Bartending – A New Career Opportunity
The Spirits industry has never been as exciting before as in 2017. Are Bartenders the new Chef’s?….. Yes! We would like to believe so, as they get more experimental with fluorescent cocktails, effervescent menus and genderless cocktails.
If wine and beer lift your spirits, and so do night life, why don't you make a career of it?
Before you choose bartending as your career path (or even as a job that you plan to do for a little while moving on to something else), you will want to take the following things into consideration:
Bartending is hard work
You’re going to be expected to know every drink that exists
It’s possible to keep pushing yourself and challenging yourself as a bartender
There aren’t a lot of extra perks with bartending.
You’ll probably make good money
It requires you to be nice to people all the time.
Your friends will expect free drinks.
The trend of doing things that were once looked down upon as a taboo is catching up pretty fast among the youth. Be it the elite or the middle-class, everyone is interested in the spirits industry today. That’s probably because of the more overt association with bar than it was a few years ago.
“Sex on the beach”, “Virgin Pina Colada”, “Bloody Mary” and “Blue Lagoon”—are terms which probably wouldn’t make sense to an average Joe, in fact they would sound rather explicit, but these are just some of the wide range of cocktails and are a part of a bartender’s dictionary.
A bartender’s job is not just to serve the customer his or her drink. To serve the right drink one needs to know how to make it—should it be at room temperature or ice cold—and in which glass it is to be served. Not to mention that it is about the passion for alcohol, for different drinks and the style in serving them to your patrons. The job requires you to stay up all night, you need to learn to deal with all sorts of people, be gentle with glasses and bottles and not break them, and most importantly you can’t drink along with your customers. Mixology (the art of bartending) has gained an instinctive response in a young country like ours. The youth who work hard to cope-up with life’s hard and fast rules in the morning relax themselves at a pub or a party in the evening or on weekends. Simply put they work hard and party harder.
Coming to the eligibility criteria for being a bartender, to work in small restaurants and bars where people look to hire the cheapest help available you don’t really need to be a certified mixologist. However, if you intend to work in an established group of hotels or pubs which pay well and give lucrative tips, it is always helpful to have a certificate backing you.
The best institute in India offering a course in Mixology are STIR Academy of Bartending, Mumbai. This is the first school for bartending in the country that offers everything from a graduate program to a corporate appreciation program.
We also have the Indian Institute of Bartending (IIBT), Chennai which is affiliated with the World Bartender’s Training Organisation, and offers diploma and certificate courses in Bartending and Bar Flaring with a 100 percent placement guarantee. Institutes like Tulleehoo Bartending Academy offer certified courses in Bartending and Mixology. The West offers a greater choice in this field with centers like California, the United States of America and the United Kingdom that have the most number of institutes that offer courses in bartending.
These courses offer sessions in studying the history of wine, introduction to different types of wine and wine tasting. They also have a 3-4 week training program, in which the students are taught over 200 recipes of drinks and garnishing, bar sanitation and liquor laws, specifications of bar equipment and glassware, customer service, speed techniques and much more