Long time, no blog. Life has been busy. I was working a couple nights at a bar by my house to get used to bartending, since I want to own a bar one day. I’m glad for the experience. I feel like it’ll save me from a lot of potential mistakes when I go to open my own. It’ll make it easier for me to both hire and train bartenders. There are a lot of little concerns I hadn’t thought of, things as silly as which distributors sell what, that I now know.

But I’m ready to move on. Between my day job and that, it was getting to be too much. It’s not that I couldn’t fit it into my schedule. But after a few months, I felt like I wasn’t learning anymore, and at that point I was just doing it for money. At the end of the day, I don’t want to be a bartender. I want to be a bar owner. It better suits my skills. There are some soft skills that good bartenders excel at that I probably never would. I’ve been called the Human Grumpy Cat on several occasions, but that’s really just how I am when I’m working for someone else.

Todd, the owner of the bar I worked at, is about the best someone else you could work for. Really he’s a great guy. And intelligent. He’s a math teacher by day, which makes him fucking Einstein for a bar owner. I’m not surprised he’s succeeding.

My main contribution to the operation was the cocktail list. I taught a couple of the other bartenders how to properly make some drinks. I added a bunch of classics to the menu. I’d get people who used to drink vodka-soda switched over to a Tom Collins or a French 75, which adds a few bucks a drink to the top line. I got beer drinkers to try cocktails. I had customers raving that it was the only bar in town where they’d order a whiskey sour. I got them infusing liquor, and we made some good strawberry margaritas and blackberry daquiris.

Like all good things, though, it came to an end. I’m leaving after June and starting my own thing.

My good friend, Heather, and I found a guy a couple hours away who refurbishes Airstreams for a living. We went and saw his lot. He had 30 or 40 of them laying around. His dad started the business almost 50 years ago. He worked with his dad, until pop retired, and now works with his son.

We’re planning to buy one and make a mobile bar out of it to cater wedding receptions, etc. I’ll have lots of pics and videos as we move along. Hopefully we’ll be signing on it this week.

Right now I’m working on our competitive advantage. One thing I want to do, that you can’t find anywhere else, is have a great tap system. I plan to make homemade ginger beer on draft for Moscow Mules/Dark and Stormies, etc. I want to do tonic on tap, either our own or Jack Rudy or something. I also want to partner with a few local breweries to have good beer on draft as well.

We’ll do awesome batched cocktails. We’ll have a couple punches. Maybe Manhattans on draft if I can get a nitro system going, which seems easy. Maybe even a rapid barrel aged cocktail served from a barrel for aesthetics.