Booze and Boobies
Anvil's Alba Huerta crowned Miss Speed Rack Houston — even the "Simon Cowell ofcocktail judges" can't hold her down
Photo by Caroline Gallay
Where most Houston office workers and paper pushers dreaded their year-end performance reviews, drink slangers in H-Town had a different sort of evaluation to look forward to: Speed Rack Houston, a national cocktail competition that pits female bartenders against one another in a test of time and accuracy.
More than a dozen of Houston's best lady bartenders competed, each going head-to-head to impress judges David Alan (best known as the Tipsy Texan), Lillet ambassador Amanda Pumarejo Boccato, LA mixologist Chris Bostick and famed NYC cocktail scholar Audrey Saunders (who made Anvil's Alba Huerta cry, but we'll get to that later).
In each round, each bartender made four different drinks — one for each judge — as quickly and accurately as possible. After the judges reviewed the drinks, time penalties of five to 30 seconds were added at the judges' discretion. If the judge gave a bartender a "0," that was the best possible score.
Judge Audrey Saunders called a garnish offensive at one point and, in the best quote of the evening, declared one cocktail, an Alaska, to be "a fat fucking chartreuse bomb."
If the atmosphere of the event was party-centric, with complimentary cocktails from more than 15 sponsors and passed shots of Becherovka appearing occasionally, the attitudes of the judges were anything but. Feedback was serious, specific, and sometimes harsh.
Saunders, dubbed by the Tweeting crowd as "the Simon Cowell of cocktail judges" told the first two contestants, Liberty Station's Lindsey Ann and Double Trouble's Lainey Cullom, to go back to school; she wouldn't hire either of them. She called a garnish offensive at one point and, in the best quote of the evening, declared one cocktail, an Alaska, to be "a fat fucking chartreuse bomb."
But many of the cocktail nerds in the crowd — and there were many, including Linda Salinas, Bobby Heugel, Alex Gregg, Chris Shepherd and many, many more — found the feedback to be spot-on, if snide.
As the bracket trudged inward for five long, looong hours, the semi-final saw two Anvil bartenders pitted against one another when Huerta and Ornella Ashcraft competed to advance. Ultimately, though, it came down to Lindsey Ann and Huerta, who also helped organize the event, with Huerta taking home the title of Miss Speed Rack Houston and $500 toward planning her trip to NYC in May to compete in the finals.
The grand prize winner of that event will be dubbed Miss Speed Rack USA and get an all-inclusive trip for two to Paris, including a course at the Cointreau Bartender Academie.
But it wasn't just the fastest bartender that left a winner; proceeds from the event went to breast cancer charities.
