How Hospitality Distilled Is Upskilling Tasmania’s Hospitality Industry.
A quiet revolution is brewing in the heart of Hobart – not in a cocktail shaker, a wine barrel or under a chef’s cloche, but in the minds and hands of some of Tasmania’s next generation of hospitality professionals. Hospitality Distilled is the education arm of Tiny Island Hospitality, the team behind acclaimed local venues like Rude Boy and Punch & Ladle. It’s the brainchild of industry veterans Campbell Nicol, Jack Turner, Khayla Massie and Rohan Massie, who between them boast over 50 years of hospitality know-how. But for all their expertise, they are embarking on another mission, to fill a long-standing gap in industry education and in doing so, elevate the experience for customers across the state. “One of the things that we firmly believe is that you can’t whinge about a problem and not try and fix it,” says Massie, who is one of the state’s most well-regarded mixologists, having featured in numerous World Class Australia bartending finals over the years. “With hospitality, everybody since Covid has been talking about the exodus within the industry, particularly of experienced hospitality members. It’s been taking its time to refill those positions, both with people who want to have a base level of knowledge, as well as those wanting more expertise in wine and spirits.” Rather than sit on the sidelines, the Hospitality Distilled team has stepped in. They offer a range of training options to help address these gaps – everything from basic front-of-house operations like pouring wine and changing a keg, to advanced cocktail workshops and internationally recognised certification through the WSET (Wine & Spirit Education Trust) program. “We’ll do cocktails for home that enthusiasts and people who have a basic level of kit at home can do, but we also want to utilise, I guess, our experience on the cutting-edge techniques that are used in cocktail bars around Australia,” Massie says. “That’s getting into some of those really on trend techniques, whether that be stuff like cryo distillation, whether that be a rotary evaporator, whether it be clarification, utilisation of those techniques. “I think it’s something that not a lot of Tasmanian bartenders actually get to use and get experience with. So, we’ll run them through that, as well as how to put together a cocktail and how flavours work and how to build those flavours in a cocktail.
levels one, two and three and range from basic courses – what is a spirit or a wine, what are the differences between the grape varietals, or the spirit types, how they made – through to what’s probably most important about WSET, how to taste them. It gives you a what WSET calls a systematic approach to tasting, whereby you can judge a wine or a spirit based on a certain number of characteristics and using a lexicon of words that if everybody uses similar words, then when you say what a wine tastes like, the other person knows exactly what you’re tasting.” For the Hospitality Distilled crew, these training modules were born to try and help address a void in the education pathway. The newly rebranded School of
“Then there is one of the biggest aspects of Hospitality Distilled, the WSET programs. These come in
21 Tasmanian Hospitality Review June/July Edition
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