Bartending and mixing drinks is a fancy way to impress your friends. Let’s face it, you look cool AF if you can mix a drink that is actually bearable to take down.
Bubble tea drinks are popular mixtures of tea, milk and/or tapioca add-ons that are customized to your personal taste. Boba can be an addiction (speaking from personal experience).
But why the sudden mention of bubble tea after talking about alcohol? There’s one thing that these both have in common. Bubble tea makers and bartenders are mixologists.
Both are sick gigs that you can impress your friends with (if you know what you are doing). You might think that making these drinks are easy, but it’s actually easier said than done. They’re both an art that requires the perfect balance to create something where the first reaction isn’t to spit it out.
Here are five characteristics that demonstrate how making bubble tea and mixing cocktail drinks are the same.
Mixing Drinks is an Art
It is important to understand the contents of the drinks and what you will mix. You don’t want to pull a Chase Adams from One Tree Hill and make a drink like “The Brain Blaster” that looks pretty, but actually tastes horrible.
Bubble Tea needs the right amount of milk, sweetness and other add-ins because the drink can’t be too sweet or be too bitter. Knowing what flavors mix well together and knowing the right amount of each needed is the key to mixing the perfect drink.
Proper Training Required to Mixing Drinks
Both require learning or job training in order to become qualified for the position of learning how to mix the drinks.
The paths to become a bubble tea maker or a bartender are a bit different of course. But whether working at a boba store or at a bar, both require job training once hired or prior experience in mixing drinks.
“Making bubble tea is similar to making a cocktail or great cappuchino. Proper training and recipes are necessary to ensure that your Bubble Tea tastes the best and that your customers keep coming back,” according to bubbleteaology.com
Job Qualifications
To become a bartender, a legal drinking age is the obvious difference between the two jobs. Although, there are qualifications that both jobs require.
You have to be able to work with your staff to produce drinks in an efficient manner. Also, you are dealing with customers on a daily basis, so you must have the ability to like people. You can’t be a wallflower, but someone who is comfortable with small talk and dealing with drunk or rude customers.
On top of that, you need to have short term memory to remember which customer ordered which drinks and what you are making at hand and long term memory to remember how to actually mix the drinks. Imagine if you had a mind like Dory from Finding Nemo and Finding Dory. Yeah, customers won’t be happy if their drinks never come and you constantly ask who they are.
Similar Appliances Used in the Job
The bubble tea supplies are a s haking cup, measuring scoop, containers for bubble tea flavors, tapioca and other toppings, strainer, cups, lids/sealer machine, pumps, blender and fat straws
And bartender supplies include a strainer, a shaker, a bar spoon, a muddler, cups, straws and a variety of drinks.
Mixing drinks utilizes the similar tools to mix the ingredients together to create the drink. Meaning, you could kill two birds with one stone and learn how to do both with the same appliances.
So while both are drastically different kinds of drinks, there are a lot similarities. With this new found knowledge, who knows, maybe now you can make one of these your side jobs at school.