Bar book

My original bar notebook was pretty thrashed--pages stained and torn from years of use behind the bar. The above one is a replacement booklet I started using a couple of years before hanging up my bar towel.

In the bar book, I kept a record of new-to-me drink recipes that customers would bring in to have be made, drinks I and other 'tenders made up that were both good and tended to sell, and alternate names/recipes for standard drinks often ordered. Looking through the bar book now, I see that I wrote recipes down usually in some sort of short form. Not every recipe has amounts listed, nor does every recipe specify what glassware is to be used. The recipe for a 'Dumb Bunny', is written only like this:

Dumb Bunny
Kurant
1/2 lemon
7-Up

I'm assuming I meant Absolut Kurant as flavored Absolut vodka was a call-level favorite during my tenure. -don't know if it still is. And given that Dumb Bunny is a 3-ingredient drink that sort of mimics a Collins, then it's assumed that the drink would be served on ice and probably in a chimney glass. As Kurant is the only booze in the recipe, then it's also assumed that that would be a shot's worth. There is no industry-wide shot standard*, but shots generally tend to be hovering around just over an ounce here in the states. In the majority of bars where I worked, 1.25 ounces was the standard shot. 

At the first bar I ever worked in, we, generally, free poured. This means that in lieu of using a measure or jigger, one counted the shot in one's head: 1-2-3-hup! At the 'hup', the tipped bottle neck would be brought back upright and the pour would stop. Free pouring, like any skill, took some practice in order to be good at doing. 

All of us at that joint individually trained to free pour with a booze bottle filled with water placed in the well (where the cheap booze 'lives' in front of the ice well). We'd each go through a series of pulling the bottle up from the well and pouring its contents into a jigger until the booze bottle was emptied. We'd repeat the process until our 1-2-3 count matched a complete jigger pour with no effort or error. 

Here's a page from the bar book with counts (1-2-3-hup!) instead of ounces representing amounts. The Otter Pop recipe shown below lists equal parts of all the booze components. So that's a one count or 1-hup! (said in one's head) on the Chamb(ord), Curaçao, and raspberry vodka poured into a chimney glass before adding 7-Up to fill. 

Converting to metric, when moving abroad, wasn't terribly challenging. The conversion is: 1.0 US fl oz. = 30 ml.

Here's a bar book snippet from when I worked at Hix in Selfridge's in London. (Note: There was no free pouring at Hix.)



In case anyone is inclined to reproduce this classic at home, the daiquiri recipe's last ingredient and directions are: 3 bar spoons of caster sugar, shake and strain into a cocktail glass and serve with lime wedge.


*Utah has a state-wide shot standard of one ounce.