that came out of my shaker for over an hour. "IT'S A loving CORONA!"
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Aug 12, 2012 09:31
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Pretty tame weekend. Busier than the last several since the college kids are starting to move back to town but no real drama to dish on. So I thought I'd post an old story. Forgive me for not being able to tell a story as well as James Woods does but it's one of those bar stories that comes up frequently at my place when we're counting tips and going on about the old days. So my girlfriend tells me early in the week that one of her brothers, whom I’ve never met, is going to be downtown on his bachelor party this upcoming weekend. Oh gently caress. While we’ve never met, he knows my name and, more importantly, the bar that I work at. But she gives me the heads up that he might stop in and want to talk to me. Now, I’m not looking forward to this. I’m expecting the typical “Hey, you are dating my sister, if you break her heart I’ll break your neck” conversation, which we’d managed to avoid up until this point and I’d really prefer to continue to avoid it. But, whatever. The week passes, it’s Saturday night, and I’ve all but forgotten about her mentioning it. We’re pretty busy that night, not entirely in the weeds, but getting there. The other bartenders and I have spaced ourselves out appropriately across the bar and are focusing on our particular sections. We're pounding out drinks, throwing poo poo at each other at every possible opportunity, lovingly yelling at the barbacks when they get in our way. Business as usual on a busy night. Out of the corner of my eye, I see this group of guys approaching the bar. It’s clearly a bachelor party, not because they are all wearing the same t-shirts, or constantly yelling about “THIS GUY IS GETTING MARRIED!”, but because the bachelor is walking around with this huge fist shaped dildo. An entire fist and then some. And I mean huge. I’ve got a decent sized fist and forearm, but this was painfully bigger. Now, immediately I remember the girlfriend mentioning her brother’s bachelor party and recall that it’s tonight. And while I’ve never seen him before, I see the resemblance and know who he is. He gets to the bar, and gets the attention of the nearest bartender, all the while waving this fist dildo around. But not just waving it around, shaking it at whoever he happened to be talking to, and rather menacingly. Him: “Hey! You! Are you Dirnok? I’m looking for Dirnok!” Bartender: “Uh.. no, that’s not me. He uh.. Dirnok isn’t here. He.. uh.. he isn’t working tonight. Has the night off. Haven't even seen him tonight.” That’s all I could hear from where I was at, there was a bit more conversation but eventually he and his group walked away from the bar and then headed outside. Once they were gone, the bartender involved comes up to me, just completely shocked and serious. Bartender: “Dude, what the gently caress, did you hear that?! Dude was waving around a loving fist and looking for you!” I'm grinning like a motherfucker, I explain to him who that was and why he was looking for me, how the girlfriend had given me the heads up earlier in the week. Bartender: “Oh, well, sorry man, I didn’t know. But I’m never going to point you out to a drunk guy waving around a huge fist dildo. Ever.” It immediately got added to the "If this happens, this is how you handle it.." list that we go through with each rookie bartender. Guy with any sort of dildo asking about a bartender, said bartender is absolutely not loving here. We maintain that policy to this day. Dirnok fucked around with this message at 09:51 on Aug 13, 2012 |
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Aug 13, 2012 09:47
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navyjack posted:Nice perk to management...all the TVs are on Shark Week for lunch/happy hour today and no one can stop me! I'm glad I'm not the only one! A bunch of us were drinking at a place across the street a few nights ago and raised a little hell about the lack of Shark Week in this particular establishment. In other news, gently caress interviewing cute girls with bartending experience for my one open barback spot. If I hire you as a barback you'll quit in less than two months when you find something better. And if I even mention hiring you straight to bartender my staff will mutiny. But gently caress if tips wouldn't be so much better if I did.
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Aug 17, 2012 01:04
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JawKnee posted:There are no cute girls with *no* experience applying? Summer in a college town, ain't nobody applying. Students move back in this week though so I'll be buried in applications soon enough.
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Aug 17, 2012 02:18
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Respekt posted:What other jobs could I look for with Restaurant/Bar manager skills that is not in the retail/food service industry? I really don't feel like my management skills would transition into other fields very well. I manage a staff of a dozen unprofessional, sticky fingered, gently caress everything that moves, raging alcoholics. I am a glorified babysitter when it comes to both the staff and the crowd. So.. babysitting? 
