Cocktail Challenge

What it is

Who will be the best bartender in the company? Teams compete for the prize for the best cocktail after learning the basic rules of mixing from experienced bartenders. They work on the look as much as the taste, build the case for their drink and present it to a jury and to the room. We run it in licensed venues we work with.

When it makes sense to choose it

It works well when time is short and the group has to get moving straight away. It sets up anywhere there’s a bar or a long table, it doesn’t need a kitchen, and within ten minutes people are on their feet doing something.

It works well as the opening of a company evening, and it’s one of the refreshing formats that work all year round. It sits happily alongside Finger Food Factory in the same evening; if you’d rather have wine than mixology, the parallel road is Wine Experience.

It works less well if you’re after something long and structured. It runs two or three hours, and everything in it builds towards the final challenge.

How it actually works

You start by drinking. The warm-up cocktail is made by the bartenders, and it does two things: it breaks the ice, and it shows what well made means. That is a thing you understand by watching.

Then the teams form and the bartenders explain the rules of the game: proportions, techniques, and why certain combinations hold up. Along the way there are separate challenges and tasks drawn from mixology itself. Each team gets a secret ingredient to build around, and copying is not allowed.

At some point each team has to pick the two people it thinks are best suited to handle the shaker. It’s a small and revealing choice: a good test of how well you actually know the people in your team, and of how willing anyone is to leave the centre of the stage to somebody else.

The part people remember is the presentation. Making a good cocktail is the easy half: you then have to name it, set out its character and its selling points, imagine a setting where somebody orders it. It’s a miniature sale of a product born half an hour earlier, and for commercial teams it’s more revealing than it sounds. The day after, the lesson that stays is that having something good and not knowing how to tell anyone about it is a problem.

The jury judges the taste, and also the originality, the presentation and, openly, the teamwork.

Three questions

Do you need to know about cocktails?

No. The bartenders teach the basics before anything starts, and the secret ingredient puts everyone in the same position, because nobody arrives with a recipe ready.

The fully alcohol-free version is available and takes nothing away: the creative challenge and the presentation are identical. It has to be said while the day is being designed, not on the evening itself.

How long does it take?

Two to three hours. Being indoors it doesn’t depend on the season, and it runs all year round.

How many people can it hold?

There’s no practical limit. It scales to two hundred and sixty participants and beyond by adding bars and bartenders, and the structure of the format doesn’t change. On venue and on numbers it’s the most flexible in the family.