What I Learned While Judging a Cocktail Competition

I thought I had prepared myself well, but I still encountered plenty of surprises.

I got to cross something off my bucket list earlier this week: I was a judge at a cocktail competition.

I’ve attended several competitions over the years. I’ve been to the Speed Rack national finals a few times. I credit a competition I attended in Iceland many years ago for super-turbo-boosting my knowledge as a drinks writer.

I even nearly won a competition recently, although that was of the type where you submit a recipe rather than make and present the drink live.

But I’d never been a judge until now.

It was for the Ten To One “Daiq-Off” finals. The rum brand had sponsored a series of competitions in NYC and Rochester earlier in the year. This finals competition, held at Mr. Melo in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, brought together the five winners from the NYC and Rochester semifinals to select a champion.

(Why Rochester? Well, the competition started there as kind of a drunken 2 am lark among bartender friends, I’m told, and then it grew and got sponsorship from the rum brand, and its founders wanted to bring it to a primary market. They hope to grow it to become a national competition at some point.)

Cocktail competitions take any number of forms. You may have watched the Drink Masters series on Netflix. That’s one example, albeit an extremely high-production-value one. At some competitions I’ve attended, one bartender at a time gets up and makes a carefully considered and prepared cocktail they’ve developed, telling the story of its conception while they make it; they’re given a leisurely time limit of a few minutes. In others (Speed Rack, for example), two bartenders at a time compete against each other to make the most palatable round of drinks as quickly as possible. Different competitions combine some of these elements, and many add others.

This particular finals competition took different forms over each of its rounds. I’d been briefed by email in advance: In the first round, the finalists would each prepare their own original cocktail, using syrups, infusions, etc that they’d prepared in advance. All of the cocktails had to be daiquiris at heart, meaning they needed to include rum (ostensibly Ten To One), citrus, and some form of sugar; beyond that, anything was fair game.

The second round would throw a “Chopped”-style twist into the mix, in the form of a number of “mystery ingredients” (which turned out to include Faccia Brutto Centerbe and Malort, among others) that each competitor would draw randomly and which would need to be incorporated into a daiquiri variation they would create on the spot; each competitor would be given four minutes for R&D before serving the drink.

The competitors were to be judged on speed, taste, cleanliness, and flair/technique, I was informed. I mentally added creativity and appearance/presentation to that list. I looked forward to tasting these thoughtfully developed unique daiquiri spins and evaluating their merits and garnishes and creativity.

I also looked forward to meeting my fellow judges, who included Marc Farrell, the founder of Ten To One, and Steve Schneider, who’s been a huge name in the NYC cocktail world for a couple of decades (you know him from Employees Only and his latest venue, Sip & Guzzle) but with whom I somehow hadn’t really crossed paths until now.

This might be my first cocktail-judging rodeo, but I’m totally prepared for this! I thought.

And then I arrived at the competition and found the competitors weren’t the only ones who would be encountering twists and surprises.

During the first round, it turned out, the bartenders would make their drinks one at a time, but while racing against a stopwatch. Time was of the essence, more so than I could have guessed, in making these initial unique and creative drinks: Taking more than 30 seconds to make them (an insanely short time) would incur increasing penalties. Which meant that these carefully considered cocktails were, in reality, thrown together with sloppy free pours and, in most cases, minimal shaking and no garnishes.

It seemed that all competitors decided to eschew flavor and cleanliness points in order to try to stay below that important 30-second mark. “If they’re being timed, what incentive do they have to include anything more than the three required ingredients?” Steve asked the competition’s founders. At least one competitor’s answer: Welcome to the four-ingredient equal-parts daiquiri. (Those proportions actually could have worked really well if two of the four ingredients had been rums. If.)

And there would be a third round, a one-on-one death match to determine the ultimate winner, in which the two bartenders who scored cumulatively highest in the first two rounds would simultaneously make a standard daiquiri; the fastest would get an extra half-point added to their score, but both would still also be evaluated on taste, cleanliness, and technique.

Oh, and I should mention that for each round, the competitors were to each make two identical cocktails; the stopwatch wouldn’t stop ticking until they’d served one drink to the judges and slammed the other themselves.

By the end of the first round, the competition was pretty tight between the five contestants. By the end of the mystery-ingredient second round, some clear favorites had emerged. The person in the top spot was obvious once we’d added up the points, but a tie had developed between two people for the second-place spot. Steve’s ingenious idea for a solution: An additional tie-breaking death-match round to determine who’d go up against the top-spot person for the trophy.

So by the time we were good-naturedly debating which of the final two competitors would be declared the winner, we judges had tasted 14 different daiquiris. And our individual preferences as judges were becoming apparent, never more so than in our evaluations of the final, trophy-determining round. One hastily made standard daiquiri was made with equal parts and was not only overly sweet but overdiluted as well. The other was tart but underchilled.

To my palate, the more tart one was the better balanced of the two. Another judge seemed inclined to go with the equal-parts one, but I argued my case: If I were served either drink in a bar, I’d be far less unhappy with an underchilled but reasonably tasty daiq than I would be with an unbalanced and overdiluted one.

And so Wyatt Brennan, from Lucky’s and Good Luck in Rochester, was crowned the winner of the Ten To One Daiq-Off Finals. He’d done an excellent job throughout the competition, and I truly believe his win was well-deserved.

