BEST SELLING

Ketel One has retained its top spot for the second year of the World’s 50 Best Bars brands report vodka list – testament to Diageo and the Nolet family’s continued efforts to tell the Ketel One story to a discerning audience of bartenders.

Grey Goose has risen from fourth to second place and the vodka’s presence is likely to grow as the brand focuses more on ingredients and provenance.

Its latest marketing campaign in London, for example, featured an artisanal bakery selling bread made from the same wheat used to produce the vodka.

Svedka and 42 Below have fallen off the list to be replaced by Finlandia and Skyy. Interestingly, these have long been bastions of the flavoured beverage.

Finlandia makes a handful of classic, fruity vodkas and Skyy’s Infusions range is largely fruity, with the exception of ginger and coconut.

Absolut, Russian Standard, Wyborowa, Stoli, Smirnoff and Belvedere remain in the list for a second year, though they have all switched position.

TRENDING

As usual, the trending list attracts some smaller, craft brands and there’s a new bird bobbing around on the vodka lake. A

ylesbury Duck hails from The Eighty Six Co, based in New York but working with distillers around the world. Aylesbury Duck is a winter wheat vodka continuously distilled in copper-lined column stills from the 1940s. Canadian glacial water makes the cut and wheat comes from a farm in the Western Rockies, near Calgary.

Sounds like a bartender’s dream story. No surprise – all four of Eighty Six’s spirits (rum, gin, vodka and tequila) were launched last year, following “conversations within the bartending community”. Indeed, you’ve already met Fords in the gin list - expect big things from this company.

Both Tito’s and Sipsmiths are trending for a second year and neither hail from vodka’s traditional eastern European heartland. Tito’s Handmade Vodka is from Texas and Sipsmith’s is distilled in London.

Tito Beveridge uses a copper pot still, as does Sipsmith. Is this a trend within the trending section? 

To see how we did it, go to page 2.

HOW WE DID IT

The World’s 50 Best Bars has grown considerably over the past few years. The Academy of voters continues to expand and thanks to their votes, we think we’ve built up a pretty fantastic list of top bars and bartenders from all over the world. It’s still growing and long may that continue.

Last year, this growth and subsequent success of the World’s 50 Best Bars allowed us to reinvent the way we conduct this brands survey and we began asking this list of elite bars what they were selling.

To create an even better global picture of popular brands, we polled 100 of the top 250 bars. We used independent research company Leslie Henry Marketing & Research to do the polling.

Among the bars that responded this year is the Best Bar in the World – the Artesian in London – as well as a whole host of other great bars from around the globe. They include Black Pearl in Melbourne, Schumann’s in Munich, Employees Only in New York, Bar Hive Five in Tokyo, Floreira Atlantico in Buenos Aires, Le Forum in Paris, Quinary in Hong Kong, Delicatessen in Moscow, Dry Martini in Barcelona and Tippling Club in Singapore, as well as many other top venues.

The team at Leslie Henry asked the top bars which brands were best sellers and which were – to borrow from Twitter – trending. A trending brand might not be doing the same volumes as a best seller, but it’s a brand that customers are increasingly asking for. It indicates a trend – and sometimes trends turn into best sellers down the line. There have been a few moves this year and a few brands have fallen from the list. In their place, we welcome several new brands that are riding the wave of popularity with both bartenders and consumers.

We also asked this crack team of bar experts to name their favourite spirit for a number of classic cocktails. So, if you want to know which tequila tops the poll for a world class Margarita and which rum wins the tussle for the best Mojito, you can see those results on pages.