How To Avoid Common Bartending Mistakes

If you want a career as a bartender, you’ll want to continually improve your skills by picking up bar service tips and best practices. It’s also important to understand common bartending mistakes and how to avoid them.

Below, we’ll go over different types of bartender errors, the potential consequences, and the training you need to develop the bartending skills that will help you steer clear of them.

What Are the Potential Consequences of Bartender Errors?

There are two broad categories of bartending mistakes that you need to be aware of: the ones that hurt your tips and the ones that can get you in real legal trouble.

Customer service slip-ups and mixology mistakes will impact your day-to-day work life in terms of the amount of money you make and how smoothly things will run. That’s a good reason to polish your bartending skills and seek out bar service tips from experienced professionals and blogs like this.

But some bartender errors can lead to such serious consequences that you need to prioritize avoiding them even if they seem less immediately pressing. In particular, making an illegal alcohol sale or allowing illegal or disorderly activity to happen on the premises can lead to liquor license sanctions at the very least.

Administrative consequences from the liquor board range from fines and penalties to suspension or revocation. No employer wants to hold onto an employee that threatens their livelihood that way.

Then there’s civil liability. You (personally) and your employer can be sued by private parties who are harmed by your actions, particularly in states that have dram shop laws.

In some cases, bartenders have even faced criminal charges for overserving patrons, up to and including jail time.

These are the most important reasons to learn the best practices for professional bartending and customer service. Below, we’ll go through examples of bartending mistakes at both levels and relevant tips for improving bartending skills and reducing errors.

Bartending Mistakes That Hurt Your Tips

First, we’ll tackle the types of blunders that hurt your bottom line. These are common bartending mistakes you’ll want to avoid, but the stakes are lower, so these are bartending skills that you’ll refine over time.

Customer Service Slip-Ups

The first bartending skills that most new bartenders are anxious about are customer service skills. Bartending comes with all the problems of retail, plus lowered inhibitions and impaired judgment.

Here are a few bartender errors that you want to avoid in your early days:

• Talking Too Much: There’s a stereotype of the bartender as the friendly neighborhood therapist, but in many cases, modern customers don’t expect a lot of chitchat. On a crowded night, everyone just wants their drink; in other cases, people just want to enjoy some quiet or the company they came in with. Be sensitive to how people respond to small talk, and be prepared to back off when you get signals they’re not interested.
• Buckling Under Pressure: Whether it’s a night where customers are three deep or just one particular guy that’s becoming a problem, bartenders can face different kinds of pressure. No matter what’s happening, remember to stay calm and cool.
• Moving Too Fast or Slow: As a bartender, you want to balance efficient service with accuracy. A lot of new bartenders are worried about moving too slowly and making customers impatient, but their mood will not be improved by drink order mistakes. Take the time you need to get it right.
• Not Keeping Organized: Keeping your station neat and organized is something you need to practice when things are slow so you can maintain it automatically when things move fast. Staying organized and cleaning as you go plays an important role in serving at the right pace.

Mixology Mistakes

Aside from customer service stress, the other thing new bartenders worry about is mixed drinks: learning recipes, knowing ingredients, and being prepared for any exotic order that walks in the door.

Here are some mixology mistakes you might overlook when you’re boning up:

• Making Terminology Errors: Mixology comes with a lot of jargon, and knowing the meaning is the difference between a satisfied customer and an annoyed one. For example, when someone orders liquor “neat” or “straight up,” you need to know what they expect.
• Not Knowing When to Shake or Stir: Different types of cocktails require different mixing techniques, and applying the wrong one can lower drink quality.
• Making Substitutions: Whether it’s ingredients, glassware, or garnishes, changing things up from the classic recipe can cause a subpar cocktail experience. Save the improvisation for when you’re more experienced. Learn the basics and the reasons before you start trying to riff so that you’ll have the knowledge to make things better, not worse.
• Mishandling Ice: If you’ve never bartended before, you might be thinking, how can you mess up ice? But oh, you can. Choosing the wrong kind or using the wrong amount can make drinks too hot, too cold, or too weak. Sloppy techniques like hand-packing ice and using glassware as a scoop present safety concerns.

