Indie Bartender, Danil Nevsky’s global online platform designed to educate and empower bartenders, has just launched an additional resource: the Cocktail Menu Collection. 106, so far, cocktail menus collected from bars around the world that can be browsed by country, bar name, year and key words, are now accessible to hospitality professionals in search of information, guidance and inspiration.

The Cocktail Menu Collection has both a functional and community-centric goal. The centralised body of menu files provides an outlook on ingredients and recipes used in bars from almost 30 countries, and therefore a glance at different drinking cultures. It has been built to offer inspiration for menu concepts, drinks ideas as well as guidance for menu design, layout, and wording. On the other hand, the project wants to credit and showcase the work of the bartenders behind each menu by crediting them, and create a digital footprint for cocktail menu building, globally.

Every single menu included in the collection has been personally collected from the bars visited by Danil Nevsky, with the approval of the relevant bar teams, or submitted by the bars themselves. The project will be supported by a content series reviewing some menuhighlights according to three criteria - concept, visual and structure of the menu – to build on the practical aspect of the collection and help professionals navigate and consult the menus with an analytical lens – looking at the balance of the different drinks styles, how they are named, presented, aligned with the bar concept and overall brand, how easy it is to approach and understand the drinks from a guest perspective and so on. 

Danil Nevsky, founder of Indie Bartender, commented: “Cocktail menus are a big part of a bar’s work, and we’re now accustomed to promoting and celebrating them locally and internationally. However, if you don’t have the opportunity to travel around the world, what you get is just a series of pictures posted on Instagram by other people visiting the bar, thusmissing out on the full picture of how the menu is built, structured, worded etc. The goal of the Cocktail Menu Collection is to bridge this gap and give every bartender on this planet an opportunity to check what other bars are doing. The compiling work that has been done so far is just the beginning and the aim is to exponentially grow the platform for it to become an essential educational and inspirational tool for the global bar industry.”

The  Cocktail Menu Collection is available on the Indie Bartender and powered by SIP, a Pernod Ricard’s Global Trade Advocacy program. With an initial collection of 106 menus collected around the world, the project calls for additional bars to submit their menus and team members details to show and make their work accessible to the global bar industry.