Out of training Shaker has branched out into consultancy, building drinks concepts from the ground up, including helping launch award-winning bar Nightjar. In the last couple of years I think we've matured as a training organisation - we're WSET-approved and official training provider for the UKBG." "I have a seven-year plan: I want to have 20 franchised schools globally to set a global standard for training, one that's internationally recognised and allows bartenders to work all over the world. Everything from why you shake, when you muddle, to the practicalities of the job, and what we call the five 'P's of world class service: pride, passion, preparation, professionalism and presentation. "We focus on the fundamentals of training. The business grew and today he runs schools in Abu Dhabi, Sydney, Trinidad, Tobago, Barbados and South Africa in addition to London. Whoever made that call from Bulgaria at what would have been 5am (they must have had a really bad shift) marked the start of a journey for Adam. "A call for training came in from a guy in Bulgaria at 3am. The business started out from his flat in Birmingham, he built its website himself, and remembers the first time someone actually called up asking for a course. By the time he graduated, the idea for Shaker had been gestating for some time. Then, during his masters degree, he wrote a fully fledged business plan. Those summer jobs came into their own as the inspiration for a chunk of study in his undergraduate business degree, using his experience to write a feasibility study for a training school. It would have been so much quicker if it had been structured." "I am self-taught but it took me a bloody long time to even understand what it was all about. There was really no one else." On the back of this, he learned enough to convince bars back in glamorous Luton, where he was studying, to let him draw up a cocktail list for them on the back of what he'd read and found on the fledgling internet.īut while he had discovered there was a side to bartending outside the get-'em-in, sell-it-cheap, get-'em-drunk model, he recognised his methodology was completely unplanned, and that he could have learned far quicker if it had been at all structured. "The only person doing anything was Dale DeGroff and Dick Bradsell.
In between selling Blue Lagoons and Tequila Stuntmen, he'd read the newly launched CLASS magazine (this was the late 1990s), and then Dale DeGroff brought out Craft of the Cocktail. In any case, there was nowhere near where I lived in Worcestershire." "I wanted to be trained, to get out there and learn from the best, but all I'd come across was TGI Friday's and this school where I think they taught you with coloured water, rather than real alcohol.
They might sound like tangential plotlines from The Inbetweeners or Benidorm, but while he had lots of fun, Adam had bigger aspirations. And they'd tip me too." The Self-taught trainer I couldn't believe people were paying me to do that. Or we'd give them a crash helmet to wear, pour tequila down a funnel into their mouths and hit them around the head. "I plied my trade at selling shots, we called them Tequila Stuntmen, where you'd snort salt up one nostril, tequila in the other, squirt lemon in your eye. Or rather, a plank of wood on top of two barrels that were assembled in the corner of bar. In Ibiza, he ended up running a tequila bar. If a blue or a red or a green drink went out, within 20 minutes I'd have 15 people asking for one too." I'd be making partly my own inventions - classy things like Adam's Orgasm - as well as the usual suspects: Blue Lagoons, Sex on the Beach, Woo Woos. "I remember one place that had one of those optics carousels. He quickly realised holidaymakers lapped up whatever he served them. Adam Freeth spent six seasons working bars across the Mediterranean including Ibiza, Rhodes and Crete, no doubt peddling goldfish bowls 'cocktails', pushing shots of cheap tequila and basically creating drinks in as lurid a colour as he could invent.
#Tgi friday bartender training professional
It's a memory many professional bartenders will recognise: their first foray behind the bar during a summer of sun, sea, sand, sex and sangria. The school he founded upon graduating, Shaker, has since trained more than 12,000 bartenders, including big names such as Erik Lorincz, Marian Beke and Stanislav Vardna. As he taught himself about cocktails he realised there was a gap in the market for bartending training that the industry would respect. Adam Freeth spent his college summers serving less-than-glamorous drinks to unsuspecting tourists, but he was hatching a plan.
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