Imprecise Pours

Whether you dispense too much or too little, failing to pour a standard and consistent amount of alcohol can cause problems.

Certainly, it will throw off your inventory and reordering schedule. Even small variations in each drink can build up to significant quantities over time.

Underpouring can also be a customer service problem. Patrons may feel like you’re stiffing them by watering down your drinks, leading to dissatisfaction with both you and the business.

Overpouring can lead to more serious bartending mistakes like overserving a patron. If a guest consumes a drink under the assumption that there’s a standard amount of alcohol and you’ve overpoured, they can unknowingly become more intoxicated than they mean to. If they drive and cause an accident, that can be a serious problem for you.

You can avoid these mistakes by using proper measuring tools like jiggers. Free pouring, while it looks cool, takes a lot of practice and special pour spouts to do accurately. It’s a skill to consider building later in your career.

Bartending Mistakes That Cause Legal Trouble

Now, let’s look at the high-stakes oversights that are easy to fall into when you’re more focused on improving your alcohol and customer service skills. In each case, we’ll talk about how to avoid the common errors in bartending that can put you in legal hot water.

Serving a Minor

One of the actions that can have serious legal ramifications is allowing or facilitating the sale of alcohol to a minor. Bartenders and other alcohol servers have to be on the lookout for fake IDs, suspicious behavior, and evidence that a legal adult is planning to pass alcohol to an underage drinker.

This makes properly checking each patron’s ID one of the most important bartending skills.

The first key is to card patrons more often than not. You don’t need to check the ID of a senior citizen, but it’s better to err on the side of caution in terms of whose identification you check rather than counting on your intuition to tell you who looks “too young.”

Secondly, you need to know the anti-forgery characteristics of photo IDs in your state and how to check if they’re genuine. It’s important to take a good, thorough look at each ID and check for signs that it may be borrowed, doctored, or faked.

Getting good at recognizing invalid IDs takes both formal training and lots of practice, but the consequences of serving a minor are dire enough that you must put the effort in. Selling to a minor not only carries criminal charges, but in many states, the parents of the minor can file a civil suit.

Serving an Intoxicated Customer

In addition to minors, it’s also illegal to overserve a patron or serve a drink to an intoxicated customer. Dram shop lawsuits allow injured third parties to sue both the bartender and the business when damages result from the actions of an overserved customer. There can also be criminal liability.

That’s why it’s important to understand the biology of alcohol consumption, the myths about getting drunk and sobering up, and the signs and stages of intoxication. Anyone who enters your bar already intoxicated should be booted immediately, and you need to monitor other customers for warning signs that they’re crossing the threshold. You should practice refusing service professionally and providing “slow service” to people who are approaching the line.

If a customer ends up intoxicated, it’s important to do two things: get them out of the establishment and offer them a safe ride home. This can mitigate liability in situations where a patron decides to drive drunk.

Prevent Serious Bartender Errors with Alcohol Service Training

Responsible beverage service training, also called alcohol seller/server training, is designed to teach you how to avoid common errors in bartending that can lead to liquor license sanctions, lawsuits, and jail time.

Some states, counties, and townships make this kind of training mandatory for all alcohol servers, while others simply incentivize businesses to require it. Even when legal compliance isn’t involved, businesses may want servers to complete training in order to prevent serious bartender errors, and smart alcohol servers will want the knowledge and tools to protect themselves.

Effective alcohol training courses cover more than the basics, like how alcohol affects the body and what laws apply where you work. It also teaches the skills and strategies you need to prevent illegal alcohol sales – like spotting a fake ID, recognizing signs of intoxication, and professionally refusing alcohol service to a risky customer.

Our courses are online, self-paced, skill-oriented, and approved in many jurisdictions. You’ll be able to complete your training whenever and wherever it’s convenient while building the knowledge you need to comply with the law.

Enroll today!