Kevin Armstrong - Satan's Whiskers Bar, Classic Cocktails, London Bars, Batching, Acidifiers

Kevin Armstrong is a bartender, bar owner, spirits and cocktail educator and the author of Round Building, a manual for the professional bartender. Kevin rose to fame in the London bar scene over 20 years ago as the group bar manager for the Match Bar Group. He wrote and deployed the most comprehensive cocktail training program of the era, contributing significantly to the critical acclaim of bars like Milk & Honey, The Player, Trailer Happiness, and Sosho to name a few. He has since gone on to open Satan’s Whiskers which, over its 12 years of existence, has become one of the best loved bars in London and more recently featured in the World’s Best Bars... twice.

Kevin and I were together in Scotland a few weeks ago and got inthralled in some deep conversations about cocktails and bars. He is known to have strong and well thought out opinions on various topics pertaining to drinks and drinking, so I was delighted when he agreed to come on the podcast. I was also keen to hear about the rise of Satans Whiskers as a globally recognised venue.

On the episode you can expect to hear about Kev’s early career in bars and how he transitioned to the match bar group, you can hear us reminisce over the London bar scene as it was in the early noughties, we talk about his time at Soul Shakers working with the legendary Mahiki bar, then becoming a bar operator, first with pubs and then Satan's whiskers. We spend some time talking about modern cocktail bars, both the things we like and don’t like including homogeneity, ingredients, batching, and more, then we touch on bar awards and finally finish with a surprise quiz! Well, a surprise for Kev that is - not me.

There’s not many better people to sit down and have an in depth and varied, zero bullshit conversation about cocktails and bars than this man - it was a fun one.

00:00 Vodka: Misunderstanding, Appreciation
06:20 Kevin’s Bartending Origin Story - Oxford, Pub Life, Joining Match Bar Group
22:45 Training Programs, Sauce Guides & Simon Difford, Best Bars of the 00’s, Favourite brands of the 00’s, Zubrowka
35:45 Desi Daru Vodka Tasting, The Vastness of the Vodka Category, Vodka Training with Finlandia and Michael Butt, Vodka Archetypes, Taste Training
49:17 Soul Shakers, Mahiki
55:00 Becoming an Operator, Business Partners
1:02:22 Becoming Satan’s Whiskers, London Bars in 2010’s, Challenges of Serving Classic Cocktails, Perfecting Classic Cocktails, Martini Temperature & Dilution, Bruising Gin
*1:26:15 Batching Cocktails: Protocols, Philosophy, The Magic of Cocktail Customisability,
1:37:24 Are All Orange Juice Cocktails Bad?
1:47:07 Critiquing Modern Cocktail Bars: Souring Agents, Homogeneity, Laziness, The Myth of Customer Engagement
2:00:50 Satan’s Whiskers Rise to Fame, The Cyclical Nature of Bar Concepts, Bar Awards
2:16:16 The Match Bar Manual
2:24:54 Bar Quiz!


🙏 This epsiode is sponsored by Fever-Tree

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📚 I've written quite a few books on spirits and cocktails - https://www.thecuriousbartender.com/