A great piece in the Herald’s glossy Saturday Magazine in bonny Scotland. Thanks Gordon for doing this, you are a legend

I was made redundant by Bacardi after six years as a product training and mixology manager. I didn’t know what do with myself until a friend whose sister had gone off to Borneo handed me a brochure. I had a look through it, saw Fiji and thought, “I’m going there.” Three weeks later I was on an island in Fiji learning how to dive and doing marine conservation. One of the other guys took a keen interest in what I used to do with cocktails, and it just got my brain thinking: “If this 18 year old is interested in cocktails, who else might be?”

I came home just before Christmas and had the breakthrough moment in the middle of January, when I thought, “What does a guy do if he wants to impress his girlfriend?” Then I thought, Cocktails.” If you go out for a couple of dates and it goes well and she wants to come round and have dinner, normally you’d go out and buy a bottle of wine. I make cocktails and get my date to make them. It’s a nice ice breaker.

Because of the credit crunch people can’t afford to go out as much, but that does not stop them wanting good-tasting drinks. They know what tastes nice, they know what looks nice, but they don’t have the skills to make it. So what my business does is educate people in a fun manner about how to make cool drinks.

Most people have cocktail ingredients in their houses: spirits they bought on holiday or they get for Christmas and never use. For example, there is a drink called a caipirinha, the national cocktail of Brazil, which is made with cachaca, sugar and lime. But you can replace the cachaca with vodka and make it a caipiroska, or you can use rum and make a caipirissima. All you need then is a lime, some granulated sugar and some crushed ice, and you can make a cocktail that will cost anything from five to seven pounds in a bar for 30 pence.

A good trick for understanding cocktails is to look at the yoghurts in the supermarket. Straight away you will see flavours that go together, like passion fruit and orange. You have got to have a bit of
sweetness, like sugar or honey, but you can also use maple syrup or jam. Then, to counteract that, you need a bit of tartness, like limes, lemons, even grapefruit. After that you need your spirits and your mixers.

The great thing is you experiment and then drink the results. I am branching out into teaching the flair moves – Tom Cruise and all that. Flairing is an art. People think it is amazing, but they do not understand it takes hours of practice, like three to four hours a day. I am trying to introduce people to it so they can do a little trick with a straw or a napkin.

I am trying to do for cocktails what Jamie Oliver did for food – stripping the process down to the bare bones and saying, “If you follow these steps, you’ll make a great tasting drink and, more importantly, you will be able to impress your mates.”

John Collingwood – www.wanttoimpress.com