It wasn't just down to making a nice drink either. Other rounds included food-matching, which tied in nicely with this country's unhealthy obsession with chefs and cookery, but the real challenge was when the bartenders had to present their drinks to 100 thirsty guests for the People's Choice vote.
Mixing drinks and delivering a spiel at the same time is at the very heart of bartending, so you'd imagine these guys would be very good at it.
All in all it was a great night, although I must admit that I'm not always convinced by bartending competitions. Too often they are simply ways of pushing a particular spirit brand and have little real meaning.
There's also a risk that it all gets a little stale. We're blessed here in New Zealand with the number of genuinely brilliant bartenders we have, but there is always a danger that you end up with the same faces winning everything. That can happen, but then good bartenders will rise to the top and we should really be sitting back and relishing the fact that we have such innovative custodians of the back shelf to serve us.
The World Class competition, though, was a real test and it was intriguing to watch Auckland bartending heavyweights Cam Timmins, Barney Toy and James Goggin facing off against the best of the rest of the country, in the persons of Mikey Ball, Jason Clark and Shannon Sanderson. Clark took out the title after a frenzied night of mixing, shaking and bedazzling.
His Marilyn Monroe-inspired concoction involved gin, whisky, gold spray, popcorn and mini meringues and was like a meal in a glass. Intricate and beautiful, it was a deserved winner in a competition where the difference between victory and defeat was wafer-thin.
For me, though, Fukuko's Cam Timmins made an exquisite gin and sauvignon blanc-based cocktail that was a thing of rare beauty and a reminder that, whatever else might be happening, we can always get a world-class drink in Auckland.
