Drinkmaster Bartending School

"Give me a Woo Woo, a Sex on the Beach, and a Fuzzy Screw!" And I was filling three highball glasses with ice, metering out the vodka, Peach Schnapps and fruit juices with hardly a thought. Monday I had never even heard of two of those drinks, but this was Thursday. I was standing behind the training bar at Drinkmaster Bartending School, taking their Master Bartending Course, and having the time of my life.


I didn't know what to expect the first day, when I finally found the nondescript stairway in Downtown Crossing. I stepped out of the elevator and into a bar. Wait, it wasn't exactly a bar, because there was a desk with a computer there and some people waiting on couches. But the rest of the room - dominated by a large L-shaped bar, beer taps, and rows of bottles in front of a mirror - was a reproduction of the familiar bar landscape. All of it was set up to make the classroom identical to a real drinking establishment.

That first day we learned to nail the free pour - being able to pour a solid ounce is a critical skill in most bars and we practiced that until it was second nature, pouring the colored water that substitutes for alcohol into a measured glass. The booze in the bottles was fake, but they had the original labels and were in the special order they belong in on the back shelves (hey, there's a system back there!) I was like a pig in mud. It was a throwback to my old laboratory days, with a little showmanship thrown in.

So for four hours a day for five days, we students came in, put down our bags and got behind the bar for some quick review of the previous day's drinks before the instructor came and we started in on some new drinkables. The instructors were old hands behind the bar and they led us through drink recipes and how to remember them, wine and beer service, and the subtle performance art of slinging perfect drinks under fire. There were fifteen of us, with only two women and something like 6 of us over 21. We had our share of Natty Light drinkers (really, why take the course?), a few decent hands with an opinion on alcohol, and one forty something (ahem). By our final exam, everyone had their techniques and recipes down, though the Brazilian guy kept asking me which garnish was the lime and which the lemon.

Walking out of there I felt like a whole new world was open to me! I would take a job in a sleepy bar one night a week, see how it went, and go from there. Maybe I could work in a swank place like Drink, stay up late, get to know all the knowable people in Boston. But really, who am i kidding? My bed starts calling me by ten, and if I am not asleep by eleven I am a zombie the next day. But at least I got to see another interesting way to make a living. And I have a lot more respect for a bartender that does a good job under pressure.