Don Lee and Finding Your Place In The Mixed Drink Multiverse: Class Recording

Industry icon Don Lee joins The Academy for a free-roaming conversation on treating creativity as a muscle, how to do R&D right, and why you shouldn’t create drinks based on your grandma’s cooking.

https://youtu.be/dXd2cVC1azw

Industry mentor Don Lee thinks about creativity often – how to hone it, strengthen it, and push our industry to places we have only dreamed of.

He join us for a conversation about the process of creating new cocktails (if there are any such things), and how to thoughtfully and daringly join the centuries-long creative dialogue of the bartending craft.

A must watch for:

• Treating your creativity like a muscle: How to hone and strengthen it.
• The Art School Approach to criticism and why makes you a better bartender.
• Context as an ingredient, or why you should be drinking more Daiquiris.
• Cocktail Competition Tips (hint: Don Lee doesn’t know what your grandma’s cooking tastes like)

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About Your Teacher:

With a background in documentary photography and software engineering, Don Lee’s fierce curiosity and fascination with creation and interpretation found a natural home behind the bar during the mid-aughts cocktail renaissance. Lee’s industry icon status was cemented not only by direct innovations—designing industry benchmark barware, spearheading the fat-washing technique with the Benton’s Old Fashioned, menu creation and consultation—but through his work guiding the next generations, for which he was awarded American Bar Mentor of the Year.

Follow Don on IG: @donbert