We asked about mentorship, how to extend hospitality to both guests and fellow bartenders, and our panelists’ hopes and dreams for the future. Here are some of the highlights from our conversations.

Start simple. “There are so many resources that weren’t available when I first started out. Now there’s probably a YouTube video or an article about pretty much anything and everything. But with there being so much information out there, I think new bartenders today want to get to the most exciting stuff. They kind of skip over some of the steps with learning the basics… I think learning the building blocks of cocktails before you just jump right in and get started is really important.” —Lily Wang, partner at Nine Bar and Cara Cara Club in Chicago

Put yourself out there. “Show up for stuff. It doesn’t just have to be a competition. It could be an educational [opportunity], it could be a brand thing, it could be a seminar, it could be your friend’s pop-up. But show up, put yourself in the room, give other people the opportunity to meet you and get to know you.” —Izzy Tulloch, founder of A Bar Called Pancakes in New York City

You don’t need to be a mixologist. “Don’t feel like there’s this massive barrier to entry. It’s not like you have to have all the equipment… As great as it is for your craft to learn how to take it to the next level with molecular gastronomy, you don’t need to… Bartending is an art because we all have different styles and that’s really the most beautiful thing about it.” —Jenna “Duckie” Reynolds, bartender at Hermanita in Charlotte, North Carolina

Learn to take feedback. “Developing an ability for critical self-evaluation is really important when you’re starting up. This doesn’t mean you need to put yourself down, but you do need to develop an ability to look at your skill set and look at how you perform, shift to shift, and be honest about the pitfalls. If you struggle with that, you need to become much more open to feedback from your peers and your direct superiors.” —Daniel Villa, beverage director for R+D at Thai Taste in Charlotte, North Carolina

Understand the business. “If you want to progress—or even if you just want to bartend forever—knowing the business, knowing how to make a bar profitable, and how to cost your cocktails is important. [Say] you want to put a new cocktail on, it’ll be much easier to get that cocktail on the menu if you say [to your manager], ‘I got this idea for a cocktail. I costed it out. It’s only going to cost us this amount, and the prep is easy… The farther you go up [in management], it’s honestly less about creativity and more about reading a P&L, making sure your beverage cost is correct, managing a team, and things like that… When you go into beverage director or bar manager interviews, they’re going to be interested in that.” —Devin Kennedy, partner at Press Club in D.C. and Best New Bartender alum

Be thoughtful about who to ask for mentorship. “I’m a big fan of mentorship… When you’re looking for a mentor, it’s important to find somebody who you sync with. It could just be your approach to cocktails, your approach to business, your approach to back-of-house machinations. Whatever it is, it has to be that you share a bit of the same philosophy, and I feel like that’s when it can be most fruitful for everybody.” —Erick Castro, co-owner of Raised by Wolves and Gilly’s House of Cocktails in San Diego

Listed below are this year’s final nominees. We were impressed and inspired by their drinks, their creativity, their passion and their commitment to their communities. We received a record number of submissions and are so grateful to everyone who nominated themselves and their peers.

Please join us in celebrating the final nominees, and check back in June, when we will name the 10 Best New Bartenders of 2026.

Miley Aryucharoen | Tomat, Los Angeles, California
Carley Callis | Paloma Restaurant and Copita Wine Bar, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Kayla Campbell | Courtland Club, Providence, Rhode Island
Christy Cartagena | Sparrow, Chicago, Illinois
Matthew Huntley | Three Dots and a Dash, Chicago, Illinois
Abigail Jennings | Father Forgive Me, Detroit, Michigan
Princess Johnson | Allegory, Washington, D.C.
Chris Kuse | Monstera Mezcaleria & Natural Wines, St. Louis, Missouri
Sid Lewis | Occidental Bar, Denver, Colorado
Laurymar Lopez Melon | Bar Snack, New York, New York
Lena Maio | Beatbox, New York, New York
Nicole Nathan | Viridian, Oakland, California
Jakob McCabe-Johnston | Kimball House, Decatur, Georgia
Dominique Muñoz | Polite Provisions, San Diego, California
Kristine Nguyen | Bludorn, Houston, Texas
Dillon Raaz | Atoma, Seattle, Washington
Samantha Ruth | Darling, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Nicolette Shea Irvine | The Paddock, Eugene, Oregon
Sean Teague | Rada, Charlotte, North Carolina
Lucy Mae Valenti | Residents, Washington, D.C.

