Mentorship, colour-coded calendars: how Jake Down won Diageo World Class Bartender of the Year Australia

Getting a cocktail competition win on one’s CV is a great thing — it’s something that shows you work hard, and you have a talent for tasty drinks.

But there are some cocktail comp wins that are bigger than others; there is perhaps no bigger win than what Jake Down pulled off when he went and won the national final of the Diageo World Class Bartender of the Year Australia 2024 back at the end of May.

It’s a huge deal. The winner of World Class is always a quality bartender, and Jake is no exception to that — he has won other comps before, but as we talk about in this interview, winning World Class in Australia means that he now gets to go to what is like the World Cup of bartending competitions, the global final in Shanghai later in September.

But Jake will be the first to note that he didn’t get the win all on his own — in this week’s episode of Drinks At Work, Jake talks about the win and about the mentors and others who have helped him along the way. And in that chat there’s a lot of good advice for bartenders who, yes, want to enter World Class next year, but also for those who are looking to progress in their work and carve out a creative and interesting — and in the end, fulfilling — career in the hospitality industry.

I spoke to Jake for this interview the very next morning after his big win in Sydney back in May. It was clear that everything was still setting in for Jake, which is great to see just how much the win meant to him.

So below, I’ve got a few of my takeaways from the interview with Jake, but as always, give the full episode a listen — there are even a couple of Jake’s signature bad jokes included at the end.

While I have you — I’ve got some good news: we’ve published a print magazine! It’s called Bottled and we launched it up at the Bartenders’ Weekender in Brisbane last month — and it’s now available to buy. There are over 100 pages of stories about drinks and the people who make them from around the globe — stories you’ll only find in print. You can read more about what’s in the magazine and get your own copy at bottledmag.com. We’re shipping around Australia, New Zealand, the whole world really. I can’t wait for you to read it.

The quotable Jake Down

“I think about it a challenge at a time.”

Jake doesn’t want to think too far ahead when he’s competing — he tells us that he hadn’t been thinking of the globals before winning the national final — that could add more pressure than is useful. In the preparation for the national final, he also broke down each week and allocated each of the three final round challenges to certain days — Tuesday, say, was the day he’d work on the first challenge — so that her didn’t get distracted or over invested into one challenge over the others. It’s good advice for anyone with competing creative demands.

“One of the biggest ones for me is ‘eyes up.’”

We talk so much about the importance of the greeting — when you walk into a bar, you want to be acknowledged. And that — as Jake points out in the chat — is impossible to do if the bartender is working with their eyes in the drink rather than up and looking about at the room. It also helps your guests to feel like they’re being looked after — if you eyes are in the drink, you might as well be ignoring them.

“I just would engage with the judges the way I would with any of like any guest.”

Throughout the stories we have done this year on World Class Australia — such as the initial interviews with ambassador Kate McGraw and last year’s winner, Eduardo Conde which you can find here — one key piece of advice has been to emphasise hospitality. Yes, it is a cocktail competition, but that doesn’t mean the focus is only on the drink; how that drink comes together and they way it is presented matter. The best advice, as Jake suggests, is to treat the judges as you would someone sitting at your bar. The bartenders who can address the competition criteria in an authentic and genuine way — rather than those who are ticking boxes on a scoresheet — are the bartenders for whom the whole experience is about hospitality.

“It’s a great way to challenge yourself.”

If you’re a bartender who thinks about the job as a career — and if you’re reading this, I imagine you do — then you might want to think about getting involved in the next instalment of World Class. That’s not just because you think you can win — though you very well might — but because it’s a process which gets you thinking about the things you do behind the bar in detail. You’ll get access to knowledge from previous winners and the ambassador team. You’ll get experience working to a creative brief — something that can come in handy in many aspects of your career. And anything that helps you develop in that way can only be beneficial for your career, whether you win the thing or not.