Acats Bartending Guide

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Acats IKEA Guide to Bartending

This is a short course in how to start your own bar with as little effort as possible. The most basic spirits and liquors are presented. The essential techniques for mixing cocktail and long drinks are shown. Pictures are available. So lets get going. It will be an introduction to bartending using real professionals.

Starting with the setup of a typical bar site. You'll have to have a position where there is a room directly behind you. This is a good strategy as you can store extra liquor and rest when you are through with your pass. Make sure you have running water in the room so that you can change your rinsing water a few times during the night. We typically use 4-6 mixing stations as the normal party/happening has about 1000 guests. In the rush hour ~01.00-02.00 we approximately are mixing up to 180 drinks/h.

We have about 100 drinks that we are guaranteeing our customers and the setup of the spirits and liquors is shown below. As we need to know where the different types of spirits are on the table we have a special setup. To the left we have whiskey and Swedish punch moving to the right the alcoholic content decreases with different liquors and ending with grenadine and sugar to the right. In the fridge we have the supply of juices, sodas, milk, cream and other things that need to be stored cold.

Each mixing station have a small selected amount of base spirits:

Vodka
Gin
Tequila
Rum

And a set of juices and fruit extracts:

Orange Juice
Pineapple Juice
Lemon
Lime

Below each station there is also some soft drinks such as Schweppes Russian Water and Tonic Water and Sprite, CC and Pommac.

Each station also has the "How-To" mixing list, the Shaker,a Measuring Cup, a Rinsing Bowl, Straws and Glasses (three sizes: 32cl, 25cl and 8cl). There is also a cloth placed on the mixing area to take care of some alcoholic abuse, i.e. spilled liquor.

On some occations, we also have a Whisky bar, serving a wide selection of mostly Scotch Whisky. A normal Acats Whisky bar contains something like 10-15 different kinds of Whisky with favorites like Glenmorangie, Oban, Laphroaig, Lagavulin and more.
In your Whisky bar, you should always have some fresh room tempered water for your customers to pour into their Whisky in order to bring out all its flavours.
Another important thing to remember is that a good Whisky bar have Whiskys for both experienced and novice Whisky lovers. (We have never been able to figure out why, but not everyone enjoys a glass of 16 year old Lagavulin...)

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