A true show of spirit
JUDGING always fills me with dread. It's bad enough at a blind tasting, but when the producer of the drink is standing in front of you, the job becomes terrifying. I mean, they all seem such lovely people - and you never know what they'll do if you don't give them the prize. Kill themselves? Kill you? Still, I was asked to be a judge at the UK final of this year's Havana Club cocktail competition and it was too good an opportunity to let pass.
The winner was Bryan Duell of London bar Che with his El Guapo (Havana Club three-year-old, hibiscus cordial, orange bitters, lemon juice, vanilla Madagascar and sugar), and he'll be trying to be the mixology equivalent of Audley Harrison when he competes for the world title in in Havana in December.
This is the second competition that Harrison has won in the past few weeks. He recently walked off with top prize in Marblehead's Back to Basics competition, which involved making three cocktails, each of which had to show the quality of the core spirit.
Ultimately this is the criterion everyone should use when looking at any cocktail, and was what we were looking for in the Havana Club contest. You'd be surprised at how many competitors forgot, for example, that a rum cocktail should… well, taste of rum. There was also a baffling love of large quantities of blue Curaáao, a liqueur that needs to be treated with as much respect as an LA gang-member toting an Uzi.
The most difficult element in judging, however, was how to assess 13 completely different drinks from different bars. Ideally, the cocktails should not just be fantastic creations, but show purity of flavour and be relatively easy to make. Now Harrison's hibiscus cordial is hardly the sort of thing you can pick up at the local cash and carry, but, once it is made, a little goes a long way so, though exotic, it's practical… and the best cocktails need to have this simplicity.
A case in point: I got the train home with Drey Hucko from Brown's in Brighton and he had his ingredients and equipment with him. How many of the complicated cocktails could have been made on board a Connex South Central train? The fact that Drey's Havana Laugh worked under those conditions shows it to be a cocktail that would work brilliantly in any bar.
The second part of the contest was a flair competition, won by Sam Clayton from B@1, Battersea Rise, London. Bottles were flying through the air, bare arses being shown, there was rum on the ceiling, rum on the walls, ice cubes on the floor. It has to be said that, after all the juggling, not much rum actually ended up in the glass, but this was about entertainment and boy, was it fun. Which, come to think about it, is what cocktails are all about. n
by Dave Broom
