Drinking vs. Thinking

This is a concept I have been working on for years when it came to suggesting liquor, upselling and drinking personally at home. It's really not a hard concept to follow but it can help with the stepping up on upselling a product or picking an off the cuff cocktail for a guest.

Drinking vs. Thinking is very simple, too many people drink without thinking and too many people think without ever drinking. Let's start with a fundamentals of alcohol, we drink to get a buzz, a euphoric sense of awesomeness & enjoyment. We should enjoy the things we are drinking to get to that end, that "happy" place if you will.

Drinking without thinking, in my opinion is the nasty shooters people pull on their friends, cement mixers are an especially bad or good example of this. When you are a teenager going to parties at a friend's house, this is the sort of thing you do. You drink to get buzzed on whatever you can afford, I am sure there are more than one or two of us who have done this. This style of drinking usually goes till your late 20's...ish.

Swing to the other side of the fence, the Thinkers without drinking. These are the quaffers, the nerds who sit there and smell and dissect the aromas, the color, the flavour. Sitting on a whiskey for hours at a time, trying to define that dry cacao that Jim Murray wrote about in the Whisky Bible this year. There is nothing wrong with this style of drinking, there is a time and a place for it as there is for drinking without thinking. A very well known bartender from London once said "regardless of how good you get at your job or how high up in the community you go; when you are in a room with a bunch of bartenders, someone will scream shots and you will do it with the group".

Using this methodology of Drinking vs. Thinking, you can apply this to every shift and your after work drinking rituals. For me, I always have a nice bottle of whisky and something that is a little on the inexpensive side. After a 12 hour shift behind the bar, I want to throw some Maker's Mark or the like on the rocks and watch Robot Chicken at 2am in the morning. On Sunday's, on my day off after spending the day with my wife and little lady, I would prefer to pour a special edition of Glendronach neat and savour it while watching some show on Treehouse with my daughter. The careful balance of Drinking vs. Thinking separates us from the monkeys who eat fermented fruit and sit in the hot springs wasted.

When it comes to serving a guest, this concept can truly take your service game to the next level. If you have guests hit your bar in any ilk, taking that step up from their first few rounds can make their evening. Now, I am not talking about having the solo traveller sitting at your hotel bar drinking Jim Beam White & coke and kicking them up to Rip Van Winkle, but the introduction to Maker's Mark, Buffalo Trace or even Basil Hayden's may change his opinion on bourbon for a buck more an ounce.

Simple steps can change a guests enjoyment without coming off like a pretentious know-it-all. It stems from giving the guests what they want for a few rounds and then move to the next thing, it has to always be the next thing. That's our job as bartenders to go that next step.

Really at the end of all of this, the one thing you should take away is balance. Don't be a drinker without thinking about what you are drinking, and don't be a thinker that never gets a buzz. There is a place and time for everything and everyone, where will you stand?