The other competitors were Nick Ryan, from Swan Dive and Leonore’s in Rochester, Ari Fujimoto of Arthur & Sons, Alexandra Marilley of Bar Belly and Perla Negra, and Hector Sam-Roman of TAO (the latter three all in NYC), all of whom were amazing in a huge range of ways. I hope that someday I can drink each person’s creations the way they’re meant to be appreciated, free of time constraints and other limitations.

And the real takeaway for me is that I need to head up to Rochester soon to check out its cocktail bars. I’d heard it had a surprisingly good cocktail scene for a smaller city, and this competition confirmed it.

The champion being hoisted into the air by the competition’s founder before receiving a trophy from Marc Farrell

I had thought I was going into this whole endeavor reasonably well-prepared. I’d given plenty of thought to my own personal criteria as well as the official competition rules. I’d watched carefully and taken mental notes at each previous competition I’d attended. And yet I was still surprised by plenty of aspects of the evening, small and large.

This is what surprised me most.

• How much I was rooting for each and every competitor. Each person had their own strengths and weaknesses, and we really saw the range of both. One competitor was sloppy with their drink-making but had amazing charisma. Another seemed so nervous I wanted to take them aside for a pep talk, but they produced excellent drinks. Each stood out in their own way. I wish I could have crowned all five competitors champions.

• How much I was burning to give feedback. Hearing remarks from the judges—often witty, occasionally snide, generally extremely educational—had been a highlight each time I had attended the Speed Rack finals, and I’d been looking forward to giving back in a similar way. I was looking forward to saying encouraging things to the competitors as we went along, noting what they did well as much as where they missed the mark, but the judging was silent.

  We marked our scores on the score sheets; I took small notes there and in a notebook I’d brought with me. Most of the competitors came up to me after the competition had ended, and I was happy to tell each as much as I could recall at that point (even as the first round was, admittedly, already fading in my 14-daiquiri memory).

  By the second round, I was finding it tough to hold back my thoughts, and started whispering to Steve, sitting next to me. (The enthusiastic crowd was making enough noise that I’m certain the competitors didn’t overhear.) Things like “Did he just grab vodka? That’s a choice” and “This is delicious, but is it really a daiquiri?” (“It’s closer to a pina verde,” Steve replied, accurately) and “Again, not bad, but also not a daiquiri?” (It’s a French martini,” Steve said, joking this time but still not far from the truth).

  Being a judge, I also couldn’t join the rowdy crowd in hollering and clapping, even though I badly wanted to. A cocktail competition, especially a speed-based one, is a fun, adrenaline-fueled event—and even more so when you’ve got ringside seats, as I did. I had to constantly remind myself to choke back the cheers and whoops building in my throat.

• How much we judges would, um, share with each other. Drink-wise, that is. We were expected to share each cocktail between all of us; we didn’t each receive our own. It makes sense: It cuts down on waste (it’s not like each judge would want to drink the full amount of a dozen or more daiquiris), time is of the essence, and all that. I get it. But this is no endeavor for germophobes. The group agreed I could be the first to taste each drink.

  Which meant taking two sips and passing the cocktail on down the line. There was no chance of retasting it, no tasting it side-by-side with another contestant’s cocktail, no holding on to it to finish later “for pleasure” if it was particularly delicious. I had to make up my mind about each drink immediately.

• How sticky I would get. Since the cocktails were made as quickly as possible, the straining and pouring was sloppy at best. Each coupe glass ended up with a fair amount of daiquiri down its side. Which, since I was the first to reach for each glass, meant that sugar-sticky rivers of daiquiri ended up all over my hands, down my forearms, everywhere. I ended each round feeling as though I’d just bathed in simple syrup. (Which was fine; it washes off. It was just an amusing aspect I truly did not anticipate.) My apologies to everyone I hugged.

• How many things there are to evaluate in the span of 30 seconds plus two sips. Every time I glanced down to take a note I worried I may have missed something with the free pours, the ice, something playfully tossed in mini-flair style…who even knows. And as for the drinks, I was evaluating more than simply balance and dilution. It was about flavor and creativity and delivering on stated intention and “Is this even really a daiquiri at heart?” It’s very different from drinking for pleasure, and there’s a lot to process in a mere two sips.

• How subjective it is. Is overdilution a bigger flaw than under? Is a much-too-sweet original drink still flawed if its creator stated ahead of time that it was intended to be “dessert-y”? Should a drink that’s creative and delicious, but strays a bit far from a typical daiquiri, be rated higher than one that is clearly a daiquiri but doesn’t come across much differently from a standard one?

  These were all real dilemmas we had to navigate and questions we had to answer for ourselves, and there were so many more. I was sure I was correct each time, but I’m equally sure my fellow judges were correct in their own assessments, as well, even when they occasionally differed from mine. Catch any of us on a different day, in a different mood, and many of our decisions could’ve gone a different way.

• How wonderfully well-informed and helpful my fellow judges were. I owe many thanks to Steve, in particular, who was sitting next to me and bore the brunt of my “how would you evaluate that?” questions (e.g., “That wash line was sad; which category would you ding it under?” or “Does an acid solution count as citrus or is that a DQ?”), answering patiently each time.

• How rewarding it would be. Not financially; we judges don’t get paid. (I did get a cool brand T-shirt, though; I saw a fellow judge had snagged a couple of baseball caps.) We did it for love of the industry and the fun of the competition and the joy of helping people advance their skills, all of which are fantastic rewards in and of themselves.