More than 300 people crowded into a small event space in San Francisco’s Mission District on Dec. 9 to watch a race. Unlike many other tests of speed, this one could potentially be decided by an Old-Fashioned, a Paloma, or a Moscow Mule.
They were all there for Speed Rack, an international bartending competition that pits some of the world’s best female bartenders against one another to make classic cocktails as fast as they can. Those cocktails are made on stage in front of a live audience, with 100% of the money from ticket sales going to breast cancer research and education. So far, the event has raised over $1 million.
“We started nine years ago, and we’ve had thousands of women compete,” Ivy Mix, one of the cofounders of Speed Rack, tells Fortune. She created the competition with Lynnette Marrero in 2011. Its purpose: to shine a light on some of the best female bartenders out there.
“When I first moved to New York, I was having a hard time getting a job as a bartender. The response I would get would be, ‘Oh, you’re a cocktail waitress’ because I didn’t have the suspenders and the mustache and the beard and whatever,” Mix recalls. The initial idea behind the competition was to show bars that female bartenders aren’t only out there—they’re good.
“It’s all about supporting women and uplifting women and showing how amazing women can be,” Mix says.
Prospective competitors apply online to be part of the event. From those applicants, which typically range from 60 to 80 per city, Mix and Marrero select 25 to compete.
Those 25 women show up at the venue early in the day for a preliminary round, where they are then whittled down to the eight who participate in the final competition on stage that evening.
So what does a high-speed bartending competition look like?
Contestants are brought onto the stage two at a time. Four judges each make a drink order. The women start making those orders while fans, some holding massive signs, cheer them on. When done, a contestant hits a buzzer on her respective bar to stop the timer. For an idea of what you might be up against: four craft cocktails are often made in less than two minutes.
Drink orders all come from a collection of approximately 50 standard cocktails that the bartenders know about ahead of time.
“What’s been great is kind of a revival of classic cocktails, because women have been forced to learn how to fix new drinks that maybe have fallen out of the lexicon,” Marrero says. Think beyond your standard rum and coke to drinks like a Singapore Sling, Kamikaze, or a Barbary Coast.
“To be honest, sometimes the Cosmo is actually a hard drink for the younger generation because they didn’t grow up making them,” she says. “They know it’s a Cosmo, but they don’t understand how to balance the dilution between cranberry and Cointreau. So it’s kind of fun to watch their minds explode a little bit on some of those drinks.”
Finishing first also doesn’t always mean you’ll win. After the final two bartenders have hit their buzzers, drinks are passed off to the judges, who score those entries based on quality. If a drink isn’t perfect, then a judge can add seconds to a bartender’s score, ultimately increasing her time.
For instance, a Mojito with messy mint might get you a 10-second penalty, or a drink that would disappoint a paying customer in real life might get 25.
And as one might imagine, there are mishaps. In San Francisco’s first matchup, one bartender knocked a glass off her bar, shattering it on stage. Mix tells the story of a previous competition, during which one bartender hit the buzzer so hard that she managed to send her bar top, and all her completed cocktails, into the air. It’s not a competition for the faint of heart.
“It’s kind of like the roller derby of bartending competitions,” Mix says. “You’re going to get a black eye, but then you’ll win.”
The semifinals are conducted in similar fashion to the average sporting event bracket. Four pairs of women go up again each other, and then the four winners of those duos go on to compete against each other to narrow the field down to the final two, who will compete against each other to win a host city’s competition and go on to the finals. A “wild card” winner from each city selected by an audience vote also earns a spot.
“We’ve raised over a million dollars for our breast cancer charities. And San Francisco has always been one of our most successful events of the year,” Mix says.
San Francisco’s winner, Jessi Mess, a bartender at Elda in San Francisco, will now go on to compete in the competition’s finals in Chicago on May 3, 2020. When she does, Mess will be battling against other semifinal winners from New York City; Chicago; Denver; Portland, Ore.; Boston; New Orleans; and Washington, D.C.
If you want to check out the action yourself, you can still get tickets on Speed Rack’s website to the Chicago, Denver, Portland, Boston, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., semifinal rounds as well as the final round in Chicago.
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