It’s not every day you get to meet one of your bartending heroes. It certainly isn’t every day that you get to meet two.

Well yesterday I did!

For anyone not in the know, Simon Difford (Hero 1) was the founder of CLASS magazine and he then went on to write the Difford’s Guide (formerly Sauce Guide) cocktail books – the very books which formed the foundation of my own bartender training.

Myself and Tom Aske hotfooted it accross London to Simon’s Bermondsey place of residence. The apartment is complete with an entire working bar known as the Cabinet Room.

And what a room it is.

The collection of spirits amassed in this space can only be described as phenomenal. Upon first inspection Tom and I concluded that he actually had everything, but Simon assured us otherwise and that in fact, he was low on stock…

Please bear in mind that the above picture only shows about one third of the bar itself, and even that doesn’t include the draws filled with booze and the cabinets holding the really good stuff.

When we first arrived Simon had four glasses lined up along the bar with similar looking liquids in them, he had been playing around with a new idea for a drink, which made sense since you’d be hard pushed to design a better place for creating cocktails.

An Aviation or two later and some more guests arrived including Peter Durelli (aka Hero 2), Angus Winchester. Gary Regan and many others. I would call Peter a legend but apparently he doesn’t like the term because he is still alive! Peter served as a bartender in the Savoy Hotel for forty years and managed the bar for twenty-three of them. He now writes for the Savoy Cocktail Book and recently retired as president of the UKBG, a living legend who is so cool I couldn’t even bring myself to photograph the man.

(So here is a picture of Tom instead!)

What ensued next was the stuff of dreams. Hours of cocktail making, booze sampling, method critique’ing, glass snapping, food eating fun. I know it makes me sound like a crawler, but I felt very lucky to be in a room with people I hold in such high regard.

Some highlights included: The cranberry bitters, flicking through the books (oh, the books!), the food, and I also tried a bit of Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s tonic water syrup which I was really impressed with.

Apologies for the poor photos by the way, I was armed only with my iPhone so they could have been worse.

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