Phil and Angus Winchester are presenting a Pro Series seminar on Wednesday the 21st, How to Give Great Presentations. Camper hit Phil up for some tips, and this is what the ol’ boy had to say.

Philip & Angus’ Ten Top Tips for a Tip-Top Presentation.
1. Speak slowly and clearly in four-word groups, and don’t say “fuck” too often. Oh, and be funny. Harder than it sounds.

2. Be sensitive to cultural norms. In Japan, for instance, people attending a presentation show they are listening intently by – I’m serious here – closing their eyes. That’s just Japan though, so that shit won’t fly in Nawlins.
3. Expect something technical to screw up. Your wireless presenter, your laptop, the microphone, the video you want to play, the air conditioning…It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of anything with a plug must be in want of a hammer to demolish the damn thing when it drops the ball.

4. Cui bono?To whose benefit is the presentation? Your own? The attendees? The sponsors? Figure out who wants what and a way to give it to them. Free food for presentations to bartenders in the morning or afternoon is a genius move, for instance.
5. Look healthy, be well dressed, fed, showered and spruce. There is a little sneaky trick us jet-set bartender chaps use to achieve this nefarious goal: we exercise, eat healthy, drink sparingly and go to bed early. The night before the presentation, at any rate.

6. Appear relaxed. This will necessitate you being relaxed, though. See #5
7. Know everything – everything about your topic, everything about other theories on the topics, everything about the category, everything about your brand, everything about competing brands. This will help you a whole bunch with #6.

8. If the room’s empty when you come in: be all prepped and set-up at least half an hour in advance, and then go sit in the middle of the room with a cup of coffee and a pleasantly brain-damaged smile. Direct said smile at people who peep through the door and say “Hi, welcome, come on in! Can I get you a coffee?” Within 5 minutes you’ll have 5 people: within twenty minutes you’ll have 30 or so, at least.
9. For drink demos: put all the tools, glasses, garnishes and ingredients for each drink on a separate tray. Then you know, when making the drink, that everything has to come off the tray once, and then go back on the tray, removing the possibility you’ll forget an ingredient in your drink or a bar tool in the sink.

10. Come see How To Give Great Presentations by Philip Duff and Angus Winchester, 10AM on Wednesday July 21 at the Queen Anne Ballroom in the Hotel Monteleone.
It’s be a whole truckload of merriment, featuring such side-slapping Duff & Winchester anecdotes as The Time I Made Caipirinhas With Salt In Phuket, not to mention alcoholic drinks in plastic cups at 10 in the freaking morning!

Wondering how to fill your suitcase(s)? Camper English’s story about what to pack for the week (for media, speakers, bartenders, PR, and brand reps) in the June issue of Tasting Panel Magazine is now online. (It’s an e-mag, so give it time to load.)

With all the attention paid to cocktails in the media, bartenders, brand ambassadors, spirit company owners, and master distillers are constantly being contacted for interviews for print, radio, and television. In the session dedicated to interview skills, two veteran journalists will provide strategies for navigating the interview process for each type of media. In this blog post, Camper English asks potential seminar attendees for input: What would you like to learn about being interviewed for print, television, and radio?

If you missed one of Philip Duff’s talks at Tales of the Cocktail or want a reminder of what you heard at one, note that he’s put his slides up online at: http://www.slideshare.net/philipduff

His talks were:

• Take a right at Albuquerque
• Liquid Nudging
• Low Country Libations
• The Fine Art of Banging Out Drinks

Jacob Briars at the Molecular DNA of Classic Cocktails seminar

One of my favorite talks at Tales of the Cocktail 2009 was The Molecular DNA of Classic Cocktails, hosted by Jacob Briars with Sebastian Reaburn. The talk centered around the idea that molecular mixology is not a new concept at all; we just didn’t use the same terms to describe it.

In fact, Briars started by mentioning the “Futurist Manifesto on Food” from 1909, in which an Italian writer said that the knife and fork should be banished, and that there should be courses in meals that are not to eat, just to look at and smell. I guess he had Ferran Adria beat by 100 years.  Cocktails, too, took on new forms long before we called them “molecular.” The Ramos Gin Fizz changes the texture and shape of the liquid into foam. The Blue Blazer Briars called “ersatz distillation” as it burns off some of the flavor of the whisky. The Clover Club and other egg white drinks not only make a nice foamy texture on drinks, the air bubbles that foam on the surface trap air and aromas so we can experience them more intently when we sip from the glass.

The discussion then turned to the Bloody Mary, a drink that has all the different taste sensations: sweet (tomato), salt (salt), sour (citrus), bitter (olive brine), umami (tomato, Worcestershire), and the possibly newly-identified taste category of smoke.

Next they discussed the mental palate. A drink served by a surly bartender in an overcrowded bar will probably not taste as good as one served in a more pleasant environment. They expanded this concept  to describe other aspects of the “cognitive palate,” including emotion, expectation, attention, memory, vision, and sound. All of these things we experience before we take a sip of the drink yet do influence our perception of its flavor.

