Last month I caught up with Matt Perkins, a great bartender, at one of my favorite restaurants in Washington, DC: Cedar.

Watch as Matt teaches us a new drink and gives us a few tips on building business.

Enjoy!

As bar and restaurant operators, we produce copious amounts of waste each year.

Sure, everyone would like to do more to slow down the overflowing landfill sites… but….

No more buts! Take 3 minutes to see 5 things Anthony Clarke of Irish Restaurant Company is doing to SAVE THE PLANET and BUILD HIS BUSINESS in the process!

Here is the drink to bridge the sweetness of summer with the urge for heat during cool fall evenings!

One sip of this drink and you will never forget it. Sophisticated and delicious!

Last guy off the patio,

Curious about what the greatest bars in the world are doing RIGHT NOW to amaze and delight their guests?

Global Explorer, Angus Winchester has an ALL ACCESS pass into the bars and restaurants that set the trends and break the molds.

Today he takes us to Japan, land of samurai, Godzilla, and… diamonds made of ice?

Watch this video and see how to add a little WOW! to your drinks!

No passport required…

About once a decade a cocktail comes along that takes over a position in my Top 5 favorite cocktails.

…the Basil Smash is that drink!

Let Angus teach you how to make (and sell) this drink and thank me later!!

Watch, mix, taste, enjoy!,

Crowd rich, time poor, upwardly mobile & aesthetically pleasing; are today’s barmen & barwomen set to be suddenly elevated to the like of celebrity chefs and are we to witness something similar to the 90’s phenomenon of the rise of the superstar DJ, ponders Simon Blezard, CEO & Founder of Bar Exchange, the world’s largest social network for bar & hospitality professionals & drinks enthusiasts?

A new breed of entertainer...

The process of ‘enrichment’ that we are witnessing at the moment for bar professionals, which is partly due to consumer demand for better tasting drinks & more elaborate preparation and partly due to the digital technology at their disposal for quickly proliferating their concoctions to large global audiences, means talented & ambitious bar professionals are positioning themselves to be snapped up as either Brand Ambassadors and travel the world representing large drinks companies in the way a marketing person never credibly could, or they are acting independently as evangelists of ‘mixology’, cocktail gurus and voices in their own right. Irrespective of their corporate allegiances these individuals are becoming a respected, popular, vociferous & powerful force. And with words like ‘mixologist’ and ‘flairing’ now commonly used there is even a hip, new vernacular to support this growing movement.

For mixologists how you shake is like your own handwriting

The digital trail or ‘crumbs’ these individuals leave behind them, i.e. Facebook postings, comments on Twitter etc. are rich pickings for the media and especially marketing departments from which to extrapolate the current trends & tastes in the drinks world. Long gone is the need for focus groups, expensive marketing road-shows, exhibition stands, a mobile salesforce and the like; all the information a savvy journalist or drinks company needs is right there on his computer in the form of ‘snippets’ on social networks or blogs!

Either way I am witness to and relieved to see the drinks companies finally starting to realise that social media is definitely a cost effective and powerful medium by which to reach this controlling, “influencer community”. Most brands these days have a profile on Facebook & are struggling to understand how to maximise results from Twitter, but what really do they hope to gain by using social media as a marketing channel?

And this is where the dichotomy between exposing a brand to professional social networks like Linked-In and consumer led social networks like Facebook collide. Add a bit of Twitter into the mix and suddenly there is the need for 3 different distinct forms of messaging and a social media team to manage the whole process. Maybe the drinks brands should go back to running focus groups after all? At least that way the learnings are kept behind closed walls?

This said, even if the drinks brands are struggling to harness social media, let alone accurately ascertain who are the leaders amongst this demographic, do you think this will stop this new breed of self educated, barmen & mixologists from further self promoting? No way, Jose! And indeed why should they? If Juan Carlos from Costa Rica thinks he has made the new, perfect flavoured Mojito, will he wait for next year’s Bacardi sponsored flair competition to demonstrate his talents? No, he will ask a friend or colleague to film him making his new drink and upload the content onto Youtube, Facebook and tweet like crazy, so much so, that we often see expensive, brand or marketing generated content being eclipsed by that of ‘real’ people.

So what have we learned so far?

• We know that bar professionals are rising in popularity and influence amongst consumers & venue owners and are subsequently cannibalising brand led advertising campaigns.

• We know that bar professionals are becoming extremely vocal about their craft and really understand how to promote themselves through social media.

• We know that brands are desperately trying to reach and harness these bar professionals, their intention being to use them to evangelise and promote their products.

And yet the marketing led attempts of drinks companies to create a ‘digital nexus’ where bar professionals, venues and brands can all interact, seem to have failed to resonate amongst each party. Why? Because the sites they have created are marketing led, exclusive, uninspired and simply not useful. In conclusion, the current choice of bar & drinks networking sites out there is poor, un-engaging & biased, unless you elect to be part of a particular clique or have a leaning towards a particular brand and its content.

Where Bar Exchange aims to fill this need & gap in the market is through the provision of a niche social network as well as an engaging, content rich, online publishing platform with a suite of useful tools for both its individual & corporate user bases. Impartial & brand agnostic as we are, we have built up a global community of 65,000 users since our launch and are home to the world’s largest online alcoholic drinks library, or as we call it ‘a drinks brands network’.

What makes Bar Exchange different is that not only are we passionate about learning about and collaborating with this exciting, developing industry, but as our heritage is with the Internet and its continued development, we are here to provide bartenders & hospitality professionals, craft brewers and batch distillers with all the digital tools they need to promote themselves, their trade & their products. Watch out for our Facebook App…coming soon!

Follow us on Twitter @barexchange