It’s here. The Summer 2022 edition of CLASS – Shapes and Forms - has now launched.
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Inside this issue
Fronted by the leaders of A Bar with Shapes for a Name – which was a finalist in six categories in the Class Bar Awards – the Summer issue of CLASS comes with an interview with its co-owner Remy Savage. This year’s Bartender of the Year lets us in on the thinking behind his Dalston bar, how it's expanding, and explains the process behind this year’s Cocktail of the Year, Pastel.
We follow this interview with profiles of all of the bars and bartenders who took to the stage at last month’s awards. So many of the bars are children of the pandemic – Shapes, Schofield’s, Publiq and Pineapple Club to name just four - evidence if there ever was of our industry’s reinvention.
In this edition we also tackle the issues of the day. Anna Sebastian writes another forthright piece on equality in the bar industry and Danny Murphy tackles how the bar operator might deal with rising inflation.
But with the working ambition of ‘less crisis, more cocktails’, we’re mostly hands deep in the liquid. Mike Baxter writes on the curious tradition of the Bartender Handshake on page 17, Monica Berg chews the fat on the use of oils in cocktails on page 20, while Jake O’Brien Murphy unearths his secret hoard of cocktail menus – they’re a chronology of our industry’s evolution, he says on page 18.
Ellen Manning delves into the trend of cocktail tasting menus for which the Midlands seems to have a certain proclivity (p26), while Anistatia Miller & Jared Brown – winners of the Outstanding Contribution award, no less – are making drinks from seasonal blossoms (p50).
Joe Wadsack shifts his wine column cocktail-ways too to make the case for more vinous mixed drinks (p62) and among the many more features, guides and reviews, Professor Charles Spence discusses the science around the liquid-to-air ratio in a glass (p52).
If the mood at the Class Bar Awards is any measure of our industry’s optimism, it’s fair to say the glass was half empty, but it’s now very much half full.