The Wild Drink Blog

Laura and I turned up at Riva (with her parents) at about 1.45PM, it was a lovely day so a bit of a shame to be stuck inside a dark smokey bar, but worth it in the end.

I had a large cool box and a crate of equipment & ingredients which I dropped off and went and had a quick 1/2 of Artoir Bock at the bar next door to calm my nerves! When I returned about 30mins later they were ready for me to register which took a little while as the questionaire asked things like ‘What would your superhero power be?’ (I answered absorb other superhero powers!).

We then had a really long wait, the competition was supposed to start at 3PM but due to two of the three judges being late we didn’t get going until 4PM, still with only two judges, plus I was last on!

The first round involved making an original drink using ingredients found in the South West including at least 25ml of Plymouth gin. Since most of my cocktails are local & seasonal I was pretty conident with this round but as we started I had the feeling that it could be harder than I thought. There were 12 bars competing but most of them had more than one bartender, the idea being that they each did a different round.

I can’t really remember all the drinks from the first round, I tried half of them probably. Ones that stood out were a cider/apple one made by a guy from The Treasury in Plymouth which had a nice sherbert edge to it, he suprisingly didn’t make it through to the 2nd round. I also tried a nice simple drink consising of Plymouth gin, a local wine & frozen grapes (which float). Other drinks included a stinging nettle & cider brandy, pepper & chilli somethingorother, South West spring punch (from The Refrectory), beetroot & mint martini (from MC’s bar).

My turn came up and I was still fairly confident that mine was one of the best drinks. I was mic’d up and began making my Breakfast in a Glass, unfortunately I made a mistake… The drink requires brewing a small jug of earl grey tea but unfortunately I poured the boiling water into the jug which I had my honey in! Obviously I was still able to brew the tea but this meant that the honey was watered down meaning that the whole drink would be watered down and meaning that putting the correct amount of honey in the drink would be quite hard. Fortunately I did add the correct amount of honey, the drink tasted well ballanced and all was not lost! I spent at least 5 minutes talking to the judges after I had finished making it which was encouraging.

20 minutes later the results were announced, 6 bars were knocked out but i’d made it through to the speed round…

In the speed round we were required to make a Caipirinha (Muddled lime & sugar with cachaca & crushed ice) as quickly as possible, everyone clocked times of under a minute, I went last again and got 41sec. I had time to taste it as well and it was a good balance, 41sec was second fastest so I was confident that I was through. I later found out that I actually won that round as the taste bumped my points up above the guy who was fastest.

So having made it though to the final round I was pretty happy, top 3 was a good result. The final round involved scenarios picked from a hat. My scenario was to make a cocktail for a nun who had just left a life of prayer in a convent and gone in her first bar. I did a take on the seven deadly sins assigning a sin to every ingredient in a strawberry, basil, vodka cocktail. I was really pleased with how it went and the crowd really got behind me as well, highlight of the night for me.

One of the other finalists did a cocktail with grass (picked from outside) which I didn’t get to taste but it sounded very interesting!

The results were announced and i’d won! I had some great support from the crowd and lots of people approached me afterwards. I won a boston tin trophy which will have my name engraved on it + a bottle of Snow Queen vodka (which was the spirit that I won with). Thanks to all the family who came to support me, it was a very long day.