The Galvin Cup Cocktail Extravaganza

On Monday 15th June I had the honour of helping to judge The Galvin Cup, the cocktail mixology competition organised by Galvin at Windows and hosted at The Dorchester Hotel. The competition saw competitors in two categories, professional and student, mixing up their own creations in order to win first place and some fantastic prizes, with the top one being £1,000 and the silver Galvin cup.

It was a hard afternoon’s work for me, which started after a rather fabulous lunch with my fellow judges, who included Salvatore Calabrese, Silvano Giraldin, Peter Dorelli and Chris Galvin himself, and then moved onto the taxing task of tasting lots of delicious cocktails. OK, it wasn’t that much like hard work.

It was, however, an extremely difficult task to judge the cocktails. The talent and hard work that had gone into each was clearly evident. Each contestant had to create a vodka martini and then a cocktail of their own choice and I was really blown away by the creativity and excellence on display. I could quite happily have sipped cocktails all afternoon and into the evening but to avoid a messy exit and monster hangovers we used straws to taste the cocktails and had just a few drops of each. We also rotated so that we only tasted 3 cocktails in a row, to avoid killing our taste buds and finding the judging even harder than it already was.

All of the contenders, both professional and student, were incredible but at the end of the day there could only be two winners and they were:

In the professional category, Riccardo Semeria of The Connaught

In the student category, Jeoffrey Anthony Warmerdam-NHTV

Many congratulations to them both, and thank you again to Chris and Fred for inviting me to help judge the competition.