Franklin & Sons Flavour in Motion: What It Looks Like to Lose a National Final to the Best in the Business

We have written about cocktail competitions before on this blog. This one was probably the biggest thing that has happened to Nectar's drinks programme so far, and I want to write about it honestly, because the honest version is more useful than the version where everything goes well.

I did not place in the top three. But before I get to that, I want to be clear about the part I am genuinely, deeply proud of, because it is easy for a loss at the final to overshadow everything that had to go right just to get there.

Two bartenders from Nectar, in a bar barely a year old

Franklin and Sons ran Flavour in Motion this year to mark 140 years since three brothers with a passion for flavour and no established name started what has become one of the UK's best-known mixer brands. The brief asked entrants to identify the very first cocktail they ever learned to make, the story behind it, and then rebuild that memory into something that bridges 1886 and 2026, using a heritage technique from the 1880s alongside a modern one. The drink was not supposed to just be a cocktail. It was supposed to be a narrative in a glass.

We entered, both of us, separately, without coordinating what the other was submitting. Two bartenders from a single bar on Broughton Street, open for barely a year, made it into the UK top 20 of a national competition run by a 140-year-old brand. That is the part I keep coming back to, and it deserves to be said plainly rather than treated as a footnote to what happened afterwards.

Aris, who has been with us for a few months now, submitted a reimagining of the Bahama Mama, the first cocktail he ever made professionally, working at Hard Rock Cafe before he joined the team. He is a few months into working at Nectar and he made the UK top 20 of a national cocktail competition. I do not think I can overstate how proud that makes me, both for what it says about Aris specifically and for what it says about the standard we are building into the team more broadly. This was not a competition entered by one experienced bartender carrying the bar's reputation on his own. It was entered independently by two people at different stages of their careers, and both of them were judged good enough by an outside, national panel to make the cut.

My own entry went back further, to one of our first house parties in Zurich, a drink somewhere between an Amaretto Sour and a Whisky Sour that I built the summer American Pie was everywhere, twisted with my mother's apple pie recipe. From the top 20, Franklin and Sons sent their UK Brand Ambassadors, Tom and Joe, to visit each of us at Nectar for a private presentation, judged against a set criteria. From there, ten finalists were selected to go to London. I was one of them, and the only Scottish entrant in the final ten.

That is the achievement. Everything from here is about what happened once I got there, and what it taught me.

Calloh Callay

The final was held at Calloh Callay in London, a genuinely serious room with a serious reputation. Ten finalists, each building the competition drink from scratch on the day, presenting directly to the judges.

It was impressive to see the impact that it has working at a bar that is not my own. Although I prepared the movements of my hands rigorously, I did not know where to find ice, I could not find shot glasses and the environment was unfamiliar. One of the biggest learnings about being a good bartender is knowing how to move in unfamiliar places.

I did not come close to the top three.

What ten years in a corporate career did not prepare me for

I spent a decade in marketing before Nectar existed. I have sat in boardrooms, pitched to clients, presented to executives who were deciding whether to spend significant money based on what I said in the next fifteen minutes. I thought I understood what it meant to perform under pressure in front of people whose judgment mattered.

The bartenders in that room in London were better storytellers than anyone I worked alongside across ten years in corporate life. I have thought a lot about why, and I think I understand it now. It comes down to exposure. A bartender tells a story about a drink, in person, to a stranger, multiple times a night, every night they work. That is thousands of live performances a year, compressed into a single skill, refined through sheer repetition in a way that almost no corporate role ever demands. I gave a handful of significant presentations a year in my old career. The bartenders in that final have effectively been rehearsing their storytelling every single shift, for years, without ever calling it rehearsal.

Watching that skill applied to a single, high-stakes competition brief, watching someone hold a room's attention through a personal story while their hands worked through a technically demanding build without missing a beat, was genuinely humbling.

What I got wrong, and the basics I am still building

My preparation was thorough. It was not thorough enough, and looking back honestly, the gap was less about the drink itself and more about a set of fundamentals I am still developing as a competitor.

Some of it is genuinely small. Asking about dietary requirements before presenting to a judging panel, something that should be instinctive after a year of running service at Nectar, was not front of mind the way it should have been under competition pressure. Respecting the heritage of the brand I was building around, understanding not just the brief but the actual 140 years of history behind Franklin and Sons deeply enough that it comes through naturally rather than as a mentioned fact, is a skill I am still developing. And the biggest one: putting simplicity first, and then wrapping a genuinely solid story around that simplicity, rather than reaching for complexity because complexity feels more impressive under pressure. The finalists who did well were not the ones with the most complicated builds. They were the ones who had reduced their drink to something simple and correct, and then told the story around it with total confidence.

None of these are technical cocktail-making failures. They are the fundamentals of competing at this level, the things that separate a good bartender from a finalist who is actually ready to win, and I did not have all of them in place yet.

Why it was still worth everything

I am not going to pretend the disappointment is not real. It is. I wanted to place, and I did not.

But looking back at it honestly, I was nowhere near the top three, and the bartenders who took those places were genuinely among the best in the world at what they do. There is no version of this where I walk away thinking the result was close. It was not, and there is something clarifying about a result that decisive. It removes any temptation to explain it away and leaves me with exactly what I need: a precise, honest map of what separates where I am from where the best in this industry are. Dietary requirements asked without prompting. A brand's heritage worn naturally rather than recited.

Simplicity, told with total conviction.

That map is more valuable than a placing would have been, and I only have it because of something that happened after the final that I was not expecting at all.

Every judge made time to sit down with every competitor individually and give personal, direct feedback on our drink and our presentation. Not a generic score sheet. An actual conversation. What worked, what did not, what they were looking for that I had not quite delivered. What struck me most was how aware every judge was that the people in that room were not finished products. They were not there to catch you out or confirm a verdict they had already reached. They wanted to be constructive, specifically, because they wanted every one of us to become a better bartender than we were walking in. That is a genuinely rare thing to receive from someone whose job it was, minutes earlier, to score you against nine other people and decide you had not done enough.

The same spirit ran through the other competitors. Nobody in that room was guarded or competitive in the way I might have expected walking in. Spirits were high across the entire day, and the general feeling among everyone there was that simply being one of ten bartenders in the UK selected for that final was already a genuine achievement worth being proud of, regardless of where you finished. Kindness was the dominant tone of the whole event, from the judges and from the people I was technically competing against, and that generosity is a large part of why I came home from a loss feeling motivated rather than deflated.

What this means for Nectar

Two bartenders from a bar that opened in Edinburgh a year ago made the UK top 20 of a national cocktail competition. One of us made the final ten, at Calloh Callay, against the best in the country. That happened in our first year of trading, while running full service on Broughton Street every night in between.

I did not place. I am glad I went anyway, I am prouder of Aris and of what our team achieved together than any single result could diminish, and I am glad I am writing about the loss rather than only ever writing about the wins. The best in the business showed me exactly what the next level looks like, and now I know precisely what to build toward.

We will be back.

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