By Sacha Delfosse
The winner has been announced in the Canadian Club Smugglers Redemption competition, which pitted 10 Sydney bars against each other in an innovative challenge that called for each bar to sneak their own Canadian Club cocktail into as many rival bars as possible, and document it with photographs.
After weeks of covert cocktail trafficking and bartender border controlling by 13B, Chingalings, Dr Pong, The Commons, Pocket, Porteño, Lotus, The Passage, Shady Pines and Gotham, Randy Joseph, from Pocket Bar, was crowned the top smuggler and walked away with $1000 and two PS3s.
Joseph, with the help of the Pocket Cartel and his partner-in-crime Karl Schlothauer, managed to find a way to permeate the security perimeter of 13B, The Commons, Shady Pines and Gotham, however the competition’s runners up, Sticky Bar, proved too hard to crack.
“We got Gotham, Shady Pine, 13B, The Commons pretty easy. We had a bit of a plan when we went up to Sticky but got foiled by them. We gave Sticky one of the PS3’s we won cause it was the right thing to do,” Joseph said.
“We didn’t enter for the prizes, it was definitely the fun of it, everyone got involved in the bar, and we had a good time, it was much more fun than just making a cocktail for a world cup comp.”
The competition was the idea of Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA) customer business executive, Walter Kennard, who was inspired by Canadian Club’s history of being smuggled into the US during the Prohibition era.
“Canadian Club has a great story and it works very well with this idea, which sort of came to me one day, and it was something that got all the bartenders attention, every time I told someone the idea they were excited and thought it would be great to do,” Kennard explained.
“We are really happy with the competition, got a lot of traction with it, and all the bars had fun. We are looking at doing it again next year, and it could be replicated nationally, we just have to see and work it out with the team.”
Apart from the smuggling activities, as part of the competition the bars each had to design a Canadian Club cocktail and promote it for a month as well as coming up with a creative story behind their smuggling adventure.