The Sun-Herald

My BarShow diary

If you've read today's Party of the Week about BarShow and the National Bar Awards you'll have glimpsed the tsunami of decadence that swept through Sydney this week. Here's a more detailed account.

SUNDAY
Throughout the year, the social calendar is punctuated by particularly demanding periods of revelry: the racing carnivals, Fashion Week, Christmas, my birthday. But none test the stamina quite like the approaching week-long congregation of all the country's bar people plus international stars of the liquor world. To prepare, I have spent seven days in a spa, strengthening my constitution for the rigours ahead. My kitchen counter is lined with vitamins, tonics, hangover remedies and Tibetan herbs with miraculous properties. I swallow as many as I can and have an early night.
MONDAY
You can almost smell the extra alcohol in Sydney's atmosphere as hundreds of bartenders, bar owners, bar suppliers and liquor company brand ambassadors begin to arrive in town. The airport is filled with passengers whose luggage clinks seductively.
By mid-afternoon I'm boarding luxury yacht A.Q.A, for a party hosted by Sagatiba's global brand ambassador, John Gakuru, to showcase this premium Cachaca (Brazilian rum). The boat is laden with top bartenders and their presence in sunlight and out from behind their bars is curiously discomfiting. I've never seen them this way and it's hard to identify even those I know well. Perhaps this confusion accelerates my cocktail consumption - or maybe it's the band playing or the boat gently rocking or the smooth qualities of the spirit. But after two hours, I've tried at least five ways with Sagatiba and everyone looks familiar again.
We flow from the boat into King Street Wharf's Cargo bar, where bartender Phil Gannon is ready with more cocktails. Then it's off to Astral's bar at Star City, for the announcement of the Master Apprentices in Signe's The Craft bartending mentor programme. Despite the renewed deluge of cocktails, there is a reverence and solemnity about this gathering which typifies many of BarShow's events. No other profession - not doctors, academics, priests nor even Shakespearian thespians - takes its calling as seriously as bartenders do. The best have a dedication to their craft which borders on obsession. They pore over its history, scrutinise ingredients and venerate their teachers. Today I've even seen one with a Martini glass tattooed behind his ear. The week's shenanigans may be utterly mental, but they also serve as a mass homage to the industry's traditions and its masters - many of whom are in town to share their wisdom.
TUESDAY
My serious BarShow business begins today: I'm speaking to senior bar professionals at the BarShow conference about How the Media Can Work For You. Myself and fellow panel members Stuart Gregor the Liquid Ideas PR boss, Bartender mag's David Spanton and City Weekly editor Paul Hayes knit our brows and say serious things. I remember to drop some business-y words like 'leverage,' and 'platform.' But essentially we're talking about bars and booze and it comes quite naturally.
I speed to Hugo's Bar Pizza for a meeting with Angus Winchester, global ambassador for Tanqueray no.Ten gin and renowned Martini guru. We order Martinis and I admit I prefer mine with a twist rather than olive. "That's absolutely fine," says Angus. "Many believe that olives are the testicle of the devil." He proceeds to fascinate me with Martini lore: we discuss Lillet versus Noilly Prat, the increasing size of glassware down the decades (three Martinis are now more likely to knock you over than relax you) and the history of toasts. I learn they were once banned in Massachusetts because they encouraged faster drinking and that Angus' favourite is: "May the best of your past be the worst of your future." This is the first of many toasts I'll hear over the following days.
Hugo's owner Dave Evans arrives and with him I hit the harbour again, this time in a water taxi, all the way to Manly where he's throwing a party at his new Manly Hugo's for Australian Surfing World magazine. For a couple of hours it's beers and boys, then back into town for three more BarShow parties: the Behind Bars Trivia national final, in which Australia's best bartending brains are trounced by a team of International all stars; the Cazadores Tequila launch party at Oxford Art Factory and then an impromptu bash at Phil Bayly's Cafe Pacifico, where everyone has turned their attention to Margaritas. There's talk of an after-party. I gaze around at the nation's most prodigious drinkers and, mindful of next day's early start (and last year's disaster - see below), let them persevere without me.
WEDNESDAY
Today is my second crack at being on the judging panel for Bartender of the Year. In 2007 I missed the start of the competition after a regrettable misjudgment of my capacity for Tequila the previous night. This year, I arrive on time and take my seat beside some of the most esteemed names in the bartending world. There's Angus and John; the legendary veteran Dale 'King Cocktail' De Groff from the US and also from stateside the author and drinks guru Gary Regan. In their trade, these men are the equivalent of Olympic gold medalists or emeritus professors and I feel hopelessly ill-informed, even though I'm really just the 'people's judge.' I sit next to Gary and learn we share common heritage - we're from neighbouring towns in the UK and I know the pub his dad used to run. Gary, who's another walking encyclopedia of cocktail lore and humour, likes to call bartenders 'spiritual advisers' and soon we're watching 10 of Australia's best show their stuff on stage before hundreds of their peers.
