So You Think You Can Shake Report by Zdenek Kastanek

42Below Cocktail World Cup hopefuls, ‘Team West London’, are going hard in their efforts promote the brand to get themselves to the New Zealand final.

Messrs Wrigley and Mant in Action

Zdenek Kastanek, Glenn Morgan and Andy Mill are no doubt hard at work creating the drinks that they will take to the UK final in October. However they found the time to put on their very own comp at Lab on August 2^nd called ‘So You Think You Can Shake’.

Team West London member Zdenek Kastanek sent us this competition report:

So You Think You Can Shake was an a idea which we [Andy, Glenn, Zdenek] came up with to promote 42Below, to have fun, to bring all of us “busy and tired – as we love to say” bartenders together, and to get us the tickets to world final at NZ!

We had a pretty simple aim – The comp had to be fun and bring old and new names of the industry together and for lots of crazy 42 drinks to wrap all of this up!

Setting the comp up cost a few weeks of work and a bit of time on the  phone and sitting in meetings – but in the end we had Shervene Shahbazkhani, Erick Lorincz and Leanne Davidson as a our judges, Isaac Asha Tomiczek as our MC and over 20 competitors, including names such as Matthew Dakers, Paul Mant and Jim Wrigley.

Competitors had to make 6 drinks in 4min 20 sec – the quickest time was 1.46min… Judges had 20 points for speed, 10 points for taste, 7 for bar skills and 5 for chat and charm!

The whole thing happened on Sunday 2nd August from 2:30pm till 10:30pm [well LAB closed at 1am!]

We got over 120 people in at a same time after 5 pm so God knows how big was the total number.

The winners

Mr Jim Wrigley took first prize, Amanda Humphreys 2nd and Matt Dakers 3^rd.

Much love to all – thx for coming!