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Aug 17, 2012 05:15
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Perdido posted:You guys expect your BAs to be flat out running? I'm mostly with you on the running. I expect everyone to be hustling. A light sprint from one end of the bar to grab something, cool with me. But anytime I catch anyone really hauling rear end out of the corner of my eye, my brain assumes BIG DEAL and I go to follow them. I've got one bartender that is awful about doing this, and while his argument is that he is quite literally moving as fast as possible, it breaks everyone else's rhythm and drives us all insane. I can't relate on the danger of someone running into me though. We have the biggest behind the bar space that I've ever seen in a bar. Aside from some hip checking right against the well, we've got plenty of room to avoid each other.
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Aug 17, 2012 05:44
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navyjack posted:yeah, I'd I see someone in a dead run, I'm after them, so I don't miss out. I went over the bar one time cause my GM saw a old girlfriend from college and I misunderstood his sprint. Having a legitimate reason to go over the bar is one of the few goals that I've yet to achieve in this industry. The only time anyone has had to do it since I've been there was because I was the jackass on the other side of the bar that had bitten off more than he could chew and needed saving. The guy that went over rubs it in my face to this day. Sheep-Goats posted:First job is a first job and you get it where you can. Seriously. I think we've all made it very clear that getting your foot in the door in this industry can be pretty tough. There's a good chance that the first job you manage to get is going to suck. But it's all about getting experience and doing some networking. Keep your head down, learn everything that you possibly can, tough it out, and make as many friends in the industry as possible. And once you've lined up something better, be it through your newly acquired experience or your newly acquired connections, loving jump ship. Most people only put in a few years at a particular venue before moving on to something better. It's just the nature of the business. There might be some hard feelings when you leave and you should do your best to not burn any bridges on your way out but, at the end of the day, you are in this for you. Get in, learn what you can, get out when you find something better.
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Aug 17, 2012 06:46
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Girl and I arguing about how much alcohol was in her drink. "Well, I use to bartender in <nearby city> and this isn't enough. Now, I don't know where you went to bartending school, but I was taught.." 
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Aug 18, 2012 10:25
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Sheep-Goats posted:Harvard. The word "oval office" is important here. I use this word far more than most people. Someone gets in my way behind the bar "Move, you oval office!" Girls' bathroom is an utter mess at the end of the night "These messy loving cunts.." Girl orders two drinks, I make them, and then she adds on 8 more "This loving oval office.." But the best use of the word, as I used it tonight in regards to this situation.. "Listen, you oval office.." Perdido posted:On a completely unrelated note, does anyone here have experience working in clubs that offer greasing? Either officially or unofficially? How did that work for you? Greasing as in door guys taking bribes to get people in? If so, while I have no experience with it at my place, I know door guys in my midwest town that make as much as I do doing it at their "clubs". Dirnok fucked around with this message at 14:35 on Aug 18, 2012 |
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Aug 18, 2012 14:20
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Rotten Cookies posted:Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!! Awwww...  No, we're not reading that thinking you're a puss. We all remember that first zen moment where you've finally crossed the line and are now handling poo poo like a real loving bartender. It's awesome and I absolutely love seeing it in a rookie and hearing that same excited description of the night while we're counting tips. Welcome to it. It only gets better from here.
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Aug 19, 2012 10:55
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poo poo ends up the weirdest places in a bar. Just this weekend a girl came up to the bar. She couldn't find her ID. Blamed the door guy saying that he checked it but didn't give it back to her. She said she'd already talked to him and he claimed he didn't have it. As unlikely as it was for him to keep it if it wasn't fake (and I'd have been notified immediately if he'd caught one), I went and asked him myself. He distinctly recalled putting it back in her hand. Alright. So I asked her if it had maybe gotten lost in her purse, if she had put it in a pocket instead and forgotten, or if it was possible that she'd dropped it. No on the purse, no on the pockets, and no on the dropping it. But, she was pretty lit at this point so I didn't really buy that. I take down her name and info, assure her that we will search high and low for it once the bar is cleared out, promise her the door guy didn't take it but that I will grill him relentlessly just in case. Then, as I'm walking through the women's bathroom at the end of the night to clear it, I find this!  My best guess is that it slipped out of her back pocket as she was sitting down.. or getting up, I don't know. Either way, I get the joy of calling her up and, not only vindicating my door guy, but informing her that I found her ID in a loving toilet.
