Across the UK and around the world bartenders are competing in the Monkey Shoulder Ultimate Bartender Championship and the scores are all being put on Local & Global Leaderboards.
The Ultimate Bartender Championship (UBC) is a bartending competition like no other from the, always inventive, folk at Monkey Shoulder. Every bartender that enters is challenged across a series of task designed to test every element of the modern bartender.
The challenges are:
Quiz
Mixiodic Table
Pouring
Nosing
Stocktake
Tray Service
and for the top three in each heat Round Building
For a more in-depth look at the format of the competition check out our look at the Edinburgh and Newcastle heats here.
At the end of each heat the scores are tallied up and uploaded to the UBC website where both Local and Global Leaderboards let everyone know where they stand. Whilst the UK heats are only half way through with many more cities to compete we thought we’d take a look at what those leaderboards are telling us so far.
The Local Leaderboard makes very good reading for the bartenders of Aberdeen and it seems if you want to find the best bartenders in the UK it would serve you best to head north of the border. They have the number one score in the UK thanks to Jonathan Arthur from Orchid with a very impressive 40.7, as well as the second fastest Round Build Score (Nottingham’s Ehren Khoo-Steel holds top spot on that challenge).
Aberdeen actually hold the top three spots with Nick Gordon (Orchid) and Cameron Woodger (99 Bar & Kitchen) joining Jonathan at the top of the table. Even more impressively Aberdeen hold 7 of the top 10 spots in the UK charts.
Manchester’s Adam Binnersley (Mojo) is the highest ranked non-Aberdeen bartender in 4th spot before we head back to Aberdeen for the 5th placed Hattie Aitken.
It really is an impressive show by Aberdeen, we had a great night last time we were up there and sensed it was on the verge of really making some waves, it seems that time has come.
As good as the news is for Aberdeen in the Local Leaderboard, it isn’t such pretty viewing in the Global Leaderboard for the UK as a whole.
Jonathan is up there in 5th place which not only means we are getting beaten by four other people but to make matters worse two of them are from the US and the top score is from an Aussie (albeit one working in Malaysia).
We actually only have 3 bartenders the top 20 and 8 on the top 50.
So UK bartenders, it is time to step up. Time to make your mark. Time to show the rest of the world just how good you are. There are plenty more heats to come (a full list can be found here along with the registration form) so get yourself involved and if you don’t want to compete head over and support your colleagues.
We will be doing another update next week and we hope to be able to bring you better news. In the meantime a huge tip of the hat to Aberdeen and Jonathan, fantastic work.