Qualities of a Great Bartender

What makes a great bartender?

It’s not just about an encyclopedic knowledge of cocktail recipes and the right pair of shoes. It's a profession that demands a unique blend of skills and personality traits to navigate the fast-paced, demanding environment of a bar or restaurant.

So, what exactly makes a great bartender? Here's a breakdown of the key qualities that separate the good from the exceptional.

#1: Friendly Personality

One of the key traits of a successful bartender is the ability to connect with people well enough to make them feel comfortable and welcome.

Great bartenders are outgoing, approachable, upbeat, and confident but agreeable. They’re good at light conversation, quick with a joke, and able to engage all sorts of people.

New bartenders often need to practice striking the right tone while staying professional and service-oriented. It’s great to remember regulars and strike up relationships, but the best bartenders know how to be sociable without becoming too personally involved.

#2: Customer Service Skills

Customer service skills are a complicated tangle of qualities and skills that are essential to being a successful bartender.

Active listening, patience, and a positive attitude do a lot of heavy lifting, but good customer service also requires efficiency, resilience, attentiveness, flexibility, fluency in body language and tone, and an aptitude for prioritizing the right tasks at the right time.

And if you wish to elevate the customer experience, you’ll need to throw in resourcefulness, tenacity, the ability to personalize interactions, and a knack for upselling or cross-selling.

It’s a tall order, but for most people, these skills are honed over a lifetime.

Luckily, customer service skills are also incredibly transferable from one job to another – most jobs these days require some customer service component.

#3: Great Work Ethic

A lot of people seek out bartender jobs because they seem fun. They like hanging out at bars, they like talking to people, and they’ve been known to make margaritas at home.

They eek through their first packed Saturday night, and then they quit. Why? Because they didn’t realize that bartending is hard work. It’s long hours on your feet, the presence of mind to pay attention to a lot of things at once, and a proactive mindset. Although bartending appears, from the outside, to be all about responding to patrons, the only way to keep pace in food service is to think ahead. This means filling any downtime with cleaning, organizing, and restocking.

While talking to patrons and straw testing are legitimate parts of the job, one of the traits of a successful bartender is an instinct for keeping the “fun” parts of the job in proportion. They know to stay mostly sober, remain aware during conversations, and take their job seriously.

Bartending requires you to be simultaneously diligent to three things all the time: the customer, the business, and the law. Maintaining a balance between these interests requires you to be “on” all the time.

#4: Problem-Solving Skills

Working in a bar means expecting the unexpected. How do you deal with glass in the ice bin during a busy night? What do you tell customers when you’re out of a key ingredient behind the bar?  What do you do when your coworker gets sick in the middle of a shift?

The ability to problem-solve on your feet is one of the most underrated bartender qualities, and composure is a key ingredient.  The ability to stay calm under fire allows a good bartender to stay calm, think things through, and respond quickly while remaining unruffled in front of customers.

#5: Teamwork

Pop culture often makes bartending look like a solo gig, but in the real world, it’s definitely a team sport. On busy nights, it takes the cooperation and coordination of the whole staff to get through a shift, not just with fellow bartenders but also with barbacks, servers, kitchen staff, security, and management.

An excellent bartender understands this and sees their coworkers as allies. They’re as willing to offer help as they are to take it, and they’re able to put aside differences to get the job done.

Just as communication skills are important with customers, they’re also crucial to teamwork, particularly when your workplace is often noisy, dimly-lit, and crowded. Excellent bartenders are able to coordinate with their coworkers through signals and body language by anticipating and circumventing confusion or miscommunication.

#6: Technical Skills

Of course, actual bartending skills – the technical capabilities that you need in day-to-day life as a bartender – are a gimme on a list of what makes a great bartender.

Why are they so far down the list?  Because the technical skills of a bartender are some of the easiest to acquire. Anyone can be taught how to free pour or when to use a muddler, but it’s harder to develop problem-solving skills or a work ethic from scratch.

That’s why managers should give new talent a chance – if a newbie can demonstrate the first five qualities on this list, then they can already have the most important traits of a successful bartender. A few months of training and they’ll be a far better employee than someone who comes with mixology skills but a difficult personality.

#7: Knowledge of Laws and Regulations

If your bartenders don’t know how to follow local liquor laws, you’re at risk for licensing problems and Dram Shop lawsuits.

And they need more than simple knowledge of liquor service hours. They need applicable skills for preventing illegal sales, like verifying valid IDs and preventing guest intoxication.

TIPS is a skills-based training program for responsible alcohol service that’s widely accepted – and wildly popular – because it works! Bartenders gain practical knowledge to safeguard your patrons and your business. You can choose between classroom training or online passports for onboarding and regular refreshers.

Enroll your staff today!