What Presenting at a National Cocktail Competition Final Taught Me

I spent a decade in a corporate marketing career before opening Nectar. I have presented to executives, pitched to clients, stood in front of rooms where a significant amount of money hinged on the next fifteen minutes. I assumed that background would carry me reasonably well through a cocktail competition final.

It did, to a point. But presenting at the Franklin and Sons final taught me things about presentation that a decade in a boardroom never had the opportunity to teach me, and I want to write them down properly, separate from the story of the competition itself.

The gap between a great cocktail and a great presentation

By the time you reach a heat or a final, your drink has usually already been assessed for flavour in some form. What decides the result at that stage is the presentation, and I underestimated, badly, how large the gap is between making an excellent cocktail and presenting one excellently.

This is not a small distinction. A brilliant drink presented poorly loses to a good drink presented brilliantly, more often than I expected before I had experienced it directly.

Hands and words have to move together

The single most concrete lesson I took from the Bumbu Originals heat stage is that a presentation needs far more preparation than simply having something to say. Talking alone is not enough. Your hands and your words need to be genuinely synchronised.

If you are talking about the bottle in your hand, that is what your hands need to be doing at that exact moment, not fumbling with garnish or reaching for the next ingredient. If you are talking about yourself, about the story behind the drink, ideally the cocktail itself is not sitting in ice, quietly diluting while your attention is elsewhere. This sounds obvious written down. It is genuinely difficult to execute under pressure, in front of strangers, with a clock running, and it requires real, repeated practice to get right rather than something you can simply decide to do well on the day.

Confidence is not optional, and it does not come naturally

Presenting a cocktail you built, in a room full of strangers, is genuinely nerve-wracking, and I do not think that gets said enough in how these competitions are discussed. In most cases, the drink you are presenting connects to something personal, a memory, a piece of your own history, which means you are not just describing a recipe. You are sharing something of yourself, in front of judges scoring you on how well you do it.

A lot of competitors get visibly nervous and struggle through that exposure. My advice, for what it is worth, is to treat it the way Steve Jobs is famously said to have treated his product presentations: rehearse until the words no longer require conscious thought. For Franklin and Sons, I practiced my presentation more than sixty times before the day itself. My hands were still shaking when I actually delivered it. That is not a failure of preparation. It is simply what the moment does to you, and the preparation is what carries you through it regardless.

The mistake I made about the brand itself

The single biggest lesson from the Franklin and Sons final was one I did not expect. These finals exist because a brand is hosting them, and as a competitor, you are there to represent that brand properly, not simply to showcase yourself.

My presentation that day focused almost entirely on me. What I had done with the drink, how it tasted, what my personal story was. I barely mentioned Franklin and Sons at all, the brand whose 140-year history and whose specific brief had shaped the entire competition in the first place. Watching the other finalists present over the course of the day, I saw clearly what I had missed: several of them wove the brand's own story and heritage directly into their presentation, honouring the host as much as showcasing themselves. That balance matters, and I got it wrong.

Showmanship is not decoration, it is part of the score

The other thing I underestimated is how much genuine showmanship contributes to how a presentation lands. Bring props. Bring elaborate garnish. Bring photographs of whatever inspired the drink. And critically, if you have built a homemade ingredient, let the judges taste it as part of your presentation, in the moment, rather than only offering it if they happen to ask at the end.

None of this replaces a genuinely good cocktail. But it is part of how a presentation is actually experienced, and treating it as an afterthought means leaving something real on the table.

Have fun with it

If there is one thing I would say above everything else in this article, it is this: entering cocktail competitions has been, by a wide margin, the fastest way I have found to genuinely improve as a bartender. Not because winning teaches you anything in particular, I have not won most of what I have entered, but because the process of building something under a brief, defending it in front of strangers, and watching how far more experienced competitors handle the same pressure, compresses years of learning into a single afternoon.

We will keep entering. I will keep getting better at the presentation part specifically, because that is where I know, clearly now, that I still have the most room to improve.

Book a table at Nectar Bar and ask what competition we are preparing for next.

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