Recently I watched a clip of Tristan Stephenson’s excellent The Curious Bartender podcast, in which Toby Cecchini – New York bartender and inventor of the Cosmo – was bemoaning the proliferation of the guest shift. His views were nothing new – many have called out the soullessness of transactional guest-shifts – and in some ways, he’s not wrong. I have personally taken jabs at the subject multiple times. But with this podcast I came away with a feeling that I often have when I see legends lamenting modern-day ills – that it doesn’t matter, the die is cast, and that the future of bartending probably isn’t listening anyway.

I – like many people – grew up with the idea that we should respect and learn from the experiences of our elders. But the experiences of our mentors whose heydays were in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, couldn’t be more different from today. You get old quickly in bartending – things change at breakneck speed. Even those at the forefront 20 years or so years ago now seem near ancient when they talk nostalgically about the second golden generation of the cocktail, the rediscovery of the craft of bartending, and how this was achieved with little training and resource – just great drinksmaking and even better stories.

Expecting 20-somethings to listen to you because you brought back fresh fruit or were the first to use block ice, is like expecting them to be impressed by your mix tape. Things have moved on. Maybe young bartenders should be grateful, but the legacy of these pioneers’ work is that their ideas are so ingrained in global bartending culture, this generation don’t even think to assign credit. History will remember the legends for their famous bars and the classic cocktails they created, but not the journey, and not the struggle. It is life’s greatest glory and tragedy. Everyone is using your invention but no one remembers you invented it.

When I was growing up, I looked up to the likes of Erik Lorincz, Shingo Gokan, Beckaly Franks, Simone Caporale and Alex Kratena. Larger-than-life characters with crazy backstories, even crazier ideas, who actively expanded the borders of the cocktail bartending movement worldwide. They won competitions, they pretty much completed 50 Best – but to many coming into bartending, if you’re not doing it now in front of them on social media, you may as well not have done it at all. They weren’t there to witness it, it wasn’t in their feed, so they can’t pretend to feel emotions towards the same things.

This is the generation of everything, everywhere and all at once. There’s almost nothing left to discover – we have the ice programmes, the rotovaps, fermentation labs and fancy bar stations in every corner of the globe. They’re born into a world in which they have more information in three swipes of their phone than the early 2000s bartender had on the entire internet.

The age of social media has meant that advances proliferate globally within days. If Iain McPherson has invented a new sub-zero technique, bartenders know about it and are trying it out minutes a er he has posted. It also means trends come and go quickly – a new serve, glass or technique has a moment, then fades away.

But instead of bemoaning the educational shortcuts and the perceived shallowness of young people’s easy-earned understanding, you must accept that there is no going back. This is a one-way street.

And actually none of that is bad. It’s just a different form of progress. The legends of the past created new things, the next generation refined the ideas and took bartending to new frontiers. And for this generation, there will be less discovery – you cannot invent what is already invented – but they will add layers to what we know.

In every walk of life, each generation’s evolutionary function is to build on what came before. It’s a journey that is as old as Greek mythology, where the Titans were the first generation of immortal beings, superseded by their offspring, the Gods. The current set of young bartenders are the Humans – mere mortals whose faith and memory of their gods will fade with every generation, just as it did with the Greeks.

The new currency

In many ways, information and knowledge is so accessible it's no longer the currency.

This new currency of attention has created a second sphere of influence – to some bartenders, being digitally active is as much a route to success as your performance in a bricks-and-mortar bar. It’s no longer good enough to be good at something – you have to be seen doing it. We are in the attention economy – not just bartenders, but broader society.

The importance of creating content and building their personal profile doesn’t mean not having presence outside of the digital world. For this generation of bartenders, the guest shift is one of the real-world ways in which you build your profile and grow in your career – while also providing a content opportunity. It’s the way you travel and network and learn to work with brands, bars and bartenders. It’s so ubiquitous because it works for the bartenders, the bar community and the brands. It also feeds the attention machine that creates this new currency.

One day, I’ll be introduced as an industry veteran, and I’ll be asked about the new trends facing bartending of the day. How AI bots now make drinks while startenders pose for 3D photos – or whatever the latest thing is causing old men to shout at the clouds. I hope I use my platform to support, understand and learn from them – reverse mentoring, if you will. Anyway, the likelihood is, they’ll have buried their gods – they probably won’t be listening