Finally, we got down to some science. In the UK, the test drink that people use to judge the quality of the bar is the Old-Fashioned. At better bars they’ll take several minutes to slowly add the sugar and bitters, then repeated rounds of bourbon and ice with a slow stir. To find out why the drink tastes better than using the same ingredients splashed in the glass with a fast stir, they used an electric stirrer and measured the temperature and dilution of the drink. It turns out this doesn’t change anything about the temperature of the drink, but they theorize what is different between the two is that the gentler, slower method releases the volatile flavors from the alcohol, but they land in the liquid of the drink instead of in the air. Thus the slow-stirred Old-Fashioned is a more flavorful drink.

Their conclusion is that “molecular is just a way of thinking” about drinks, rather than a specific set of techniques. And that gave me a lot to think about.

When we think of cognac cocktails, we think of the Sidecar, but we should also think of the Sazerac and Mint Julep and possibly the French 75. Poor cognac was kicked out of these cocktails in favor of home-grown bourbon, rye, and gin. But given the resurgence of interest in authentic, original classic cocktails, shouldn’t we give the grape spirit a second shot at glory in these drinks?

Of course we should, and the place to do so is at the Cognac, From Vines to Shaker seminar at this year’s Tales of the Cocktail. Session moderator and writer Jack Robertiello leads an all-star panel that includes Salvatore Calabrese, author of Coganc: A Liquid History and owner of Salvatore’s at Fifty in London; mixologist Jim Meehan, who runs the show at PDT in New York; and Jean-Louis Carbonnier, who handles PR for the Bureau National Interprofessionnel du Cognac in the United States.

Not all cognac drinks fell out of fashion, and some bartenders are doing their best to bring it back. Jim Meehan, for example, created the French Maid with cognac, cucumber, mint, falernum and house-made ginger beer. Another drink, The Summit, was created at the International Cognac Summit by a group of bartenders from around the world, and contains cognac, lime, ginger, lemonade, and a cucumber peel. One of these is likely to show up for sampling in front of session attendees.

Speakers will also cover what cognac is- an aged white grape brandy from a specified region of France double distilled via traditional methods- and what product labels like VS, VSOP, XO, and Extra mean. Most of that hasn’t changed in recent years, but now we’re seeing changes in how cognac is marketed. No longer relegated to the snifter, brands are promoting its use in cocktails and even launching new bottlings just to promote its mixability.

Talk topics will cover cognac’s history, its past and present use in cocktails, and how bartenders might include it more in the future. Thirsty learners might prepare for the future by ordering up some Cognac Juleps or Sazeracs in the meantime.

Cognac, from Vines to Shaker takes place Saturday, July 11, in the Riverview Room at the Hotel Monteleone. Tickets may be purchased here.

Since they’re not up on the Tales site, I thought I’d use the Tales Blog to announce the panelists for the Regional Trends in American Cocktails session taking place Saturday, July 19th at 10:30 AM. We’ve got some great people with big-picture perspectives on popular cocktails and trends in the US.

• Camper English (that’s me) lives in San Francisco and writes for the SF Chronicle and other local magazines, plus national ones like Wine & Spirits.
• Jeffery Lindenmuth (my panel co-leader) lives outside New York and writes for giant national publications like Men’s Health.
• Paul Tanguay is a cocktail consultant who has developed menus for the Sushi Samba chain and other restaurants down the east coast and in other parts of the country.
• Sonja Kassebaum co-owns the North Shore Distillery in Chicago and reports on trends in the midwest on her blog.
• Karen Foley is the publisher of Imbibe Magazine and keeps track of booze not just in the Pacific Northwest, but all over the world.

We also have a special guest cocktailian for the seminar. Scott Beattie, who is in charge of the drinks at Cyrus restaurant in Healdsburg, is making one of his hyper-local cocktails just for us!

I hope this will help entice you to attend our talk on Saturday.

Last year’s Tales of the Cocktail really got me thinking about regional cocktail trends. While much of the national reporting on cocktails concerns what’s happening in New York, not all trends flow from there. Cocktails coming out of NY tend to be poured from bottles in exact measurements, whereas those from San Francisco, where I live, tend to come from whatever is fresh at the farmer’s market that week. Last summer, this style of mixology began attracting more notice in the media.

I wasn’t the only one thinking about the different styles of cocktails popular in different parts of the country. New York area-based Jeffery Lidenmuth thought it would make a good topic for this year’s Tales as well, so we’re co-leading a panel on the subject.

Beyond NY and SF, we’re seeing an exciting cocktail culture booming in Boston, watching LA rapidly catch up to other large cities with the opening of cocktail-centric venues, seeing Chicago and DC’s cocktail culture move beyond the news-making molecular mixology at innovative venues and into more common bars and restaurants, watching Las Vegas’ competition-focussed mixology become popular throughout the country, and and finding surprising bastions of great cocktailing in smaller cities as influential bartenders lead the way.

Our panel will look at what’s happening in mixology in different parts of the country, what influences those trends, and what are some of the future hot spots for cocktails. That’s a lot of ground to cover! The hard part will be fitting it all in, so we will drink plenty of coffee first and talk very fast.

I hope you can attend our talk on Regional American Cocktail Trends on Saturday, July 19th, from 10:30 – noon. It’s gonna be great.

Tickets for this session may be purchased here.