Flair Bartending

The practice of bartenders entertaining guests, clientele or audiences by manipulating bar tools such as cocktail shakers and liquor bottles in tricky, dazzling ways, drawing on showmanship techniques akin to juggling, including bottle flipping and elaborate shaking motions, and in its more theatrical forms even work with flaming liquors. The earliest documented flair bartender was Jerry the Professor Thomas in the late nineteenth century, who performed with fiery streams of boiling water and flaming whisky and created the Blue Blazer cocktail as part of his act, though the word flair itself did not become popular among practitioners until the mid-1990s. The restaurant chain T.G.I. Friday's began modernizing and popularizing the practice in the mid-1980s, and the 1988 film Cocktail brought it to wide mainstream attention.