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Aug 20, 2012 09:05
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Applications with bartending school listed on them go in their own special place. It's 60 gallons and has a bag in it.
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Aug 21, 2012 01:48
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Septic Knothead posted:What would well typically be? I know this would vary from bar to bar, but in general would it be just some kind of cheap blended whiskey? In the bars I've worked at around here it's been Ezra Brooks, Ten High, and Jim Beam green label. I actually like cheap whiskey but these are all still varying degrees of awful.
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Aug 24, 2012 03:12
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I'd never had Evan Williams prior to reading James Woods' rant about it in the old thread. Now it's pretty much a given that I'll have a bottle of it around the house. It really is remarkably good for the price.
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Aug 24, 2012 03:25
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Halloween Jack posted:If I say to a bartender "Margarita, up, no salt, martini glass" will I look like a total douchebag in an attempt to avoid looking gay? I work in a college dive-ish bar. If you ordered it exactly like that, I might roll my eyes a little about the martini glass, but I'd appreciate the straightforward way you ordered it and how you took care of almost all of my typical followup questions. (The only thing you didn't cover was tequila preference). I'd also assume that you are probably in the industry and I'd make a mental note to keep an eye out for you next time, assuming the tip was decent. But like Der Luftwaffle said, this is entirely dependent on where you go and the bartender you order from. You throw that order out at some rookie in the wrong type of bar and they're going get all flustered and be like "He.. okay, margarita.. um.. no salt, good.. uh.. the gently caress, up? poo poo.. do I shake that? gently caress me.."
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Aug 27, 2012 09:14
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FaceEater posted:I've met all my beer and liquor reps personally, and while I'm 90% sure that most of them don't have a clue who I am, I believe them all to be mostly decent people and honest tradesmen. Be militant about going through your liquor deliveries and your receipt. Make drat sure that they match. And make drat sure they match what you ordered initially. That 6 bottles of Captain you wanted might mysteriously be 8 and so on. Or there might be a bottle of something random that you didn't order but it's somehow on your receipt and you're going to pay for it if you don't notice. Call them out on absolutely any discrepancy. Shooting Blanks covered this, but don't let them talk you into loving anything. They are salesmen. They want to sell poo poo. Even if it is actual poo poo. Most of them only care about numbers. If they are pushing some new thing on you, tell them to leave enough so that you can have your bartenders sample it. If your bartenders think it sucks and won't move, they're probably right. Pass on it. If they give you a bottle of it for free.. that's fine, but it's ultimately just going to clutter up your back bar and either get sold for next to nothing or go home with you or a bartender. Ask about deals. Every time. Find out what's out there. If you've got an owner with some sense and you've got enough space to store it, you can get some pretty solid hookups on multiple case orders. The last one we had was a few cases of Crown got us a case of Kahlua. Yeah, might take us awhile to go through all that Crown, but every time we sell Kahlua it's all profit. But that is still entirely dependent on your bar. Free case is great unless it's a case of something that you barely use. Another example on deals, noticed a neighboring bar had started pushing a particular kind of gin. Mid range, not exceptional, no reason to start focusing on it. Talked to the manager there, turns out the rep offered them a "buy two bottles, get one free" deal. Apparently that brand was willing to take a loss to get a foothold. Mentioned it to my GM the next day, he hadn't heard anything about it but he just e-mails his orders in to that particular distributor, never talks to anyone. If he actually talked to a rep the bar could have made some easy money. So yeah, distributors. They'll try to gently caress you, absolutely. But a lot of it comes down to you letting them bend you over. Don't do that. Bend them over instead.