Of all the names for mixed drinks—cocktails, slings, daisies, mules—the word “julep” claims the oldest heritage. Etymologically, it derives from the Persian gulab, a medicinal mixture of violets, water and sugar that traces its history back more than a millennium. Even in the 17th century, when spirits (brandy, rum and gin) were added to the base recipe, the julep was still considered remedial. It wasn’t uncommon for juleps to be prescribed by doctors in attempts to heal ailing patients; created in the 19th century, the Prescription Julep, a classic variation of the drink, nods to these medicinal origins. 

In the late 18th century, the julep transformed, perplexingly, into a morning beverage not unlike coffee, designed to help early risers face the day. But it was not until the 1810s, with the advent of the American ice industry, that the julep would become an iconic summertime cocktail. Mint became the drink’s calling card, and several decades later, whiskey would surpass brandy, gin and rum as the base spirit of choice. Still, variations made with other spirits abound, like the Champagne Julep (which calls for Cognac and dry sparkling wine) and the Dabney (which is built on a mix of amari and rum).

Other modern interpretations call for lowering the proof, introducing modifiers like golden pineapple syrup and even mashing up the classic with tropical staples like the swizzle. Its enduring legacy is proof that the 19th-century template continues to be an inspiration, even into the 21st century. Here are some of our favorite takes on the template.

The idea isn’t exactly new; Fanny Chu’s Dirty Martini Highball has been a reader-favorite recipe on Punch for years, and I’ve come across olive lemonades and dirty spritzes, too. But I must confess that I’m not typically a dirty Martini drinker (sue me! I like it classic and with a twist!), so I’d never considered myself a devotee. 

Recently, though, at the new-school pub Dean’s, I didn’t realize that the house G&T would follow a similar template. I was pleasantly surprised at the saltiness and the more subtle brininess of the drink. As I slurped oysters and let the cool spring breeze waft through the windows and over me, I thought, if not for the passing taxis and tourists of the West Village, I could imagine myself lounging seaside. And whether you load your Martinis with olives or not, I think you could get behind this drink, too.

Though McGee found the Pago Pago through Jeff Berry’s work, the drink is credited to the Ronrico rum brand circa 1940. That same year, the cocktail appeared in the second edition of Hyman Gale and Gerald F. Marco’s The How and When, which was published in Chicago by a chain of high-end liquor stores. “I loved at the time that it had a Chicago connection,” McGee says. This edition featured a robust tropical drinks addendum with nearly two dozen recipes ripped from Ronrico marketing materials.

The U.S. imperialist ethos of the period, and of tiki culture, is written right into the Pago Pago’s very name: It’s the capital of American Samoa, which was colonized in 1900, and, though the Pago Pago’s origins don’t lie in the early tiki bars of the period, McGee sees some of the hallmarks of that genre in it. “This could be a Donn the Beachcomber drink,” he says. “He’s best known for using dual citrus and layering a lot of different flavors.” Perhaps it’s this quality—and the inclusion of industry-favorite Chartreuse—that explains why it’s been retroactively subsumed into the tiki canon by 21st-century bartenders. 

Originally, the recipe called for Ronrico’s “Red” expression, a 90-proof, dark, heavy-bodied rum. For his first iteration of the drink, McGee’s Pago Pago called for a four-year Flor de Caña gold rum from Nicaragua, a brand popular with tropical bartenders at the time that features a lighter body and a fairly neutral, vanilla-forward profile. Since then, he’s used a variety of rums, including a combination of Probitas and Transcontinental Rum Line’s High Seas blend. His current favorite to use is Worthy Park Silver, an unaged Jamaican rum.

His choice of crème de cacao has changed, too. He started out with Marie Brizard, which has a lighter, sweeter profile, and nowadays he favors Tempus Fugit’s rich, vanilla-laced liqueur that offers a deeper chocolate flavor.

Unionizing a bar is notoriously difficult. A couple years ago, bartenders at Death & Co.—another lauded, influential cocktail bar that started in New York—failed to drum up enough support for its own union drive. As Punch contributor Gaby del Valle wrote in her coverage of the effort, “some of the same things that draw workers to bars—including the ease of job-hopping and the ability to make a lot of money in tips—may make them harder to unionize.” 

And bartenders who do want to organize may feel that they’re taking a risk, especially when management is antagonistic. Recently, workers at Brooklyn’s Achilles Heel alleged that the bar’s closure happened in reaction (or retaliation) to the staff’s intention to unionize. 

