keeping the glasses cool

Posted on February 20, 2010

I’m a barkeep.

The lizard isn’t a huge room but people often can really pack in making it quite cozy – especially if there’s anyone that wants to dance. The floor can be difficult to wiggle through for some of the less daring… I would expect a nightmare for any socially awkward people out there.

We serve good beer. Unheard of good beer for a music venue. It’s also good music, often acoustic, but pretty much anything. Bartending, though not too much more than pouring drinks, being interested in what people are saying or singing and making change, does have it’s complexities. One detail: to serve good beer there is a critical ingredient. Not the hops.. Not the spices.

A cool glass.

The workspace can be cramped but the bar has pint glasses all around. Most locations I can have a glass in a step or two. But over all there’s just not a ton of space for glasses. There’s easily 150 pint glasses.. probably way more. ( I think I’ll need to count now).. Well if all the 105 patrons are drinking.. plus the bands.. well there’s a lot of pints going around. Just as important as keeping enough glasses clean (of course while strategically running the washer during the bands loudest sections) is to keep the glasses cool. Who wants a beer with a warm glass?

Especially a good beer.

But when it gets busy there’s much more to know than just where the exact type of glasses are, but in what rotation of cooling they are in. Quickly I learned to put cups back in groups, often times working in silent unison handing glasses off to another bartender to speed the process up. All 25-30 glasses come out steaming. At first very warm to touch. A beer comes out of the tap nice and chilly but can heat right up in a freshly washed glass. When someone orders a drink we must avoid the last load of cups that went through. On a busy night probably the last two loads. Combined with 100 people with drinks in their hands…

That’s a lot of warm glasses to avoid.

Some evenings you can find me keeping the bar, serving fine craft brew drenched in the red lights of the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge, MA. It’s not a big place, a capacity of only 105, but there are few places better to see live music in the area.

Lesson of the day: Sometimes all you have to do is keep the glasses cool and the rest will fall in line.

Hope everyone is well,

-jk

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KD says:

March 4, 2010 at 5:08 pm - Reply
And then of course you have to be sure you don’t put fresh-from-the-dishwasher glasses into the cooler or you crack ‘em and have even FEWER glasses to rotate. I learned this the hard way working at Chili’s. LOL

The Making of Studio V

Posted on January 30, 2010

A few years ago Erin came across an ad on the ever so hit or miss craigslist. An artist was subletting a studio over the summer for cheap. She had just finished photo school and booked a few shoots. It seemed like it could work. We decided that if we could make back the cost in the studio it would be worth it.

Erin doubled the rent in 1 shoot.

It was a closet. Well bigger. But it was small. It was also less than a 5 minutes walk from our apartment. It was just a few months. But it was great. We had a place to leave things setup so a shoot didn’t always include setup and break down. Erin put her name on the waiting list.

About 3 years later she got the call. The studios have opened a new floor so space had opened up. We looked at a few of the studios and really liked ours. So, we’re back in Somerville at Vernon Street Studios. What’s nice about working an industrial space is that we get to do pretty much anything. It’s also rough because we took over a space after years of painters it would seem. Hardened piles of paint, dust, grime, dust, plaster dust and more. After a bunch of coats paint, a few trips to furniture shops, some pulleys, paper stuffed mini-car and more than one near ladder death experiences, we finished hanging the lights as we opened the doors (and after an all nighter… I thought those ended in college).

Check out the photo gallery of us making the most of our space. We’d like to give a special thanks to my parents and Noah Bidgood for helping out building the place.

-jk