Episodes

My guest on this episode of Drinks At Work is Iain McPherson. He’s the owner and bartender behind Edinburgh bars Panda & Sons and Nauticus, and he’s long had a passion for the cold: he’s the guy who developed the switching technique, which employs advanced freezers to enhance the flavour of liquors, and souspression, another freezing technique to help create new drinks.

I’m talking to one of my favourite Australian bartenders in this episode, it’s James Connolly. He’s a veteran of the Perth bartending scene, one of the nicest guys in the business, and recently he opened the very bar of his own, Bertie in Bassendean in Perth. He’s one of a growing number of bartenders turned owners who have decided to open places a little further from the CBD, so he talks a bit about the motivations behind that, about his career today which has seen him in multiple roles, and he...

Earlier in August, Sam Bygrave hosted a panel talk with Daisy Tulley and Wade Tiller titled Future Proof Your Brand. Daisy Tulley is the general manager of Sydney’s Mucho Group, whose bars include The Cliff Dive, Tio’s, Bar Planet, and World’s 50 Best Bar, Cantina OK!. The Mucho Group also has their own brand of seltzer which they sell under the Cantina OK! brand, which made for some good back and forth with my other guest for this talk, Wade Tiller. Wade is one of the co-founders of Australian ...

This week I’m talking to the Maidenii vermouth and Marionette Liqueurs founder, Shaun Byrne, about his career but also about the Australian Distilled Spirits Awards, of which he is the new head judge. The ADSA is the biggest spirits judging competition in Australia, and I think it’s the most reputable — they have a mix of bartenders, writers, retail buyers, and distillery industry folks on their many panels as judges, and it’s a pretty robust system they have in place. So i talk to Shaun about t...

Hamish Smith is the editor of CLASS Magazine in the UK, the bars editor fro Drinks International, and an academy chair for The World’s 50 best Bars. He’s also the creator and organiser behind Drinks International’s Bar World 100 list — so he knows a thing or two about bar awards and lists. And that forms a large part of our chat this episode. I ask Hamish about whether the lists are good for the industry, we talk about how sometimes the lists and awards can produce strange behaviour from operat...

On this ***bonus*** episode we're taking a tour of new Sydney bar, Tucano's Lounge, to find out what we should expect when the bar — from the team behind last year's About Time popup — opens. I'm talking to Steve Davis, co-owner of Tucano's Lounge and Sydney bar industry veteran about how they basically built the bar themselves, how they're steering their modern tropical tiki drinks away from an over-reliance on rum towards other spirits, and a lot more.

Something a little different to the usual on this episode: we're talking to award-winning bartender Anneliese Grazioli and breaking a bit of news — she’s got a new bar on the way, called Bar Kokomo, so we’re going to find out what to expect when it opens in mid-to-late September. Anneliese has built quite the career for herself up in Darwin, she worked for a long time for David and Kelly Robinson, at their longstanding tequila bar and restaurant, Hot Tamale, she’s won a bunch of bartending comps...

It’s one thing for a bartender to think about opening a bar of their own one day — after all, you’ve worked in bars, hopefully have run one or two and have an idea of the business side of things, you’ve got a sense of costings and hiring and know what makes a bar work. But it’s an all-together different thing to launch a drinks brand — even one that is informed by your bartending experience, like Idle Hands Drinks Co. owners Andy McIntyre and Mitch Keane have done.

In this episode, Sam Ng talks about his journey from chef to bartender to ambassador, to criss-crossing the Asia Pacific region. And he talks about why he gave up the ambassador life and came back to open his own bar, how a series of pop-ups gave him proof of concept, and loads more.

This episode, I'm talking to Nick Winter and Pete Hollands from Frog's Hollow Saloon in Brisbane, which took out two awards last month at the Boothby Best Bars QLD awards: Best New Bar QLD presented by Patron Tequila, and the big one, the Best Bar in Queensland presented by Giffard. They've got great advice on how they built their bar, the systems they've out in place, and what it might cost to open a bar of your own. Get a look at photos from the Boothby Best Bars QLD awards here. See the lis...

This is a show about building creative and rewarding careers in and around the world of drinks. This episode, I'm talking to RockY Hair — she's the group ops manager for the Mucho Group, whose venues include Tio's Cerveceria, Cliff Dive, Cantina OK!, and Bar Planet.

This is a show about building creative and rewarding careers in and around the world of drinks. This episode I’m talking to Mitch Townsend, the Flor de Caña brand ambassador for Australia, New Zealand and Japan. The Flor de Caña Sustainable Cocktail Challenge is the sponsor of this show, too, so in this episode Mitch shares some advice on what will make a winning drink in that competition, as well as his insights into the world of ambassadoring, and tips for building a big career in the bar wor...