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Aug 29, 2012 09:38
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First college football home game today, pretty much the start of our busy season. Bartended 13 hours, was at the bar for over 15. Just weeds the entire time, rear end kicking behind the bar, throwing people out every time I turn around, catching fake ID's again (we didn't have door guys for half of it), running out of poo poo and improvising, pouring into whatever glassware was handy because gently caress if I've seen a clean shot glass in the last hour, and just everything I love and hate about bartending. Absolutely glorious but just so exhausting, utterly draining, ears still ringing from the music and that awful cacophony of people talking, yelling, singing, whistling, screaming. On the opposite side of things, as I was leaving for work my old lady was on her way to a wedding that she was in. Pulls off of flasks before the wedding. Sneaking off to a bar between the wedding and the reception. Free booze at the reception. When the reception winds down, everyone still standing heads out to the bars! We come home at exactly the same time (because she ended the night at my bar and I drove us). Now, I'm stone sober. Not a drop the entire day. The only thing I want at this point is to find some sort of screen that can project some sort of video, sit in front of it and loving unwind. I want to take pulls off a bottle until I can't feel the countless cuts on my hands or how sore my feet are, until the ringing in my ears turns to beautiful silence, until that argument I had with that stupid over-entitled oval office stops rising up in my brain and making me clench my jaw all over again. Until I hit that elusive state of numb. The only thing she wants? "Oh my god, it was such a great wedding. It was so cute! They wrote their own vows and they were crying, it was perfect. And then at the reception we had like three shots of Jager, and then a couple of beers. And then another shot, I don't know what it was, it tasted really good. And then I had this Ranger IPA, that was weird because I thought Rangers were an Army thing but this didn't have anything to do with the Army, but it was still good, and then we had a shot of tequila, no wait, that was when we got to the bars, OH BUT BEFORE THAT we were walking to the bars and I totally fell down and skinned (the utter gently caress, wow) out of my knee but it's okay, it's not that bad. But the wedding! It was so cute. They wrote their own vows. And they were crying! It was perfect! Did I tell you this already? Well it was so cute. And they were crying......." The absolute best piece of advice I can give to any bartender, rookie or veteran. Find yourself a significant other that works in this industry. It's hard, but they are out there. It limits your dating pool considerably but if you don't heed this advice, you run the risk being driven completely, totally, 100% loving bat poo poo insane. In other news, that shift paid my rent for the month. If you gents need me, I'll be out back digging a shallow grave and working out an alibi.
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Sep 2, 2012 12:43
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SubponticatePoster posted:Liquor question: I have a bottle of Carolan's Irish Cream that is unopened, but I don't have the slightest idea how old it is (probably very if I don't remember buying it). Does this poo poo go bad, and if so is it obvious? Like chunky or whatnot? It's a cheap knockoff brand so throwing it away certainly won't cause me any grief but if it's still drinkable why waste booze? It'll be obvious if it's gone bad, but they can usually sit for a couple years unopened. However, if it was ever refrigerated at any point and then allowed to sit at room temp, it's probably hosed. But as Veg implied, that is an awful Irish Cream. The only lower end brand that I've found that is tolerable is McCormick's. JawKnee posted:Except for blue curacao, I've had a bottle of that poo poo for like 3 years now. gently caress Blue Curacao. When I was a rookie bartender I lived in a house with two other rookies. We would have a fully stocked bar at home most of the time, have a bunch of people over for after hours 3-5 nights a week, and try to come up with our own shots/drinks constantly. But as the booze supply dwindled every couple of weeks we'd do our best to throw something together with what we still had. "Little of this, little of that, oh hey, we've got plenty of Blue Curacao, why not?" I don't know how it was possible but there was always a nearly full bottle of it in the house, always. So it got put in everything when we were desperate. Nothing good came of that. I can't even smell it now without cringing. As for booze that will never loving go away, there is a bottle of Creme de Menthe on my shelf that has been with me through three different moves. It is still half full. rikatix posted:I guess I don't know why I am posting this, just excited, knew SA would have a forum on it. Welcome to it. If you haven't done it already, go read through the old thread linked in the OP. It's 100 pages, I know, but if you can slug through it you'll come out a better bartender because of it. To add some content, fellow bartender and I were out drinking a couple nights back, waxing on about the industry and sharing dumb customer stories.  Can I get a vodka water with a lemon? Sure, here you go. Umm.. this water tastes funny. Well.. it's our normal tap water, off the gun.. It doesn't taste right, can I get something else? Absolutely. On us. What would you like? I'll take a vodka soda. With a lemon. Umm.. but that's the same water.. with bubbles.. No, soda water is different. Vodka soda with a lemon. ...okay, here you go.. Oh, that tastes way better, thanks! ...welcome
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Sep 7, 2012 07:59
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You guys just made the customer right. ..I don't know who you are anymore.
