THANDI SKADE and CANDICE BAILEY
IT WAS the sexy Tom Cruise in the big screen blockbuster Cocktail that popularised the art of flair bartending.
These days, juggling, flipping and manipulating bottles and bar tools in the air to entertain patrons while producing dazzling cocktails has become a full-on sport.
And while words like snatches, stalls, basebreaks and flashes are hardly the lingo the average Joe associates with ordering a drink, it’s part and parcel of the flairtending pastime, which is also emerging in South Africa.
At the weekend, hopeful bartenders from Gauteng and Cape Town packed a Pretoria restaurant for the final local leg of a vodka label’s flairing championships.
While nerves got the better of some contestants, Capetonian Travis Kuhn kept a level head to retain his title as the country’s top flair bartender – his fourth win in four years.
He’ll represent the country at the World Flairing Championship in Dubai in December.
“It’s a huge thing to make the finals,” he said after the competition.
Kuhn began flairing at home at the age of nine, inspired by Cruise in the movie, substituting liquor bottles with hair brushes and shampoo bottles.
He has honed his skills during 12 years behind the bar.
Kuhn said flairing involved more than just juggling, which ironically he detests. “Flairing is more technically difficult… it’s a metronomic way of throwing things, he said.
Jaco Brink, Africa director of the World Flair Association, said that to be the best, a bartender needs to have the technical ability, the style to pull off the best cocktail, plus crowd involvement.
Flairing comes from a passion for turning the serving of drinks into a social experience.
In South Africa, bartenders are learning from their international counterparts, he said.
Bartenders are marked on their technical ability, showmanship, the number of bottle drops and spills, and the number of moves they execute.
Technical moves range from stalling or basebreaking – where the bartender catches the base of a bottle on his arm or fingers – to a flash move, where he or she throws multiple objects into the air and catches them.
There are also smooth rolls (rolling the glass, tin or bottle across the body) and snatches (which involve flipping the bottle into the air and catching it in the shaker tin).
It takes three months to be a basic flairtender, but perfecting the art can take six years.
Flairtenders practise for four to 11 hours a day.
“In flairtending, split-seconds and millimetres are what counts,” said Brink.
Defending global flair champion Tomasz Malek, of Ireland, who put on an impressive flair exhibition at the weekend’s final, was impressed by the local talent.