Interview – Jacob Briars Global Advocacy Director, Bacardi Martini

THE GLOBAL COCKTAIL CHASER

New Zealander, Jacob Briars is Global Advocacy Director of Bacardi Martini. During a brief hiatus when he was not in a bar or on a plane, he talked to Drinks Trade about a life submerged in the global culture of drinks, his adopted home New York, and his other moniker - the Professor of Vodka.

Drinks Trade: You are a global expert on cocktails. What is your favourite drink?

Jacob Briars: I guess the standard response for cocktail lovers is my favourite drink is the one right in front of me or the one I am having next. I have a few go to classics. Top of that list is the Negroni and the Daiquiri. I genuinely love both of these drinks and they work very well at different times of the day. I have also loved to see both drinks experience a surge in popularity over the past couple of years. Not only are they delicious but there are more places in the world now that know how to make them properly. A sign of the maturity of the bar and restaurant world is once upon a time everyone was trying to muddle their way through trying to create their own unique drinks, now the way to judge the quality of a place is - can they make the classics well?

DT: Which cocktail do you believe has experienced the greatest renaissance lately?

JB: Both the Negroni and the Daiquiri. If I could tell you what would be next I would probably get myself a promotion. Obviously having come from running bars and restaurants, being a brand ambassador, and now working in strategy for a large drinks supplier, we often think what is going to be the next big drink? It is interesting how quickly and suddenly it seems that a drink becomes popular but really it takes a decade at least for a drink to go from the favourite drink of a couple of influential bartenders, to the afterwork drink of the ‘hospo’ crowd, to then being everywhere.

DT: Are their cities in the world that are driving that renaissance? Where is the epicentre of cocktail culture?

JB: New York and London remain the two most influential cities in drinks culture.

It doesn’t necessarily mean the next drink trend will start there. Wherever it starts, eventually it becomes popular and gets handed around like a trade secret among bartenders. Then it is the point where it lands in either New York or London, or both, that it takes off. First of all, both have a large number of people who like drinking cocktails. They have huge in-built populations to help make drinks popular. They also have drinks consumer and lifestyle press who like writing about the latest thing. If a drink doesn’t start there, it is there that it gets amplified, and then it suddenly goes around the world like wildfire.

Sydney is a great example of a city with a signature style that has been copied around the world. Shady Pines and the Baxter Inn started something by using fresh juice, typically whisky and apple juice. That was picked up by Naren Young, who is a Sydneysider based in New York. He re-invented the classic aperitivo style drinks using fresh juice. Now all of a sudden you have bars all over the world imitating what Naren is doing. Sometimes drinks trends can start somewhere small but once they get to New York or London it’s then they get blown up all over the world.

DT: How does one become one of the world’s best mixologists?

JB: Well I am certainly not but I have sat in front of most of them. I’m usually described as New Zealand’s 7th most famous bartender. I am very lucky to have worked with lots of great bartenders and also to have trained many of the world’s best bartenders in terms of education. I have been asked this question a lot. For me the simple process of bartending or mixology is not actually that challenging. Some technical skills take some refinement and the basic mechanics of bartending doesn’t take that long to teach, but the real challenge is being constantly hungry for new information, and constantly questioning the right way to do these things. Being extremely personable is important because ultimately we are in the business of serving guests. There is new techniques and technology always coming along. You constantly have to ask yourself - the way that I was taught to make something, is that the right way? One of the other things is bar and cocktail books from 1950 to 2000, with a couple of exceptions, were full of hand-medown stories that turned out often not to be true. People like Dale DeGroff on the bartending side, and David Wondrich on the history side, and others, have done some proper archaeology of those stories and techniques. We need to have constant confidence in the techniques, the skills, the stories that we currently have and a really open mind to realise there may be better ways of doing things.

DT: Describe the path to becoming Global Advocacy Director, Bacardi Martini.