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Sep 7, 2012 09:30
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"Can I get a cranberry Cape Cod?"  On the topic of Campari, I really wish the cocktail bartenders had rallied behind it instead of Fernet Branca. I got use to drinking Fernet. I actually crave Campari sometimes. (I know there is a lot more to all that, I just honestly like Campari and would so much rather drink it than Fernet). navyjack posted:Management is not allowed to touch employee tip pools period. They can set rules for who gets what, but they don't disburse the cash. Def shady practice. I disburse the cash every single night that I manage. They count it out and bundle it, I convert the $100 stacks of singles to $20's, the cups of quarters to $10's and so on. I take the barbacks' cut off the top and divide the rest by number of bartenders working. This is the way it was done when I started, it hasn't changed in seven years and I don't see it changing down the road. I can understand the potential for poo poo to get shady with a manager having his hands in the tips. But I'm way more concerned with things getting shady when a bartender has his hands in my change box or safe. My bartenders see what the total tips are before I start changing things out so they could easily do the math to make sure I'm not loving them. But the only way they're getting those tips without my hands getting involved is if they want to walk out with bundles of singles and pockets full of quarters. That said, in regards to Respekt's situation, that sounds shady as all gently caress. When it comes to the law though it's going to be different for every state and I'm not sure we have a veteran California bartender who can speak on that, besides the ever elusive James Woods. I'm pretty sure you're getting hosed though. Vegetable Melange posted:25 people walked out at midnight complaining that the dj sucked. What are the grounds for justifiable homicide, again? We went from slammed to polishing glasses on a Saturday night. Boss man took the early off tonight, left me the bar. He wandered around checking out the competition before coming back and pulling up a stool. A few drinks later he points out that a neighboring bar, a bar with a DJ, has a line out the door. He says "I don't know, that's a lot of people. More than we've had in tonight. We've got the space, maybe we should start booking some DJ's." I shook me head, pulled out my key ring, took my bar key off of it, and slowly slid it towards him. He looked at it for a couple of beats, nodded, and slid it back. Should be at least a year before we have that conversation again.
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Sep 9, 2012 10:55
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Muck and Mire posted:Can you guys elaborate on the dislike of DJ nights? The crowd that is drawn to DJs tends to suck. A lot of them are rolling or on something else and not interested in drinking at all. Others just want to skip the bar and find some willing chick to grind on. Those that do drink either don't tip or are obnoxious in some other way. It's always too loud. Always. Most of us can read lips but even that has it's limits. And forget actually trying to have a conversation, as a bartender or a customer. The music. Hell, I dislike having a jukebox due to the ear raping it inflicts on me. But at least with a jukebox I can plug it full of something tolerable if I want to. I won't argue that it can bring in people. But we've noticed that we're acquiring a new crowd that is coming to our place simply because we DON'T have a DJ on the weekends. These are people that use to frequent other bars and are actually being driven away by it. I'll take them over that other crowd any day.
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Sep 10, 2012 05:13
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navyjack posted:gently caress that poo poo, I had nothing but drunk goddamn football fans. Plus, I am beginning to believe that my staff is intentionally engaged in a conspiracy to drive me out of my loving mind. gently caress both those shits! I didn't have a non-employee customer from 8pm until I locked the door at 12:30. Which might sound okay but it was only three of them and they were nursing hangovers from the night before. Coolguye posted:Alcohol question time. The only thing I've had besides Sam Adams this year is the Newcastle Werewolf fall seasonal, which I found quite tasty. Nobody around here seems to have any of the fall stuff on tap yet though. If there is a bar near you with a decent selection of beers on tap, see if they'll let you do a flight of the falls/Oktoberfests. I find a lot of them to be hit and miss and I hate ordering a pint just to find out that one was a miss.
