Greater Kansas City Bartending Competition shows mixologists’ skills

The crowd at the Uptown was drunk last night. (Not just drunk, but drunk-drunk.) The fourth annual 2010 Greater Kansas City Bartending Competition made sure of that.

Bartenders from KC, St. Louis and Manhattan, Kansas, competed in what turned out to be an exceptionally upscale boozefest.

Twelve finalists competed in front of a rowdy crowd and four judges including: Doug Frost, Ted Kilgore, Katie Van Luchene and Beau Williams. The rules were simple: Each contestant made his or her own specialty cocktail; each was then asked by the judges to spontaneously re-create a classic cocktail (i.e., a Manhattan) and then required to answer an alcohol-related question (say, name six rums and their points of origin) by judge Doug Frost.