I was perusing sidebars yesterday and clicked on The Art of Drinks’ 50 Signs You Are a Bad Bartender. I laughed and enjoyed the comments as well. I followed from them to a thread on eGullet that I enjoyed even more, because it reflects pretty directly on those of us who blog about cocktails and those of us who read such blogs: You Might Be a Cocktail Snob/Geek if….

If you haven’t already run across it, you should go read the whole thing, but I want to shamelessly steal others’ material pad this post give you a taste here.

Just for fun, I’ll plead guilty to a few of these as I put them up. I’d love to hear from you about which ones fit you. (In case you’re wondering, that’s a bleg for comments!)

…no bar in a 50 mile radius has all the ingredients to make your favorite drink.
…you buy 100-year-old bottles of bitters off the internet because you can’t stand the taste of Angostura in your Old-Fashioneds.

Guilty on the first!

… your preferred vermouth isn’t commercially available in the state you live in.

Guilty, but as regards wine, not vermouth.

…you send your martini back because “You ordered a martini, not a glass of gin,” if there isn’t adequate vermouth in it.

Nolo Contedre. I drink Vodka Martinis, and I assume the bartender’s going to give me a glass of Vodka, so I call him or her on the carpet for it in advance, thus compounding the snobish/geekiness (Sneekishness?) of the offense.

…you carry your own bottle of orange bitters with you into bars

Bartender? I’ll have a Hendricks martini, 4:1 with Vya vermouth. Do you have orange bitters for that? No, don’t even look, I can tell you don’t. here, I brought some, use mine. And are those… ? Uh… you know what, I brought my own olives–you can just leave them in their plastic tub there…

Not guilty on this one. But I so want to see it happen!

…you thought the bartender’s attempt at making your cocktail was, noble, but, flawed.

…you don’t hesitate to use single malt scotch in your Rusty Nail

Now come on! Who does that? You never mix single malt with anything except a little water, frozen or not. That’s not Sneekishness, that being a poseur!

This next one is aimed squarely at a few folks on my blogroll. Let’s see if they read it:

…not only do you bring your own bottle of bitters, you actually made the bitters in the bottle.

…you watch a bartender making a cocktail and know the date the version they make was published.

…you know the schedules of the bartenders you trust to make your drinks.

Guilty on the schedule thing. I do try to keep track of Pegu Blog Certified Bartenders™.

I’m going to quote about half of this post, go read the rest:

…certain bar tenders are glad to see you walk in to their bar & almost as happy as others are when they see you leave their bar.
…you base where you are going to dinner on the type of vermouth they carry
…you use ratios when placing your cocktail order
…other patrons are watching the cocktail waitress w/ the incredible figure and you are watching the bar tender to make certain that he uses the gin you requested
…you have been “invited” behind the bar to mix your own cocktail
…you have gone behind the bar to mix your own cocktail
…you have been “invited” to leave the bar after going behind the bar to mix your own cocktail
…you have been stopped at customs b/c of tree bark you brought in to the country.

Ratios? Guilty. Who I’m watching? Nolo.

…cross state/national borders for the sole purpose of obtaining liquor

In all fairness. There are places where you can save a lot of money doing this, net of travel expenses!

…have walked out of a bar because they didn’t have any bitters

Well, no. But I have just recently used up all of a bar’s bitters.

…some friends just look at you when bartenders ask for their drink order.

…you feel your gorge rise when you hear someone order a “Goose and red bull, and tuff it up eh chief?”

…you prefer to eat dinner at the bar.

…there is more than one bartender who can start pouring your drink as soon as you walk into the bar, so it’s sitting prettily on a bev nap by the time your butt hits the bar stool.

There is one restaurant where the entire bar staff, and most of the servers, have this last characteristic.

…you have three sizes of ice in your freezer an two ice picks and you know how to use them.

…you will talk aboout ice with friends, and perfect strangers for bloody hours, and hours if someone doesn’t stop you.

Those two are directly aimed at you, Darcy!

…you can instantly answer the question Doc’s, Gary’s, or Dave’s?

I’m proud to say that not only am I not guilty on this one, I don’t even know what the Hell it means!

All these are just from the first page of the thread. There are three. Have fun.