There are few professions that seem to clock more air miles than an internationally recognised bartender in 2025. Follow any of the personalities attached to any of the World’s 50 Best Bars on social media and it appears impossible that any of them can find the time between international takeovers and bar shows to operate successful businesses on their home fronts.

These days, if you live in a major city, you’re never more than six feet away from a guest shift and with that volume, there are plenty of badly organised ones. Iain McPherson knows a thing or two about bar shows. This year, the Panda & Sons owner and Edinburgh Bar Show co-founder estimates that he’ll be out of the country for a minimum of 270 days – that’s nine months.

“Sometimes, you go on trips and you just feel like you're in a bit of a box-ticking exercise and you’re getting paraded around. I’ve done shifts where you can feel that your hosts or the bar just don’t care and you feel like you’re just here because it’s some kind of marketing strategy. You end up leaving the country not having any idea about the culture.

“The best trips get these things right. I went to Colombia with Alquímico and left feeling like I had a better understanding of Colombian culture in Cartagena and Filandia where their farm is. It made me realise how important that element is. For Scottish people, it can feel weird to sell ourselves, but the best trips show the best of the culture.”

Last month, McPherson put his learnings into practice when hosting the inaugural Panda & Sons Highland Games – a week of guest shifts at Panda featuring bars from six continents that culminated in a day of caber-tossing, axe-throwing and kilt-making at a castle in East Lothian.

“It was important to have a day about Scottish culture that was also fun. That’s where the Highland Games came from. Outside of Europe there are not really castles. Scotland has loads of castles so we thought that would be a perfect venue.

“Then we had the Highland Games and learnt about kilt making and about the Scottish wildcat. The day before we went to the Scotch Malt Whisky Society to learn about independent bottlers and single casks, which lead to the release of Unite the Clans [with Blind Summit] which was a nice surprise and a nice memento for everyone to take home.

“I hope people left the trip knowing a bit more about Scottish culture. I do a lot of guest shifts, but I wanted this to have a bit more substance than just having fun behind the bar.”

Different and specific

When Line co-founders Vasilis Kyritsis and Nikos Bakoulis set about planning their inaugural Artisan Line Up, they took a similar approach – make it different and make it specific. The event paired bars from Nairobi, Paris, Guadalajara, Milan, Guangzhou and Oslo with local Greek producers and farmers to create one-off menus for a bar show in Athens.

“Nowadays, events can be very similar to one another – at Line we are always trying to think about things in a different way,” says Bakoulis. “For the past two or three years, we have invited bartenders and driven them to different farms to pick ingredients so they have a little point of view of what those guys are doing on their farms.”

“But this time we wanted to bring everyone to Athens so they can all learn from each other’s different philosophies. Take a bar from China or Mexico or Kenya, they’ll all have a different approach to working with ingredients, but everyone will be able to learn from one another.”

Kyritsis continues: “Sharing your culture with others is the most important thing in our industry. It was one of the main reasons why our bar industry has spread all over the world in the past few years because bartenders have started to exchange their cultures and find inspiration in other cultures.”

Ahead of the evening of ingredient-led collaboration, Line hosted a day of panel talks for the local bartending community, where international bartending guests, farmers, winemakers and academics were invited to share their thoughts on tackling climate change and the environmental challenges facing the industry.

“It’s important to get the knowledge and perspectives from outside our industry,” says Bakoulis. “We’re curious, but we’re still bartenders – we don't know everything. We need to collaborate with people who know better, exchange ideas and improve our product and our understanding.”