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Sep 11, 2012 00:30
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Noticed that poo poo in our cooler when I opened last week. So continues the saga of our GM stocking every dumb thing Budweiser comes out with. 8% ABV in an 8 ounce can, in a college bar full of binge drinkers. loving brilliant, what could possibly go wrong?
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Sep 11, 2012 07:01
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Hoops posted:That's surprising to me. Internationally, US beer is thought of as being weak and watery, but most of the mass-market draught lager (Carling, Carlsberg, Kronenbourg, Fosters, Stella Artois, Becks) you can buy in a typical pub or supermarket in the UK is 4-5%, while the more common "premium" stuff can go up to maybe 5.5%. There's plenty of brewhouses where you can get stronger specialist stuff, but it's not the norm and from what I can tell they're perfectly common in the US too. The best selling beer in the UK is Carling (poo poo), and that's only 4%. Is the US reputation undeserved then, atleast compared to western Europe? All those light beers like coors light or bud light, are they all about 4.2%? I thought they were like 3.6, 3.8, something like that. I always thought that reputation had more to do with taste than actual strength. I mean, our beer tastes weak and watery compared to European beers with some actual flavor. But yeah, almost all of our light beers are around 4.2% while their "heavy" variations are around 5%. But that's only the mass produced American lagers. We have so many smaller craft breweries now that put out delicious beers that range from 5-12% ABV and I wish they were how American beer gets judged. Halloween Jack posted:What kind of people drink Jager at bars, by the way? The loving worst kind. Seriously.
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Sep 12, 2012 00:48
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Sheep-Goats posted:Let me introduce you to the Henny and Cranberry sect. Oh, touche. We purposely don't stock Hennessy so I've never dealt with them. But I've heard.
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Sep 12, 2012 02:37
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..my most expensive liquor is $6.
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Sep 14, 2012 01:47
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JawKnee posted:For real though, there are definite tiers to quality/price in liquor/liqueurs so maybe? The most expensive thing I've ever drank is JW Blue, and that was nice but I don't much enjoy scotch so it was wasted on me. I'm sure to some extent higher-price equates in a much more rigorous production of the product, and not just scarcity, but there's bound to be some kind of plateau for price/quality somewhere. Johnnie Blue Label is also the most expensive thing I've ever drank. And I am quite fond of scotch. That being said, Johnnie Gold Label (the next step down) is $80 a bottle where as Johnnie Blue Label is $250. Yeah, Blue does taste better, but not $170 better. And you'd sure as poo poo never find me paying bar markup for it. I just don't buy anything now that's more than $100 a bottle because every time I did in the past, I'd either not drink it for months or feel guilty when I did. This $200+ for a SHOT stuff blows my midwest college bar mind.
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Sep 14, 2012 08:43
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FISHMANPET posted:Jager sluts picture Vegetable Melange posted:I just took a lowboy door to the dome. Careful out there. Shooting Blanks posted:I have 2 favorite injuries. The common one was raking my arm across a speed rack, with every Spill Stop 285 pulling some skin off. Enjoy your drinks, guys! I'm not sure I have a favorite. But my most visible one is a 3" scar along my arm that I acquired while trying to put some guy in a headlock and caught his inhumanly sharp tooth in the process. Breaking up a brawl, managed to get it all squared away and seperated, cops show up. One of them sees my arm and is like "Whoa, wait, did one of them pull a knife?!" "Oh.. no. He uh.. kinda bit me."