This year's controversy: no Sydney bartenders in the final. There are mutterings about our locals being pretty boys lacking in technical know-how or selling out to become brand ambassadors. Selfishly, I'm a little relieved. This town is where I do my drinking and now I won't be forced to diss any of my regular spiritual advisers.
The ten finalists make two cocktails each and we taste them all. It's nail-biting stuff. At one point the bar collapses, obliterating an unfortunate contestant's drinks. 'Shit!' he yells, then recovers his cool and mixes another two without running over time. Everyone has shaky hands. Equipment misbehaves and ingredients refuse to comply, but these boys are natural performers and handle everything with aplomb. Each one is talented and marking them is harder than digesting all that booze before lunch.
Afterwards I tour the show's stands - a forest of portable bars, mixing laboratories and wine and cigar gardens, where every imaginable variety of alcohol is being shaken, stirred, muddled, built, deconstructed and drunk. There are curious bar accessories on display; illuminated, flashing glassware and mirrors, altar-like DJ decks and even electronic cigarettes designed to circumvent the anti-smoking laws. The show is not without incident; two exhibitors from rival booze companies have a scuffle and another passes out in the ladies' bathroom. But mainly the goodwill is flowing as generously as the beverages and everyone's busy sharing knowledge and passion.
I have to leave because it's mid-afternoon and I only have a few hours to prepare for the bar industry's Night of Nights, the National Bar Awards. Nothing less than full professional hair and make-up and a specially-made dress from Charlie Brown's new summer collection will do for an occasion considered by its participants to be more significant than the Oscars or Emmys. I've checked into the Hilton, where the awards take place and just as I enter my suite, a back injury that's been playing up all week suddenly deteriorates. I'm bent double when my Dan McLennan, my hairdresser arrives. "Don't worry," he says. "I've studied some chiropractic." When the bellboy delivers my luggage I'm being dangled upside down and shaken by Dan much like a cocktail, except one that yelps. The lad doesn't flinch. Like bartenders, bellboys have seen it all before.
Down in the lobby of the ballroom, self-expression has soared to peacock heights. Out of uniform, bar people naturally gravitate towards the flamboyant and their costumes make the average Hollywood red carpet crowd look like a small-town church congregation. I meet the Piano Room's Karim Gharbi wearing head-to-toe Frisoni Finetti. "Everyone looks so damned hot!," he exclaims.
The Awards are covered in today's paper, so I won't repeat the details here. But it's worth adding that during my tumble from the stage after presenting the Best Speciality Beer Venue award, the impact jolts my spine into place again. I'm pain-free for the rest of the night and able to fully enjoy the agonies and ecstasies, the simmering rivalries, effusive camaraderie and covert despair of those who win and lose. For most of them the party, which spreads itself all over town, ends (temporarily, of course) with dawn.
THURSDAY
Back at BarShow's base at the Royal Hall of Industries in Moore Park, the strain is now palpable. Everyone has taken on a blurred, glassy-eyed demeanour and a greenish hue. Voices are croaks. Hands are shaking. I'm on the judging panel for the Skyy Flair Global Challenge (for the uninitiated, flairing is the rock n' roll style of bartending involving juggling, dancing and even setting fire to stuff) and the championship head judge Leeroy Peterson gives me the very simple task of counting the contestants' drops and spills. Even this basic arithmetic proves arduous and its demands, combined with the pumping music, the whoops and yells from the audience and the effort required to follow the sinuous moves of the finalists, exhaust my remaining synaptic capabilities.
Fortunately they aren't required for the BarShow's last event, a charity Tiki party at my local (and newly-minted Cocktail Bar of the Year), the Bayswater Brasserie. All I need to do is don a flowery shirt and lei, make a donation and fling myself into the coconut-bedecked chaos within. This is the point at which BarShow tips from sustained revelry into unadulterated mayhem. Everyone I've seen all week is here - the gurus, the apprentices, the legends and locals - and tiki concoctions pour from multiple bars manned by champions. There are men in grass skirts and floral tights and one with a fake parrot on his shoulder. Everyone is dancing, drinking, embracing vigorously and calling out their favourite toast: 'to good health and good spirits!' They're behaving in the manner of troops approaching the end of a long, grueling war, saying things like: "when all this is over..." and "when I see you on the other side..." The finishing line is in sight, and many will reach it on their knees.
Next morning, in the uncanny quiet of the aftermath and as the pickled hordes depart Sydney at last, the Brasserie's manager Rebecca Whalley is cleaning up the final traces of BarShow. She discovers a small object in the flowerbeds: the fake parrot's severed head. She places it in the garbage atop the mountains of empties, creating a poignant monument to a week's epic decadence.
Meanwhile, I have retired to a darkened room, nursing a lost voice and a frail spine. If you come across me this week, please be gentle.

