How did bartending become more professional?

With a little help from the popularity of cocktails, bartending has become more of a profession. With its own trends, trade fairs, schools, you name it.

It may be booming today but bartending is not a recent occupation. The first professionals appeared in the late eighteenth century with the invention of the first cocktails — quite strong and bitter blends concocted for men only — in England and the United States. The pioneers in the following decades included the American Jerry Thomas, the inventor of the dry martini and the author of the first book of cocktail recipes, published in 1862. The discipline reached its pinnacle in the early twentieth century during the Roaring Twenties in Europe and during Prohibition in the United States. The latter led to the opening of speakeasies and many bartenders emigrated to Europe and the Caribbean where they passed on their skills. After World War 1, the profession split into luxury hotel bartenders, specializing in creative and refined cocktails, and bartenders working in pubs and cafés.

Nowadays new trends are helping to restore the glory of what has been an undervalued profession. Mixology has arrived: the equivalent of molecular cuisine for chefs. It plays with textures, colors and chemical effects to surprise and delight customers. The world champion of this category is Turkish: Cevat Yildirim of Lucca, Istanbul. In the past decade or so, this very fashionable mixology trend has started to attract competition from traditional bartending, more focused on customer satisfaction. At the same time, traditional cocktails — from the Cosmopolitan to the White Lady — are back in style, as are vintage cocktails where the bartender seeks to accurately reproduce the tastes of a given era, like during Prohibition with a Blue Blazer or a Tom & Jerry, two Jerry Thomas creations. The bartender's flair, the elegant art of combining ingredients and glasses, has gradually become a discipline in its own right with world championships held every year.

The result is that bartending has become more professional. Although most bartenders are students or young people who also have a day job and end up leaving the profession, an increasingly large proportion stays to make a career of it. A bartender works his way through the ranks of the largest or most prestigious establishments or towards head bartender or mixologist positions.

The profession is now much more demanding. A bartender needs to know all the products used (origins and composition of spirits and how they are made, etc.), everything there is to know about his equipment, mixing techniques, the recipes of the major classics, and show inventiveness in order to improvise his own version of a known cocktail. To be sure of a bartender's skills, establishments now look at his qualifications and past references. Whereas the profession used to be learnt on the job, nowadays several colleges offer sophisticated training courses. Like the Bartrainers school in Barcelona, run by Vincente Paulos in partnership with Les vergers Boiron. It teaches the right gestures — how to pour, mix, compose eight cocktails at the same time — and encourages creativity in making cocktails.

In France, the bartender speciality has been included in the official list of artisan trades since 2011 — like pastry chefs or — and bartenders' know-how and excellence are rewarded by the title \"Meilleur Ouvrier de France\"" - France’s Best Artisan. This five-star competition, where candidates face difficult exams on general knowledge and current affairs, have to deliver an oral presentation of a product (tequila in the first session), create a cocktail with a list of imposed products, and promote and serve champagne professionally. At the age of 25, Maxime Hoerth, of the Four Seasons George V hotel in Paris, won the title of No. 1 Bartender Meilleur Ouvrier de France 2011 followed by Stéphane Ginouves of Fouquet's Paris.

Finally — indicative of growing interest — the profession is showing up all over, for example, at international trade shows in Paris, London, Amsterdam and Moscow. One of the not-to-be-missed events is the Las Vegas Bar Show. It takes place on March 12, 2012 and Les vergers Boiron will of course be there."