Hamish Smith details the thinking behind The Class Report and how the poll was created.

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But how do we define the UK’s best bars, you might ask. Well, to help with that, we have something we prepared earlier; it’s called the Class Bar Awards.

Through the Class Bar Awards data – generated from our nationwide poll of 170 bar industry figures – we know exactly which bars the industry considers the best.

From this, we create an invitation list of great bars numbering into the hundreds and finalise the results once we have 100 completed questionnaires – above is a selection of some of the bars that took part.

The poll This year, we added non-alc to the key categories we poll on: gin, tequila, vodka, rum, American whiskey, mezcal, scotch, brandy, liqueurs and mixers.

For each, we asked bartenders for their bar’s top-three sellers and created category lists with those brands that received the most votes (which were sequentially weighted).

We didn’t only want to get an idea of the bestselling brands, we wanted to also see if there was a difference between what bars sold and what brands excited them.

There was – so we created a smaller list called Bartenders’ Favourites, which this year grew from three to five brands. Where the bestselling list features bigger, established brands, this secondary table would be a nod to the liquids bartenders love, regardless of price, value, customer familiarity or financial incentives. Who knows, these could be the bestsellers of the future.

Beyond brands Brands are the major thrust of The Class Report, but we also wanted to know about the spirits categories the UK’s best bars sell the most of and what classic cocktails are made most too. So we asked bars to list their five bestselling spirit categories and their top-10 cocktails, then weighted them as before.

This data helped us to assemble a top-10 spirits list and a new list of classic cocktails – up from the 30 to the 50 bestselling.

So that’s The Class Report in its second iteration. A little expanded from last year’s prototype, but not definitive, not absolute, just a snapshot of the market at its most influential end – the UK's best bars.

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