How I Build a Cocktail for a Competition

Since opening Nectar, I have entered ten cocktail competitions. Diplomatico Artisans of Taste. The Altos Margarita Challenge. The Honkaku Shochu and Awamori Contest. The Patron Spicy Margarita Challenge. Franklin and Sons Flavour in Motion, where I made the final ten in the UK. World Class GB. Bumbu Originals, where I reached the Scotland heat stage. The Bacardi Daiquiri Challenge. Meister Hunter, our Jägermeister entry. And The Open at Ben Lomond, which I am still waiting to hear back on.

I have not advanced from most of these. That is the honest starting point for this article, and it is important, because everything below is not a formula for winning. It is what I have genuinely learned about building a competition cocktail properly, win or lose.

Read the brief like it is the entire competition, because it is

The single most important thing I have learned across ten entries is that the brief is not a formality. It is the competition.

Every brand releases a brief explaining what the competition is actually looking for, and the specifics matter enormously. How many ingredients are you allowed to use. Is the story meant to be about the brand or about yourself. What is the drink actually supposed to say to the people judging it. These are not minor details to skim past on the way to the fun part of building the drink.

The Ben Lomond entry taught me this most clearly. The story mattered, but so did the serve, specifically how quickly the drink could be made, because it is a cocktail designed to be enjoyed at a golf tournament, not lingered over at a bar. A technically brilliant, slow-build cocktail would fail that brief entirely, regardless of how it tasted. Franklin and Sons ran in the opposite direction: the brief wanted an expression of myself, so more personal detail was rewarded rather than efficiency. Understanding which brief you are actually working with, before you touch a single bottle, is the most important step in the entire process.

The rule about other brands' spirits

I learned this one the hard way. I never use spirits from a competing brand in an entry. If I am building for a Bacardi competition, I am not reaching for a liqueur made by Pernod Ricard. Ideally I avoid heavily branded spirits from outside the host brand entirely.

If I do need to use one, it has to be modified in some way, infused, densed, fat-washed, changed enough that it is genuinely transformed rather than simply borrowed, and it does not get named directly in the entry. This is not just etiquette. It reflects what the brand is actually paying attention to: they want their spirit to be the hero of the drink, not one ingredient among several competing brand names.

Build at least one homemade ingredient

Every competition entry I build now includes at least one ingredient made entirely from scratch. This serves two purposes at once.

The first is genuine differentiation. The chances of another competitor arriving at exactly the same homemade syrup, infusion, or reduction as you are very small, which means a homemade element is one of the most reliable ways to make an entry distinct without gimmicks.

The second is what it demonstrates. Using an advanced technique, whether that is a proper reduction, a clarification, or a considered infusion, shows the judges something about how deeply you understand flavour, not just what flavours you have chosen. It is a signal of craft rather than simply a signal of effort.

The mistake I made at Franklin and Sons

Where this can go wrong is using too many techniques in a single drink. This was direct feedback I received at the Franklin and Sons final: there was a lot happening in the cocktail, and the judges could not clearly identify all the individual flavours I was explaining to them.

The lesson is genuinely important and one I am still applying. A judge tasting your drink for the first time, while also listening to you talk, does not have unlimited bandwidth to decode a complex build. If you cannot point to a specific flavour and have them immediately taste it when you mention it, you have probably built something too intricate for the format, however impressive it might be to make. Complexity should serve clarity, not compete with it.

The first round is the hardest round, and here is why

Most competitions start with an online submission: a form or a social media post with your story, your recipe, and a photo. Judges, usually brand representatives running the competition, decide who advances based entirely on that submission.

This is the round I find hardest, and I think most bartenders underestimate it. Your drink is being judged without anyone actually tasting it. No matter how good the cocktail genuinely is, you have to sell it entirely through words and a photograph. I have spent real time watching short tutorials on cocktail photography and following other competitive bartenders on social media specifically to understand how they present their entries, because this skill has almost nothing to do with bartending and everything to do with visual storytelling.

The words matter just as much as the picture. I research the brand's history properly before writing anything. I research the spirit itself, its production method, its ingredients, anything relevant to the brief. For Meister Hunter specifically, I did not simply pick berries as a flavour direction. I researched how Jägermeister is actually produced, understood its 56-botanical composition, and chose to work with berries specifically as a result of that research, not as a starting assumption.

One caution I would give anyone entering these: be careful with AI-generated entry copy. A simple prompt asking for a brand story, copied straight into a submission, tends to read thin and generic, and judges are increasingly good at spotting it. It is a genuinely useful tool for research and structure, but the entry itself needs to sound like it came from someone who actually did the work, because it needs to.

What happens after the first round

If you advance, the format varies considerably by brand, and I have now seen most of the common structures.

Bacardi's challenges are genuinely my favourite format, even though I have not yet advanced from a first round with them. They ask you to put the drink on your actual bar menu for a month, and mystery or announced judges visit to try it in a real service context. Your cocktail is not a wasted creation built purely for a form. Real guests drink it, and the competition decision comes from that live performance rather than a single tasting.

Franklin and Sons took a different approach, sending UK brand ambassadors to visit each shortlisted bar in person, asking us to present as if it were already the final. That visit meant preparing a genuine presentation weeks before the actual final existed, which turned out to be excellent practice for what came later.

Bumbu Originals selected ten entrants immediately from the written submissions to advance straight to a heat stage, no intermediate visit at all.

What I would tell anyone starting this process

Read the brief twice before building anything. Understand exactly what story it wants told and who it wants that story to be about. Build at least one thing entirely from scratch. Resist the urge to show every technique you know in a single glass. And treat the written entry with the same seriousness you would treat the final presentation, because for most competitions, it is the only chance your drink gets before someone decides whether it deserves a second look at all.

We will keep entering. Ten competitions in, this is still the fastest way I have found to genuinely improve as a bartender.

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