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Virtual and In-Person Cocktail Classes
PRIVATE COCKTAIL CLASSES
At Home: If you are hosting an event in your home, we are happy to come and teach your guests to make drinks, or, indeed, just make drinks for your event! Please enquire with Katia for prices – it all depends on what you need; we can supply everything from a fully stocked bar to just a bartender.
Virtual: Connect with your friends and family all over the world over a 90 minute cocktail class, or just invite a virtual bartender to help you and your friends shake cocktails at home and turn him off at will! You will need to source the ingredients and equipment for which we will provide a full list for you. Price for virtual: £200 no matter how many screens you have!
CLASSES IN BARS
We work with a variety of venues in London to host 1.5 hour Cocktail Classes. Of course we can also arrange a welcome reception, snacks, and a continuation to your evening whether it’s with friends or colleagues.
How it works:
The price is £39 per head. On arrival, each participant will receive a welcome cocktail made by the bartender. The class will follow a theme and there will be plenty of history, anecdotes, quiz questions and of course tasting and shaking. Each participant will get to have a turn behind the bar to make a cocktail for their friends/colleagues. Altogether, each participant will have 3 cocktails which breaks down into the welcome drink and tasting measures of 4 further drinks.
COCKTAIL 365 BLOG
New Year’s resolutions can be boring, and tough to stick to, I’ve failed on many a resolution, even 2014’s ‘drink more bourbon’. I decided that 2018 would be different.
I love cocktails, ever since my first job as a barback in a busy Auckland bar in 1992 I’ve always been in awe of them, I suspect that like all people my age working in hospitality it has something to do with that wonderful Tom Cruise film Cocktail.
I moved to London in 1997, and was lucky enough to work at Pharmacy in Notting Hill with Dick Bradsell, the person I would credit with re-inventing cocktails in London, if not the world in the late 90’s. On starting here everything was like nothing I’d seen before, beautiful glassware, brightly coloured drinks, exotic names, amazing bar staff, lots of fresh fruit and puree’s, it was like stepping into Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.
I remember at an early cocktail training session with Dick asking what would be a good cocktail book to buy, he suggested David Embury’s ‘the Fine Art of Mixing Drinks’, which had been out of print for decades. I picked up my copy after a hunt, and loved how relevant, witty and opinionated it was.
We started running cocktail classes at Goat in 2013, and I soon remembered the words of David Embury on tequila halfway through a class, ‘at a pinch it might be used in a cocktail’ and ‘in general however, the only liquor I have ever tasted that I regard as worse than tequila is slivovitz’.
I started opening the books again.
What I quickly realised is that there were a lot of ‘classics’, and accompanying drinks in these books I had never tasted or had forgotten how, or never actually made. There was decades of knowledge of flavour combinations and techniques I was behind on.
And so came my idea of a new year’s resolution, in 2018 I will try a different ‘classic’ cocktail from these old books, every day for a year.
The Bon Vivants Companion or How to Mix Drinks – Jerry Thomas 1928 edition
Old Waldorf Bar Days – Albert Stevens Crockett 1931
The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks – David Embury 1953 British edition