JB: I have been working in the industry 20 years ago this year. I’ve run bars, been a partner in a couple of bars, set bars up. I started in an extremely shitty Irish theme pub in Wellington, New Zealand when I was at law school. There is almost nothing worse in the world when starting out in bartending than a fake Irish pub or a fake English pub but it taught me an incredible amount of skills because it is a pub that is open all day. Then I went to work at Matterhorn that was probably New Zealand’s best bar for two decades that sadly closed this year when the building was condemned for earthquake strengthening which is a fairly common thing in New Zealand. Then I met the founder of a Kiwi brand 42 Below Vodka, Geoff Ross. I knew him as a patron of the bar. He would come into the bar and tell us about the vodka he was launching. He eventually approached me one day when he saw me doing some education sessions at a local liquor store. He said - do you want to turn this into a training program for us as I have big plans for this brand, we are going to sell it all over the world. To me that was incredibly exciting. When I was 25 I joined him as a brand ambassador and nobody really knew what that was. There weren’t that many in the industry at the time. There was Raj Nagra who was based in Australia working for Bacardi. Geoff had an amazing vision and we had a product that was great and in 2002 there were no NZ spirits. Back then there wasn’t the explosion of craft spirits that we have now. Several years of travelling the world selling vodka later, I was known as the Vodka Professor. I then went to work for another start up brand, a cachaça called Leblon. Another really great energetic and charismatic founder who had risked everything to get the brand started in a country that I love, this time Brazil, and a category that was totally misunderstood in cachaça. While I was there Bacardi took an interest in that brand and eventually acquired it. I got talking to the Bacardi team and they brought me into the fold so I could do the same thing for their broader business, building up brand ambassador and advocacy programs, bringing scale and rigour to our cocktail competition. I was appointed Global Advocacy Director in 2012. In that time we have significantly grown the number of brand ambassadors and we have arguably one of the largest education programmes globally within the drinks industry. We have over 300 ambassadors in various roles, working with our customers, training bartenders, educating the general public on spirits. That’s the stuff that is really exciting.

DT: What is an average week in the life of a Jacob Briars?

JB: Well I almost certainly never have one and that is one of the things I love about the role. No two days are the same and I think that’s why this industry generally attracts people who have a sense of restlessness and are looking drinks trade|37

for new challenges on a daily basis. It certainly isn’t an industry suited to people who enjoy the certainty of coming into an office at 8.30 in the morning and everyday being broadly the same. For me I will do a mixture of things. Typically on a Monday or a Tuesday I might be at an industry show, whether a bar show in a key city, or a cocktail competition in a key city. I go to as many industry events as I can to pick up and learn about key trends; what’s coming next. I will spend a bit of time working with my own team, training, mentoring, getting intelligence, as in what are they seeing. On another day in the week I might be working with one of our global brand teams working out what drinks we should be focussed on; what message we should be conveying. Another day might be hosting a group to one of our brand homes or hosting our key customers. Living in New York I often get asked to host bartenders from around the world. My days are full with office and brand work. My evenings are spent going to bars, building connections with bartenders, seeing what is happening in the industry or taking journalists out to dinner or hosting someone from one of our brands or a bartender from around the world.

DT: How often would you say you are not at home in New York?

JB: I probably travel 50 per cent of the time, whether that is in Europe where most of our brand teams are based, or Miami, our American head office or Bermuda, where our global head office is. At some stage I will be in each of our regions so I try to get to Australia and New Zealand at least once a year because to me this is one of the most interesting drinks cultures on earth in terms of new trends. South East Asia I visit at least once a year. Singapore is fast turning into the next New York and London in terms of being a shop window for new techniques and ideas in the drinks industry. Then I will be in some of our key markets, India, China, Asia Pacific, Dubai, probably once a year.

DT: What is your favourite bar in the world right now?

JB: I have a couple that I really love and it will always depend on the time of day. If it’s 5.30 pm on a lovely early spring day in New York City my favourite bar is probably Caffé Dante where there are lots of aperitivo drinks and it’s a cool place to be sitting outside watching the world go by. If I want to have an incredible cocktail to a certain standard and feel like I am almost imbibing history then I would go to the American Bar in the Savoy (London) that is probably the most famous cocktail bar on earth. Similarly that grand sense of occasion comes from Atlas in Singapore that is an extraordinary gin bar. It’s got over 1200 gins there and is a temple to gin with an enormous souring atrium. It’s in a lobby, which can sometimes feel weird, but not this one. If there was an Art Deco Bruce Wayne AKA Batman and he was really into gin this is the bar he would open. Another bar I genuinely love is a bar called Limoteur in Mexico City, which has great energy and fantastic staff and a wonderful Latin hospitality and great product. When I am home in New Zealand I love Mea Culpa on Ponsiby Road in Auckland. It’s a tiny corridor size bar and no matter how long I have been away it always feels like my local whenever I return.

Above: Atlas Singapore image by EK Kap, Below: Cafe Dante New York image by S Friehon

Jacob Briars was in Australia for Sydney Bar Week 2018.

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