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Sep 16, 2012 10:16
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FaceEater posted:I've been lucky (knock on wood) to avoid bloody injury but I think I've got a hernia from being a hardass and re-organizing our walk-in keg setup by myself, throwing around full kegs in a very, very tight space and stacking them and soforth. Going to the doctor on Thursday! Wee! I know three other bartenders who have gotten one from doing exactly the same thing. Only one of them has gotten it fixed, and it's because he is 23 and still on his parents' health insurance. The other two continue to suffer because they can't afford to do anything about it. I refuse to lift a keg by myself because of that. Which is absolutely agonizing when I come in to work after a delivery and my walk-in is a total clusterfuck and all I can do is just stare at it and seethe. Convinced the drivers do that poo poo on purpose. BIG NEWS! Not really big for any of you, but big for me. My GM asked me to attend a distributor's trade show in his place in a couple days. This is unheard of at my bar. He always goes to these, and always by himself. And it's not only this one, he gave me dates for upcoming ones as well. This comes a few months before his 25th anniversary of working at the bar. It continues the trend this last year of him taking steps back, showing me more of the back end stuff, giving me more responsibility and more say in things. I'm stupidly excited. Drinking for free in a fancy venue, schmoozing with the other bar managers, reps trying their damnedest to sell me on some new products. And it's a distributor that carries some of my favorite breweries; Rogue, Odell, Newcastle, Samuel Smith, others I'm forgetting. Any advice you veterans have on attending these? Do's and don'ts? Things to be aware of? Things to take advantage of?
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Sep 17, 2012 10:04
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JawKnee posted:Well I'm attempting to change jobs. Landed an interview after 2 days of looking around at a neat little punk rock/indie kind of vibe licensed cafe in East Vancouver named Perch. I'm not too sure how to dress for this - almost every bar job I've held involved uniforms of one kind or another (at the very least, blacks or black and whites), but I'm hesitant to just show up in jeans and a t-shirt. Anyone got any advice for this? Usually I just try and dress a level above the employees - so nice black jeans, and a Our dress code is jeans and a t-shirt, so I'm fine if someone shows up for an interview dressed like I am. Polo and black jeans or khakis and I'll make a mental note that they tried to step it up and be more professional. Anything dressier than that makes me uncomfortable and I think they're trying too hard, which leads me to wonder why. But that's in my divey college bar and my feelings on it as a guy who only owns one button up shirt, so. I'd say a level above the employees is a good baseline.
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Sep 21, 2012 05:58
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Oh, how I love this time of year, working at a college bar that pays us for every fake ID we catch. 5th one in two weeks, thanks for that $150 dumb freshmen who don't know that we're the one bar you don't try to use your fake at. I dunno if this is regional or not but just in case, pay extra attention to any of the older style South Dakota ID's, the ones with the blue background. We've caught a couple dozen fakes of that ID that are actually pretty well done, but the background is a noticeably lighter shade of blue. Hell, if there is any interest in fake ID's and how to catch them, I'll bring home some of them, scan them in and show you what to look for.
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Sep 25, 2012 10:08
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FISHMANPET posted:So a discussion came up in a (local) forum I'm a member of, about drink prices. So I thought I'd ask the experts, what's a standard price for something like a rail cocktail in your bar? Or a beer (although no idea what kind of beer). For reference, $5-$6 for a "beer" is described as expensive, which all seems fine to me. Midwest college bar: $2.75 for rail, $2.25 for a Bud Light pint, between $3-4 for better beers. Cigar bar nearby that I hang out at, beers are between $5-7 and I think their rail is $4.
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Oct 24, 2012 03:34
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Aauuugh.. Our GM's 25th anniversary of working at the bar is on Wednesday. And our owners, who live out of state and have only been in the bar 3 times in my 7 years, are going to be in town for it. I have cleaned, scrubbed, dusted, polished and washed every god drat inch of this bar in the last week. Then we get health inspected today and they STILL find poo poo to cite us on! Nothing major, but christ. I'd kinda like to see the training process these health inspectors go through because nobody is that god drat observant naturally.
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Oct 26, 2012 06:00
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 09:28 |
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While I can understand the reasoning behind no employees drinking, it would make the slow nights almost worthless for us. Employees and their friends provide at least half the total tips Sunday through Tuesday nights. But we all maintain a policy of "We drink here, we don't get drunk here." A few rounds, couple shots, and then it's time to move on to the next bar. Which is perfect because after an hour or two I'd much rather be anywhere that isn't my loving bar.
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Oct 27, 2012 09:36
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