This episode I’m talking to James Christopher, who is one third of the ownership trio behind Sydney city rum distillery, Brix. Brix began in 2017, and opened a distillery and bar on Bourke street in Surry Hills. They’ve been laying down rum ever since, and this year they’ve had a couple of breakthroughs on their journey — they’ve reached the point now that they don’t need to import older aged spirit from Barbados, and instead are bottling rum that has been made from molasses through to spirit at...

This episode first aired in December 2022, but we're giving it another because Simone Caporale is in Sydney next week for the Maybe Cocktail Festival (maybecocktailfestival.com). Simone Caporale is something of a renaissance bartender — he’s a busy guy. He’s in the process of expanding his Barcelona bar Sips — which opened in 2021 and landed at number three on The World’s 50 Best Bars list this year — and has more than a few strands to what he does, and a recent roundup includes the following: ...

Kate McGraw is the Australian World Class ambassador and the guest on this episode. The World Class ambassador role is a big job, and I talk to Kate about that and how she got to this point in her career, why preparation is so important, what she had to improve upon to do the job well (and why), and lots more. It’s a good chat and I think you’ll find plenty of advice in there whether you’re interested in working for brands, or just want to improve your own approach to your work. There’s also so...

This episode we’ve got something a little bit different. This is a recording of a panel chat that I hosted the other week in Sydney at Paramount Liquor’s Future Proof Forum. It was a great night, a number of different distilleries and brands were on hand offering samples, and we had a great audience to listen to three of the talks on the night. This one you’re about to hear was about future proofing our industry — on the panel was Charlie Ainsbury from Proof & Company, Mariella Menato from Denom...

This is a show about building creative and rewarding careers in and around the world of drinks. My guest on this episode is James Young. James is the founder of Old Young’s, a small WA distillery in the Swan Valley that makes gin and vodka — and one which has racked up a number of big accolades since beginning in 2016. In 2017 and 2018 they were named champion Australian distiller at the highly regarded Australian Distilled Spirits Awards. More recently — just the other week in fact — at the I...

My guest on this episode is Sean Baxter. Sean began his working life as a bartender up in Brisbane, before moving to Melbourne and eventually getting into the brand side of things as a brand ambassador. It’s that experience which stood him in good stead when he and business partners Tim Boast and George Georgiadis began Never Never Distilling Co in 2016. Since they first released their gin in 2017, they’ve won numerous accolades, and become something of a bartender favourite. Their gin is all a...

My guest on this episode is Krystal Hart. In this chat we get a look under the hood of the brand ambassador life. Krystal is the national bartender engagement and trade advocacy manager at Campari Australia, and one of the leading lights of the bar scene in this country for over a decade. Krystal stepped into the brand advocacy side of the bar business in 2013 with a gig for Diageo’s Reserve Brands portfolio, but before that she worked in some of Brisbane’s best cocktail bars at the time: Sling ...

My guest on this episode is the owner of Clipper in Auckland, which is talked about as the best cocktail bar in New Zealand: His name is Barney Toy. Barney is originally from the UK, but has spent a lot of his life working bars in New Zealand. Clipper debuted in 2019, but then a pandemic came along. We don’t really talk about the pandemic and lockdowns in this chat, but it’s interesting to note how the time of covid spurred the creation of multiple revenue streams for the bar — so that they are...

My guest on this episode is Julie Reiner: you may know her from any one of the New York bars she’s opened since 2003: Flatiron Lounge, Pegu Club, Clover Club, and most recently, Milady’s. She’s written cocktail books, judge cocktail comps around the world, and won numerous accolades for her bars and herself. Or if you’ve just come into the bar world, you might know her from TV and the Netflix show Drink Masters, which debuted in October last year to much success. Drink Masters is a competitive ...

This is a show about how you can go about building a creative and rewarding career in and around the world of drinks. We’re back for the 2023 season of the show, and today’s episode is a little different. It’s a live recording of a Q&A I held with JULIO BERMEJO at PS40 in Sydney after an Altos Tequila masterclass there. Julio is best known as the creator of the Tommy’s Margarita — but he’s a lot more than that. Not only does he run his family’s San Francisco restaurant, Tommy’s Mexican Restauran...

Dre Masso is a bartender who has done just about everything in a varied, successful career — and he's coming to Australia to share his experience soon. He's touring Australia with Julio Bermejo to talk about The Collective Spirit competition from Altos Tequila which has a $50,000 USD prize — keep an eye out for venues and dates soon. He also talks about how he chooses collaborative partners, how he helped create Altos Tequila, the importance of recognising opportunity and more. http://www.taho...

Simone Caporale is something of a renaissance bartender — he’s a busy guy. He’s in the process of expanding his Barcelona bar Sips — which opened in 2021 and landed at number three on The World’s 50 Best Bars list this year — and has more than a few strands to what he does, and a recent roundup includes the following: along with Alex Kratena and Monica Berg, he created the innovative Muyu liqueurs brand; launched another brand, Amaro Santoni; worked on another brand Canaïma Gin, which sustainabl...