“I meet the mixologist
Meet the Mixologist THOR BERGQUIST
Thor Bergquist is a selfproclaimed ‘nightlife expert’, starting in the hospitality industry at 16 years old.
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t’s all I’ve ever done,” he expressed. Bergquist has worked in almost all aspects of the bar sector, from bartending to managing, floor service to developing products and has worked in Auckland, Melbourne, Singapore, London, and New York before settling back in Sydney. Now, Bergquist works as a consultant helping to launch brands – anything from product development, flavours, processing and production to distribution and sales. “I got to a point in my career in New York where I was sick of bouncing around with work Visas and I wanted to come back to Sydney with the plan to open my own bar – PS40, and launch a product called PS Soda,” he explained. “The creation of PS Soda came about because of a consulting gig I had in New York where I was hired to create the flavours of a similar product – a natural energy drink, but with a cocktail influence. A guy had flown from Paris and tried one of my cocktails, he said ‘I want to put this cocktail into this energy drink.’ It was my first experience doing anything like that on a production scale. “It turned out the client also needed a designer, which worked out because my wife, Liv, is an amazing designer. It was the first time we worked together on a project, she designed the labels and boxes and worked on the brand, and I got to design the flavours.” This collaboration worked well for the
couple, so they decided to bring their creative worlds together for a new product – PS Soda. “At a point between opening PS40 and launching PS Soda, I made a personal choice to stop drinking,” said Bergquist. “I’d spent a long time bartending and getting other people drunk and I also used to drink a lot myself – I feel I have drunk enough for one lifetime so I decided I wanted to give people the option to have something that was non-alcoholic, but still adult and grown-up. So, I sold the bar and moved the soda into its own facility. “I’ve always been on the creative side of hospitality, I’ve always written menus and cocktail recipes – my joy from hospitality wasn’t necessarily the service side, it was always more in preparation, so it was a natural progression to exit the FOH life of a bartender for what I do now.” As Bergquist and other in the industry have witnessed, there has been a significant cultural shift in people’s relationship with alcohol. All over the world the pandemic has elevated consumers’ focus on health and wellbeing, but even before COVID, a greater awareness of the harm alcohol can cause was starting to make people drink differently. This is a shift that Bergquist is seeing, not only among customers, but among those who work in the bar sector too. “I was talking to a bar owner in Newtown just the other month and he said staff these days don’t want a beer after work, they want
