Philip Duff

"I started bartending when I was 15. I lived in a tiny little town north of Dublin called Skerries, with, at the time, a population of 5,000 people and 12 pubs. None of the pubs could sustain more than one or two full-time staff, but there'd be loads of part-time jobs going for Thursday, Friday, Saturday, so as long as you were large enough and behaved yourself you could start bartending at 15."

Several decades later, Duff is still going strong: a trainer, writer, educator, podcaster and brand creator, and a man of many talents, not least, true to the best Irish cliché, the gift of the gab and the love of the craic. A dozen or so years in New York have failed to take the burr out of his accent, although they have opened up opportunities: alongside his own brand and clients including Beluga vodka and G'Vine gin, he has brand projects underway for a couple of major Hollywood stars.

Following a concatenation of circumstances that began with a manager running off with the takings and ended up with the landlady in a coma, Duff became the licensee of a London bar while still in his teens. But he got his start with cocktails as a trainer at TGI Friday's. Back then, the group's multi-page menu of disco drinks was one of the longest in the UK and, with the internet barely a gleam in the government's eye and cocktail books few and far between, there were many worse places to learn the trade.

When the new golden age of cocktails dawned in the early 1990s, Duff engaged in a rapid personal rebrand and transitioned into what were then called "style bars". "It was kind of like the end of World War II, when the Nazis took off their swastika armbands," he says. "The likes of me and Wayne Collins just put on our braces and flat caps and reinvented ourselves as mixologists."

Going Dutch

Having ticked a number of boxes on any self-respecting bartender's wish list, including running a beach bar in the Caribbean, Duff landed in Amsterdam after a company approached him to set up a chain of party bars with a retro diner vibe. "I said, 'Alright, but look, Holland's a bit rough after Grand Cayman, so I tell you what, I'll come, but I'll just come for three months,'" he recalls. "And that, of course, turned into 17 years."

Duff was working as a consultant when Sergej Fokke, a friend with whom he'd previously explored opening a bar, called to say he wanted to launch a speakeasy. "And I said, 'Sergej, you've never been to a speakeasy,' and he said, 'Well, that's why I'm calling you,'" Duff recalls. Duff came on board initially with the plan of being a silent partner but soon took a more hands-on role.

Following Duff's ethos, the team sourced classic glassware, ordered spirits in individual lots from independent wholesalers, and generally took a labour-intensive approach that made Door 74 the first Dutch bar ever to feature on the World's 50 Best Bars list, and achieving an as-yet unbeaten #14 ranking for a Dutch bar. Not all that starts well ends well, however, and the partnership collapsed in a miasma of lawsuits: Duff finally exited the business-at, by his telling, a very high multiple-not long before the pandemic hit.

Not content with introducing speakeasies to Amsterdam, Duff also decided to make himself an expert in the national spirit, genever. Along the way he discovered, somewhat to his surprise, that no one in the Netherlands made their own genever, with most brands buying from the same Belgian distillery. "But that wasn't even the problem. The problem was they all lied their arses off about it," Duff says. "This was 2008: airfares had come down, everyone had a mobile phone, everyone had data on their mobile phone, bartenders were beginning to fly around the world, the internet was flourishing. I'm like, 'Guys: you can't lie any more. I know you want to, but you can't.'"

Today, Duff produces his own Dutch-made genever, Old Duff Genever. While it's unlikely to make his fortune, it's on back bars everywhere from Argo in Hong Kong to the The Connaught Bar in London to Patent Pending in NYC, and a source of considerable pride.

A one-man band

A lot has changed since Duff started educating in spirits, not least the internet. "When I was coming up, I'd walk into a bookshop and be disappointed 99 times out of 100," he says. "Now, you can learn about, for example, the Penicillin cocktail in every way you choose. You can hear Sam Ross talking about it on a podcast. You can watch him making it on 17 different videos on YouTube. You can read about it on Instagram or TikTok or Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest or in print..."

While there's more demand for education than there was, Duff has chosen not to scale his consultancy, Liquid Solutions. "I like to tell my liquor brand clients that it isn't going to be like hiring a PR agency, where the first meeting you have lunch with this older person who's the most incredibly charming and well-connected person you've ever met in your life," he says. "And then they're like, 'OK, your account's going to be run by this person who's, like, mid-30s, really good, really hardworking.' And you're like, 'Oh, amazing!' And then you find out he or she is not doing the work either and it's 22-23-year-old interns running around Brooklyn or Hoxton with iPhones. That's not how I work."

His status as a solo operator provides a creative freedom Duff values, and one that would have been unimaginable in a pub in small-town 1980s Ireland. "I get to start from zero," he says. "I get to literally sit at my desk and stare into space and come up with education programs for liquor brands that will actually interest and help bartenders, as well as creating brands from scratch. It's an incredible luxury."