• by Amy Cooper at 08:37 PM
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I'm a self-help dropout

I'm reading a lot of self-help books at the moment - for work, I hasten to add, not my personal growth. That ship sailed long ago. And sank.

These books haven't changed much since I had to exist on a daily diet of them while writing a weekly relationship column. They still leave me with the impression that in terms of being in charge of my life, I'm the ineffectual headmistress of a school for delinquent children who roam without any discipline, occasionally pelting me with sharp objects.
I'm supposed to be In Control, Know What I Want, and Have Goals. And when it comes to mating, now I'm in my thirties I'm supposed to be adopting a life-or-death military approach, helped by experts such as Rachel Greenwald and her stern How to Find a Husband After Thirty* Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School.
I'd rather use what she learned there to get my tax returns done on time and find out how to maximise my super, but that's why I'm a complete failure in the eyes of such dating gurus. After years of reading the literature, I still ignore all the advice about suitability and stability, Greenwald's techniques of 'auditing' and 'marketing' (increasingly, these days, the language of commerce is applied to dating) and I can't bring myself to treat the whole business of pairing up like some sort of grim and rather urgent business model. I allow my heart to behave haphazardly, inconveniently (example: the last man was in another hemisphere and stateless) and impulsively. I can't see this changing because I believe all efforts to control how, whom and where you love will be ultimately futile.
Besides, control freaks are just not sexy. I had a friend we used to call The Conductor thanks to a bizarre behavioural trademark: when her partner spoke for too long or about subjects she found unsavoury, she raised her hand and brought it down slowly - just like a conductor directing an orchestra to diminuendo. As she did so, the man would obediently fade out mid-sentence. It was like watching a person being operated by a puppeteer: intriguing, and at the same time, appalling.
She chose his clothes too, and they were mostly beige. It was as if she had tried to remove all elements of surprise from him and perhaps, we thought, it was because her job was so stressful and unpredictable she didn't want any more nasty shocks - even in the form of a tasteless shirt - at home. We prophesied a messy end to the whole thing, with him staging an angry uprising one day, after she'd faded him out once too often. And we were right, although he hung on in there for quite some time, as men can do when they are forced to wear too much beige.
Control is for hairspray and ugly underwear, not people. It belongs to self-help books such as my nemesis: 'Are You in Control?'. That one's about 'learning to relate' by calming turbulent emotions and rationalizing your urges. Useful skills for the workplace, but about as conducive to love as a mother-in-law on your honeymoon.
Yet the author seems to assume everyone wants to control this pesky instinct. Like the harmless bacteria living in our insides, it can flare up at any moment into a raging disease, and must remain subdued. Passion, and the people who give in to it, is disruptive and can lead to all sorts of trouble: bunnies boiling in saucepans; wild-haired men roaming the Yorkshire countryside shouting about their lost love; wars, suicide pacts, days off work.
Admittedly, love is scary. The prospect of plunging headfirst into it frightens us, surrounded as we are by divorce statistics, dysfunctional celebrity couples and other, more urgent priorities. People you fall in love with threaten to disrupt your comfort zone. It's really no wonder some try to mould them to fit.
And when the whole endeavour ends badly and you're broken and weary, it's easy to look back and decide you should have exercised more caution or made more lists or read another book or just stayed at home instead. But the truth is, if you'd done all those things and even followed every word of Rachel Greenwald's advice, it would have finished up exactly the same way, just because love often does. Sad fact.
When I first moved in with a man I remember panic rising in my throat with each box of his stuff emerging from the removal van. Suddenly, on the pavement in broad daylight, it looked like too much excess baggage. Where would I fit the owner, and what havoc was he about to wreak upon my jealously guarded order? For weeks I tidied his things into little piles and marked out bathroom territory until the poor guy finally suggested, only half-joking, that he should live on the balcony. He said he felt as if he was being minimized, like a spare document on a computer screen. I admit - he was right. I apologized, stopped segregating our laundry and chucked the whole lot in together with joyous abandon.
The relationship book I want to read is called: 'If it feels good, do it (even if he doesn't have a huge bank account or designer wardrobe or hasn't marketed himself or audited you) using what I learned behind the bike sheds at high school which stood me in good stead for a lifetime of glorious, sometimes ill-advised, but always interesting love affairs.'
Hell, I might even write it one day.

*The book's title has now been updated to How to Find a Husband After 35, presumably because five years on its original disciples are still out there searching.

• by Amy Cooper at 08:11 PM
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