Shake it up

Changes in on-premise drinking trends means customers love cocktails than ever before.

	Treating your cocktail list as seriously as your wine or boutique beer list is another given.

Nothing signals the success of any drinks category like the development of a dedicated bar scene. And in the cocktail category, the dedicated bars are springing up. Moreover, they are doing so with the same sort of aplomb as barista-piloted cafes. For any licensee with a bar outlet (and it matters not what sort of bar), this is nothing but good news. It further helps broaden the otherwise static alcoholic beverages landscape, enabling you to develop a personalised range of mixed drinks around a set of classic cocktails. And, yes, even the garish colours and silly umbrellas are back in favour.

Cocktails' new and strong consumer sentiment reflects both changes in on-premise drinking trends, and some social trends, too. For you to capitalise in the cocktail category, it's wise to understand these changes and how they express themselves through your patrons, and subsequently, through your till.

Lower unit-consumption but higher single-spend is one current on-premise mantra. And cocktails fit into this increasingly important on-premise consumption behaviour. Rather than get into a school of beer drinkers, where the use of alcohol is sessional, cocktail drinkers want the 'affordable luxury' experience of a single, special drink that they can't get at home. Besides, the capital expense of all the ingredients your customers need to buy in order to make the current cocktail du jour at home is perceived as prohibitive. There's also an issue of expertise, as currently being promoted by an increasingly sommelieresque band of bartenders. Speaking of which...

Bartenders, like sommeliers and baristas, are rapidly becoming a necessary albeit additional staff expense. Some people see this group as aloof, but they see themselves as dedicated professionals bringing the best mixed drink and cocktail experiences into reality. For the customer. That such professionalism is often accompanied by a subdued sense of the apothecary, and some theatre isn't a bad way to get customers in the door and at
the bar either... Pouring a glass of wine can seem affected, but methodically and stylishly fixing a cocktail is a free show.

On top of this, utilising their own corrected spirits or house-flavoured liqueurs, their own fruit mixers, and their preferred high-end, low-sugar mixers (such as Fever-Tree Tonic, www.fever-tree.com), the contemporary bartender brings real cachet to your mixed drink and cocktail list.

Just remember to never call such a bartender a 'totally hot mixologist' or even a 'flairtender'. It's the only way to get them to make a Flaming Lamborghini—just so that they might then tip it over your head.

Cocktails are also enjoying a renaissance thanks to another consumer sentiment. As opposed to the 'affordable luxury' scenario, cocktails represent a claim by a new generation of drinkers who do not want to drink what their mum's de facto boyfriend drank. Cocktails are not beer, they are not even craft beer; they are not wine nor are they organic wine made from terroir. Importantly cocktails are also not cider. Ipso facto, if you drink cocktails in a bar without any signage in a laneway that does not show up on your mobile phone's bar-finder app, then you are clearly an early-adopting free-spirit soaring above the enslaved Bogun & Coke masses. Thus enriched, you might even buy a second drink.

Other drink industry manoeuvres also point to the more powerful return of the cocktail. Drink conglomerates, in an effort to cash-in on the popularity of cocktails, have over the last three years quickly developed the off-premise RTS category: ready-to-serve. Unlike ready-to-drinks (RTDs), RTSs attempt to replicate the quality mixed drink and cocktail experience customers go to bars to enjoy. Yet RTS units come in larger formats—perhaps two litres—and encourage consumers to 'accessorise' (as the Skinny Girl RTS puts it) their experience of the RTS by adding a garnish of lime, and so on.

RTS products have worked because they are more affordable. They have worked as products because of the trend among some drinkers to 'pre-load' before going out. On-premise shouldn't be too concerned over this trend, however. The RTS category is already in contraction and companies such as Pernod Ricard have delisted their RTS Malibu products, perhaps with concerns over the negative externalities associated with binge and under-age drinking.

More importantly, RTS products can't replicate the very things that make on-premise cocktails the complete package: the sense of discovery; the sense of sophistication and history linked to the golden era of cocktails; the sense of theatre and protocol; of showpersonship dispensed by a bartender taking the time to make you a drink, as opposed to not looking at you while robotically swapping a glass of sav blanc for a $10 bill.

Cocktails are also linking very naturally and nicely with the 'premiumisation' occurring within the spirits category. Adding a range of higher-priced, sophisticatedly marketed, and (apparently) more painstakingly manufactured spirits above their standard range, a lot of liquor producers look to the expanding cocktail category to help embed their posher distillations.

Once again, an $80 bottle of whisky might not be an impulse buy to an off-premise customer but that very same super-premium spirit floating within your bar's unique or classic cocktail, at $22, might be just the thing to make a night out.

Making a dedicated cocktail list and emphasising the 'classic' element is now de rigueur. Treating your cocktail list as seriously as your wine or boutique beer list is another given. Setting aside trading hours and days of the week to focus on cocktails drives the whole approach home. And employing a bartender that can turn out 20 cocktails without consulting Google is another default position, particularly when you are three deep at the bar. Cocktails, some say, are nothing more than smoke and mirrors but if you want the commercial returns then you have to install the smoke and the mirrors in the first place.

Source: Restaurant & Catering Magazine, 7 March 2013