But Attaboy workers remain hopeful. I spoke with bartender Zachary Gelnaw-Rubin, who has worked at Attaboy since its early days, about the organizing efforts, Attaboy Local 134’s demands, and what fans of the bar—and skeptics of the union—should know.

Punch: What are some of the issues that your union is hoping to address?
Zachary Gelnaw-Rubin: When Attaboy came into being, it was [six front-of-house people] that worked there: the two owners and [four] other [staff members] that were all kind of friends. [Editor’s Note: There was also one back-of-house employee.] I and a few other people joined the staff maybe six months later. For the first several years of Attaboy’s life, like many places, we just made decisions as a group. There wasn’t a lot of governance… in some ways it functioned as a little bit of a boys club. This is something that’s widespread in the industry, the valorization of suffering in this job. Putting up with harsh conditions is looked at as a mark of manhood or paying your dues or a badge of honor in some way. That was an old-guard type of thing; we all participated in that.

Post-COVID, the landscape has shifted. That cavalier way of doing things is not really acceptable anymore, but some of those things have been really stubbornly persistent in this contemporary era. [Those are] things like working 11 1/2 hours without a break, or eating your food as quickly as possible while standing up somewhere in the middle of the shift. [There are also] things like, if you’re sick, well, just come to work, or find someone to cover you, but if you can’t find someone to cover you, you come to work. And then everybody else gets sick. That’s been one of the things that’s been really prominent since COVID. We have these waves where one person gets sick, then everybody gets sick. There’s no protocol or protection.

And then just basic stuff. This is a world-class institution, so it should be a world-class workplace as well. We need to have better health insurance. Back-of-house people need to be making a living wage and have a more fair pay structure, and they need to have access to affordable healthcare as well. These are all things that Attaboy is capable of and that we think is fair, and that’s why we’re doing this.

 

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You’ve also mentioned issues with management.
One of the biggest [issues we want to address] is a management style that’s foisted onto the workplace that isn’t right for the nature of our workplace. Attaboy, by nature, is a place that involves highly skilled people with [lots of] experience. To function at its best, you need to have many members of staff who have been working there for five, six, seven-plus years, who are experienced enough that they can really execute the complicated service. That’s what makes it such a special place: the quality of the product, the excellence of the service and the sprezzatura, this Italian term that’s like, “making something extremely difficult look easy.” That’s part of what makes us tick. 

Because of that, we have people on staff who have been working there for a very long time. We have people who are former bar owners, like myself, and people on staff who are former general managers of large, high-end restaurants. We have a barback who is a former serial general manager! You know what I mean? We have very highly qualified people in the bar. 

There’s been this management style, since COVID, [where we have] a single general manager who calls the shots in a very unilateral way. Over and over again, the highly qualified, highly experienced staff are left out of the decision-making process about how the bar should function, what we should do during times of transition, how we should tackle certain problems, and how service should be run. That doesn’t make sense to us. So one of the biggest demands that we have is to restructure the management style.

What kind of management style do you envision? One with more evenly distributed leadership?
That would have to be decided with the members of the union and the management; that would be negotiated in the contract. It’s going to be up to our members to deliberate that and find the best way forward, and I have faith that we have, among us, the expertise to solve that problem. We don’t have a definite vision yet, but that’s something that would be decided democratically.

We hope more people in the industry will start to call that into question as well. What we would want to see happen is, if there’s a manager, their job should be to ensure that we have the things that we need to run the place, not necessarily to tell us how to do it and boss us around.

Unionizing a bar is notoriously difficult. Did you have peers that you looked to as models of the union you wanted?
The big case studies that we looked at were Barboncino in Brooklyn, a pizzeria, and to a greater degree, Death & Co. That’s the workplace that resembles ours the most. What happened at Death & Co is definitely something that we looked at to try to learn from, and we’ve had multiple conversations with people who were involved in that. 

But beyond that, I will say that the unfortunate situation is that we’re pioneers here. There aren’t a lot of other examples to draw inspiration from because the industry has almost zero unions. We’re trying to change that. There’s really no examples that we can look at for what works; we’re mostly looking at what doesn’t work and trying to do it differently. 

For the organizing committee, we’ve been drawing a lot of inspiration from the works of Jane McAlevey, in particular her books on building power and her theories about how to run successful unionization campaigns. We’ve also taken some inspiration from a book called We Are the Union by Eric Blanc, which is about worker-to-worker organizing. In that book, there are several examples of successful campaigns that we found inspiring, not least of which was the Starbucks Workers United campaign. 

