Harvard Bartending Course

As I understand it, daily deals run on the regular for Harvard Bartending Course’s full-​day class. At a discount, this is a solid value for two very specific types of people:
1. You intend on becoming a bartender. To be clear, I am explicitly excluding what some people call «mixologists» (where that term isn’t yet passé). I mean, you’ll be armed with the fundamental knowledge and skills to serve booze. Mostly to patrons who couldn’t tell you (and probably don’t care about) the difference between a daiquiri and a mai tai.
2. You’re looking for a fun social activity to do. This could be with a significant other as a date, or with a group of friends that are interested in expanding their drink knowledge beyond Bud Light and Irish Car Bombs. Plus, you get the added bonus of becoming TIPS certified in case you decide to pursue a profession in bartending.
The morning TIPS course is, by nature, somewhat dry and technical. Our instructor did a fine job with offering enough participant engagement and real-​world anecdotes to spice things up. There’s really only so much you can do to make a video-​led instruction fun.
For the «mixology» portion of the day, you’ll actually get some hands-​on application with speed pours and you’ll experience what it’s like to get behind a bar. You’ll learn some information (or misinformation, in some cases) about alcohol products and their history. And finally, you’ll get to practice slinging a number of classic cocktails. And by «classic cocktails» I mean «colored water mixtures at the same proportions that classic cocktails would be.» That’s right, folks. You will touch zero real booze products during your class here. Caveat emptor.
All in all, it’s a day of socializing and gabbing about drinking. And anyone who’s against either of those activities is straight-​up unpatriotic in my book.

took the mixology portion of this class on 1÷30÷10, thought it was okay. i had read the harvard bartending book (bought from ebay for $ 4) beforehand, and the course really didn’t teach me that much more. if you really want to learn about bartending, don’t take this class because you can just learn it on your own, and learn it better. but if you’re not that ambitious and wanna just learn whatever and get a certificate, i guess take the class. i was not a huge fan of the professor though… he’s good at remembering names (and drinks, i assume), but very repetitive and somewhat full of himself.