Tom Dyer can't hold his liquor. The 22-year-old Londoner would sooner flip it behind his back, over his shoulder and catch it on his elbow. Dyer is the current UK champion flair bartender and is back in town after having spent six weeks here this summer training bar staff at several local clubs.
"I was in Seoul and thought I'd come back to check on my students," he says. In fact, he was there for the twice-annual Bartender Olympics, where he took top honors in two events and placed second in another. Having earned US$3,000 for each win, he decided to take a week off and spend some time on the other side of the bar.
PHOTO: DAVID MOMPHARD, TAIPEI TIMES
For those who have never seen one in action, a flair bartender is someone who can simultaneously mix your drink and boggle your mind. Dyer will flip a glass onto the back of one hand and spin a tin shaker in the other. Bottles then launch from the rail to join glasses, spoons, straws and napkins in an acrobatic orbit around his head and torso. When it's all over you have a perfect Long Island Iced Tea, but feel dizzy before your first sip.
In the four years he's been tending bar, Dyer has won or placed in competitions in London, Las Vegas, Melbourne, Paris, Rotterdam, Bulgaria and now Seoul. He's currently getting ready for the Roadhouse World Final in London in November, considered among many bartenders to be the world's premiere competition because it offers the largest purse -- ?10,000, or about NT$600,000 to the first-place winner.
"It's a hard crowd to please at the Roadhouse," he says. "People there have seen everything and if you copy what someone else has done they're going to know."
Dyer works at Behind Bars, a London-based company that offers a full range of bar services. He and his co-workers captured the top five spots in last year's Roadhouse World Final and are highly sought for training bar staff in Europe and around the world.
It was just such a mission that brought Dyer to Taiwan this summer. The owners of Room 18 offered him a kind of Bartenders Without Borders assignment to train their staff, as well as the staff at Plush, Mojo, Naomi and Party Room. By the end of his six-week stay, though, he'd been visited by others who wanted to learn a bit of flair. He had to start with the basics, he said, and offered the Taipei Times an appraisal of local bar skills.
"Rubbish. There's very little attention to proper measurements, and the set-up behind the bard is wrong. Everything is out of place," he said, including bartenders' priorities. "They want to flair, but many haven't learned basic skills. ? The first thing I teach is that God gave you two hands -- you should use them both."
Though he returns to London tomorrow, Dyer leaves behind several students he feels will develop into excellent and entertaining bartenders. He also leaves behind his first signature drink, a grape and vodka concoction he conjured up during his stay this summer. It's called, "Made in Taiwan." Ask your bartender to throw one together for you.
Dyer will be behind the bar at Plush tonight after 11pm. If you can't make it out, you can see Dyer's style online at http://www.behind-bars.uk.com/flair.htm, where a WMV movie file is available for downloading. -- david momphard
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