Rather than organizing with a larger union—like UNITE HERE or SEIU—Attaboy workers have gone independent. Why did you make that decision?
We have observed that there’s really no union that we could affiliate with in New York City that has demonstrated that they have the capacity and the know-how to organize a bar, because none of them have succeeded.

We’ve looked at the experience of Achilles Heel, the bar in Greenpoint that was part of the Marlow Collective and tried to unionize [earlier this year]. They were operating under RWDSU, the retail workers and department stores union, and they had a pretty bad experience… They told them not to go to the press; the [RWDSU] did not organize any protest action or anything like that, and they just told them “We’re going to file an unfair labor practice, sit tight.” But meanwhile, 20 people had lost their jobs.

For us, forming an independent union has been about having autonomy over how we run our campaign… Several organizations—in particular EWOC, the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, and the DSA labor working group—have offered resources to us, in addition to other individuals in the labor movement who have volunteered to help us in their capacity as lawyers and organizers. So we have basically cobbled together the type of support we would receive from [a larger] union to get ourselves through this recognition process. Once we gain recognition and certification, then we’ll be gearing up for contract negotiations. But for the time being, we remain independent.

You mentioned unsuccessful union drives at other places and how you’re taking away ideas of what not to do. What are some of those things?
We’re definitely not pursuing a campaign where we don’t [try to organize for] outside support. We need the support of the community, the industry and the labor movement at large to make our campaign really visible and to demonstrate to the owners that this is a popular idea, this is a good thing, and there’s lots of reasons why they should recognize it. Their union avoidance lawyers that they’ve contracted and the other business owners [whose advice they’ve sought out] are not the only voices they should listen to. They should listen to workers—their workers and others in the industry—and they should listen to the community generally. That’s one thing that we’re really focusing on, building that outside support.

It seems like your union drive has seen lots of support so far from the community. But do you have a response to the people who are like, “You’re destroying a legacy!”?
There’s been some haters on Instagram. They made a lot of noise on our first post, basically, and then after we posted our platform, we didn’t hear much from them again.

It’s an unfortunate reality in America that anti-union propaganda and anti-union sentiment has been so pervasive for decades, and it’s coming from the owner class and the lawyers, the people that make their money busting unions. They’ve been really successful at getting that narrative—that unions are bad and what’s good is job creation— to really stick in the heads of a lot of working-class people. Yeah, job creation is good and important, but what’s even more important is good jobs and jobs that make people’s lives better, not worse. That’s the job of unions. 

At the end of the day, all a union really is is workers coming together to bargain with their bosses over their working conditions. Who wouldn’t want that? Anybody who has a boss needs to have a union so that they can make their working conditions better. The union doesn’t suddenly get the password to the bank accounts and clear out all the money. It’s about negotiating. 

You had set a deadline of Monday, April 12 for voluntary recognition. What has happened since?
Unfortunately, the owners have not recognized the union. They didn’t reply to our email requesting voluntary recognition. Since then, we have petitioned for an election with the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board], and [Attaboy management] retained the same union avoidance council as Death & Co. did.

As soon as I saw that [lawyer] was on the documents, that was a signal to us that they were going to engage in union busting, which was really disappointing to us, though it doesn’t come as that much of a surprise because that’s the industry standard, right? That’s the common practice. That’s what we’re gearing up for now. 

We’ll have about three weeks to do our organizing, run our campaign, shore up our support and avoid their union busting as much as we can to win our election. But, in the meantime, we will be continuously leaving the door open [for management] to recognize the union. They can do it at any time. We’re going to continue to ask them to do that, and we think it’s the right way forward. We feel confident that we can win our election, but things will be a lot easier if they recognize ahead of it. If they recognize, we will withdraw our petition and we can just get down to business bargaining a contract and normalizing relations at the bar.

For fans of the bar who want to support the union, what should they do?
They should follow our Instagram and repost all of our content. They should come to the bar and show their support to us. They can bring handwritten notes; we would love to be able to post those things on our Instagram. They should write emails to the owners of Attaboy and tell them that they think they should give us voluntary recognition. There’s a variety of ways they can support and more ways will be announced on our Instagram as we move forward. There will be events people can look forward to as well.

