Using the Short Shaker / Doing the Short Shake (See video on the bottom of this post)
The Mechanics of Building a Drink isn’t about the recipe; it’s about building the drink.
The method described below is for speed bartending. It’s geared toward busy Manhattan nightclubs, and packed house full liquor bars, where you’re making and serving customers at the bar their drinks, taking cash and credit cards, and making change.
If you can do speed bartending, you can do slow complicated mixology if you want (and survive). But if you do slow mixology and are dumped into crazy busy, you’ll drown.
These are the precise steps and order of operations for speed bartending (also called scientific bartending):
- Pour and serve the wines and beers first.
- Ice up all the necessary glasses, including the mixing glass if needed. (Never leave old ice in the bottom of a glass. Dump it and use new ice.
- Determine what liquors the drinks have in common (i.e., 3 have vodka), and group the glasses together, edge to edge, so that you or your bartender can pour from one glass to the next without having to lift the bottle twice.*
- Pour all vermouths first, if needed (this coats the ice and helps in mixing).
- Work down the speed rack, pouring well Vodkas first, then Scotches, then Gins etc., then call brands (bottom shelf liquors): Smirnoff, Dewars, Beefeaters, Seagrams 7 etc., then top shelf liquors. NOTE: Each bartender will have their own speed rack order, their own drink building station, their own POS, and their own section of the bar to work. Each rack and station in the bar needs to be worked by one bartender or it’s a free-for-all mess of clowns climbing over each other, waiting on line behind each other – an amateur mish mosh quagmire of inefficiency, delay, frustration, and customer service slow down which means fewer dollars flowing into the til. Think of the bar as a foxhole with a few soldiers in it. Each soldier has a side, each has weapons, both can fire at the same time as quickly as they can without waiting for the other soldier to finish using a piece of equipment.
- Next finish pouring all base ingredient liqueurs and syrups.
- Add your Mixes: sodas, juices, cream etc. Work from the easy to the hard: a) Polish off drinks that are basically finished or need a garnish (scotch on the rocks). b) Fill glasses requiring sodas, cokes, tonics, etc. c) Pour toppings: roses lime juice, liqueurs, grenadine. d) Short shake** drinks: collins’ etc. e) Add garnishes and stirrers where appropriate. f) Leave drinks requiring blending, or shaking and straining for last. 1) Sour drinks shaken first 2) Cream drinks and ice-cream drinks shaken or blended second (this is because cream takes longer to clean from inside the shaker glass and cup)
- Always wash your mixing set immediately after straining drinks.
- Handle bottles as few times as possible.
- Become ambidextrous in all things – have stirrers, napkins and garnish picks on both sides of your spill mat where you build drinks so you can set them out without hesitation.
* NOTE: This is about speed and accuracy in actual high volume places where the bartenders pour drinks and sell, not where they wait tables, bus tables, clean equipment or order food, but real, pure, bartending bars. Imbibe Magazine feels the same way in a description of their on-staff professional bartenders: “At Imbibe most of the bartenders are pros at speed and accuracy, not at arcane cocktail knowledge. Thus when a cocktail nerd asks for a drink, the bartender may ask Kate or the other expert; likewise when it comes to bachelorette drinks Kate may hand the order to another bartender.” – NYC Nightclub Bartending demands freepouring accuracy (no jiggers or shot glasses to measure anything) and being ultra fast lining up several glasses at once every order and making a thousand drinks a night is the formula for success in those environments. THAT SAID: The Mechanics of Building a Drink work in slow environments (which are only “high volume” because of the number of other jobs not strictly bartending related the bartender has heaped upon him or her).
** Short Shake: Forgotten Bartending Techniques: The Short Shake. In this video I tell you to pour when shaking drinks into the mixing glass, not the mixing tin. This instruction is particularly important for high volume drink making environments like night clubs. You don’t use the tins on both sides to shake because you’re shaking so many cocktails in busy nightclubs that if you do it for decades you risk getting arthritis, and you’ll get frostbite (you can even do that using glass if the place is really busy!). No kidding. Wet hands, frozen metal shakers, over and over – hands freeze to the metal and hands go numb. Bartending has changed slowly (at first) since 1980 and M.A.D.D.’s meddling with bartenders and the continuation of teaching techniques we used that were uniquely American. Here’s a video I had to make just now on Short Shaking because apparently it either has no name nowadays – or it’s truly just been forgotten as nobody has taught anyone forward that it’s a legitimate, respected technique.
Site Author, David J. Curtis: David Curtis, a seasoned professional with decades of bartending and bar management experience began his career in Midtown Manhattan, NY, tending and managing bars before diving into Manhattan’s bustling nightlife club scene. Over the years, he has mastered high-volume, high-pressure bartending as the lead bartender in iconic Midtown clubs and tended bar briefly in the Wall Street area, generating over $1,350,000.00 annually in personal drink sales. He has since extended his expertise to establishments in Georgia and now Tampa in Exclusive Platinum Service Awards Clubs, Florida. David’s roles as a Bartending Instructor at the American Bartending School in Tampa, while maintaining a second job bartending, and his years experience of managing bars, and working as a Brand Ambassador along with his extensive professional library of over 1,000 bartending books, highlight his dedication to continually refining his craft. He holds a diploma in Bar Management and is BarSmarts certified by Pernod Ricard.