Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Food & Drink

Could You Be America’s Most Imaginative Bartender?

By

express yourself in the most imaginative bartender competition poets muse justin lavenue mib 2015
Image used with permission by copyright holder
We’re going to cut to the chase on this one. Are you a bartender? Are you the one that your friends rely on when you’re out and about? What should I get? Do you think I’ll like this? Are you the one whose kitchen looks like a smaller-scale set of any number of Food Network shows?

Better yet, do you look at Kanye and go, “You call that genius? I’ll show you genius”?

If so, this competition may be for you.

Recommended Videos

Starting April 18th, you can register to try your hand at being named the Most Imaginative Bartender in the country. Sponsored by Bombay Sapphire, and in its tenth year, The United States Bartenders’ Guild is on the hunt for the most creative bartender in the country.

Related: Meet the Mixologist of the Year: Justin Lavenue

This is the big one, y’all, and for the first time ever the Top 10 finalists will travel to London this August–home of Bombay Sapphire and its new Laverstoke Distillery—to battle it out for the 2016 North American title. The grand prize winner will be featured on a special edition cover of GQ Magazine’s December Men of the Year issue.

How. Cool. Is. That? Not only could you be named the most imaginative bartender, reaching heights that your fourth grade teacher who gave you an F in art could never dream of, but you’d be in G-freakin’-Q.

Not sure if you’ve got the whiskey stones to enter? Check out the cocktail from 2015 Winner, Justin Lavenue, of Austin’s The Roosevelt Room:

The Poet’s Muse (pictured)

  • 2 oz. Bombay Sapphire Gin
  • .75 oz. Poet’s Cordial
  • .75 oz. Yuzu-Lime blend
  • 2 dashes Umami tincture

Method: Hard shaken over a large ice cube. Strained into a large coupe glass with the large ice cube dropped in. Garnished with a lime peel Rosette. Served on a Zen Garden.

Poet’s Cordial Prep: 1 L Pistachio Milk (1 park unsalted pistachio meat, 2 parts water, blended and strained), 800ml Wildflower Honey, 2 cinnamon sticks, 4 Star Anise pods, 1 vanilla bean, 2 tablespoons Matcha Green Tea Powder. Combine ingredients, mix well, and let rest for three days. Fine strain and bottle.

Citrus Blend: 15 parts fresh lime juice, 1 part Yuzu concentrate. Mix well and bottle.

Umami tincture: 30 Shitake mushrooms (chopped), 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, 6 oz Bombay Sapphire, 1 tablespoon Himalayan Salt. Saute the Mushrooms in butter for 10 minutes. Add Bombay Sapphire and salt and steep for another 10 minutes. Strain mushrooms off and freeze to let fats coagulate. Strain off fats and bottle.

For more information on how to enter, check out the official contest website.

Sam Slaughter
Sam Slaughter
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Sam Slaughter was the Food and Drink Editor for The Manual. Born and raised in New Jersey, he’s called the South home for…
Japanese whisky-maker Nikka celebrates 90 years of distilling with Nine Decades
Nikka whisky celebrates 90 years with a unique expression
Nikka

Fans of Japanese whisky know Nikka for its award-winning expressions including Nikka Coffey Grain, Nikka Yoichi, and Nikka From The Barrel, among others. If you like those, you’ll love Nikka’s newest release. But to get your hands on it, you’ll need quite a bit of cash.
Nikka Nine Decades

It’s called Nikka Nine Decades, and it was crafted to celebrate the iconic Japanese whisky brand’s 90th birthday. This limited-release is a blended whisky made up of whiskies from the 1940s to the 2020s. But it's not just Japanese whiskies included. There are whiskies from all six of Nikka’s distilleries including Ben Nevis in Scotland. The blend is made up of over 150 whiskies. It included rare malt whiskies from Yoichi and Miyagikyo, new grain whiskies from Moji and Satsumastukasa, as well as long-matured grain whisky from Nishinomiya .

Read more
Benromach is releasing an un-peated single malt Scotch with the perfect name
There's no peat msoke in Benromach's new expression
Benromach

Scotch whisky distiller Benromach is well-known for its subtly smoky, peated single malt whiskies. But its recent addition to the core range is a little different. That’s because it’s an un-peated expression for those drinkers who don’t prefer to sip a whisky that tastes like it was dipped into the center of a roaring campfire for a few seconds. As a bonus, it has the perfect name for such a different expression.
Benromach Contrasts Unpeated

It’s aptly called Benromach Contrasts Unpeated. While it might be made using the same methods as the core range of expressions, it’s crafted with traditional malted barley as opposed to peat-smoked barley, hence the contrast.

Read more
AETHER FW24 focuses on performance for the elements
Jackets, Shells, and Coats for any element
aether fw24 man in maverick snow shell jacket

If you have ever pulled yourself out of a deep sleep, slipping out of a blissful dream, standing on the edge of a mountain, and staring at mother nature's beautifully carved handiwork of the valley, only to find yourself staring at an alarm clock. If that experience then led to you mundanely trudging through a morning routine of getting dressed, eating a processed breakfast, and sitting in bumper car traffic. And if all of that led to you asking yourself if there is something more, AETHER has been looking for you. Born out of the disillusionment of their industry, two filmmakers set out in 2009 to create a brand of clothing meant to be abused. With the creation of AETHER, Palmer West and Jonah Smith look to get everyone out of the routine and into something more fulfilling: adventure. The AETHER FW24 collection continues what they have spent a decade and a half perfecting.
Performance and versatility

When you pick up anything from AETHER, the feeling you get when putting it on is that you can do almost anything. It won't help you climb a mountain but will keep you warm. And you don't have to keep the sweaters, coats, and shells in the closet until vacation time; they work perfectly well in the office, too. And that seems to be the company's entire point.

Read more