And for those who are skeptical, what should they know?
I want to reiterate something that my colleague Chris [Hughes] said, which is that we’re doing this because we love the bar. A lot of the negative comments that we’ve gotten are framing it as though we’re attacking the bar and the owners and trying to villainize them. [There’s this idea that this is] about vengeance or being vindictive. I want everybody to understand that organizing a union is a lot of work. It’s not worth that work to just take pot shots at someone or try to fuck somebody’s shit up. Sure, we may have our differences with the owners—that’s a part of this, and we want to negotiate a better situation with them—but we’re doing this because we believe in the bar, we love the bar, we love each other, and we want our workplace to be better. We truly believe that it will make their business better as well. This is coming from a place of love.

We also want to prove that it’s possible. We want other people to feel like they have the agency to make their workplaces better as well. This is not about bringing somebody down.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

We kid, of course. It’s safe to say that foamy pours like the hladinka, šnyt and mlíko have proven to be more than a passing fad, and more taprooms than ever are embracing the style. But the craft beer industry is not one to rest on its laurels, and now it seems there’s a new pour in town.

Japanese-style sharp pours have recently shown up everywhere from Seattle to Philadelphia to Salem, Massachusetts. Hopewell Brewing Co. in Chicago even named a beer after the move. While it’s recently landed stateside, it’s been a common pour style in Japan since  the late 1990s. Zigmas Maloni, curator and beertender at the Chicago bar Beermiscuous, credits Japanese beer behemoth Asahi for the sharp pour, which involves first pouring beer without foam, then capping it with foam to achieve a “golden ratio”: 70 percent liquid beer to 30 percent foam. Tapsters let the foam overflow so that when they scrape off the excess, there’s still a frothy head that fills to the top of the glass.

As we know from the advent of Czech-style pours, foam isn’t just for show; it impacts a beer’s texture and aroma. But while a Czech-style pour involves filling the glass with foam first, making the foam and beer mix freely in the glass to prioritize creaminess, a sharp pour does the opposite. The foam acts like a cap to keep effervescence—and a crisp, cold quality—intact.

By using this technique, tapsters are able to offer “that signature wet, dense, Lukr-like foam on top,” while enhancing a beer’s aroma, says Ryan Dunlap, owner of Argenta Brewing Company in Portland, Maine. Unlike a standard serve, where aromas might dissipate, a sharp pour traps the added carbon dioxide from pouring and amplifies these flavors. Dunlap says the method allows the floral notes in Argenta’s rice lager to shine through. 

Despite the differences, most American breweries use their Lukr taps for sharp pours, though a few, like Roaring Table Brewing Co. in Lake Zurich, Illinois, have the kind of two-spout faucet used in Japan: Pulling the handle forward dispenses beer from the rear spout, then pushing the handle back tops the beer with foam from the front spout. 

Maintaining a chilled temperature is essential for the sharp-pour process. At Argenta, Dunlap inverts tall glasses in sanitized hotel pans filled with ice water. “You want the glassware to be the same temperature as the beer because you’re trying to reduce any carbon dioxide breakout or foam building in the glass during the first part of the pour,” he explains. He rinses the glasses, fills them with the same two-step pour and then dunks them in an ice bucket to both clean and chill the glass one more time before serving. While any beer style benefits from this pour, lagers tend to get the sharp treatment because they’re best served by the crisp, cold results.

That bottle was Hpnotiq. For years, it sat in the cabinet until eventually my family moved out of the country. I remember looking at that silver, swirly, mermaid-coded logo, intrigued. (Aquamarine the movie had also recently come out.) To this day, I’ve never actually tried the stuff. By the time I was in college, we’d moved onto greener (well, at least less blue) pastures, the likes of vodka Red Bulls and White Claws. To write this, I searched my local liquor stores, and I’m sad to report that they did not have Hpnotiq. If not for my weird dining-room associations with the liqueur, I might have never heard of it. That is, maybe, until now?

Last year I learned that there was an Incredible Hulk—a drink from the aughts that combines the liqueur with Cognac—on the menu at No Smoking Bar in LA. That’s random, I thought. I haven’t seen the word Hpnotiq in ages. But then I saw the drink again, at Press Club in D.C. In New York, you can get an Incredible Hulk at Lullaby, in a dainty Nick & Nora, or at Jean’s, where it was recently, inexplicably, poured into an Erewhon-branded jar. You can also get one at the recently opened Kitty’s Cosmopolitan Lounge in Chicago. But why?