Bar Talk at Barmano

Hi San Francisco and Bay Area friends,

Our favorite occasion to celebrate at Cantina is coming up this Tuesday, Cinco de Mayo.

With the current Swine Flu epidemic happening South of the Border, I am reminded of reasons to celebrate and give thanks and rock out. I’d love for you to join us at Cantina to do just that.

We’ll be open at 2PM on Tuesday, serving $4 Cazadores Tequila Margaritas and Signature Cazadores Cocktails slung by the Cazadores Tequila Ambassador himself, Manny Hinojosa, as well as ice-cold cans of $2 Tecate with Barrio tunes being jocked by our Resident DJ, B Love, and snacks by our friends at La Cocina.

What time should we expect to see you?

Gracias,
Duggan

Barbary Coast Conservancy of the American Cocktail
LIQUID THINK TANK * Brand Development & Beverage Consultancy

www.cantinasf.com
sfcocktailweek.com

The Barmano team is thrilled to announce the addition of Duggan McDonnell to the core project team at Barmano as it’s Chief Mixologist and Bar Evangelist.  Duggan’s career in the hospitality business flows like the Amazon,  deep and wide, bringing a variety of industry skills, helping to further round out the core project team.  We’re hoping to also make use of his literary skills in future blog posts, but until then, here’s a few words about the latest addition to the Barmano team.

Duggan is based in San Francisco, CA where he operates Cantina, a cocktail lounge dedicated to Latin spirits, as well as AvantBar, LLC, a consultancy group. He is co-founder of San Francisco Cocktail Week, and also serves as a Judge for the Los Angeles International Wine & Spirits Competition.

Duggan was nominated as “Best Mixologist of the Year” at Tales of the Cocktail 2007 in New Orleans while Cantina was nominated as “Best New Cocktail Bar.” He has receive other awards and recognition from other well known publications such as TIME, the New York Times, VOGUE, and MAXIM, to name a few.  Beverage Industry News made note of  Duggan in their “Top Ten Bartenders to Watch in 2006.”

Duggan brings a solid fifteen years in the Hospitality Industry to the table, and has toured wineries, breweries, and distilleries in the United States, Europe, Mexico and Australia. He has written articles for SOMA and Imbibe magazines, as well as Chow.com, and was a featured expert on the Fine Living Channel’s “Great Cocktails.”

Currently a candidate for a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from the University of San Francisco, Duggan holds a Bachelor’s degree from Seattle Pacific University. He has studied wine with the Court of Master Sommeliers, and is an owner and avid reader of over seventy books on cocktails, food and wine.

Please join me in welcoming Duggan.

So until next time, bottoms up!

Cheers,

Dave

Barmano can now help you with your next bar (or pub) crawl.   If you’ve found a great place in our bar guide to start your festivities at, we’ve added the closest bars, pubs and clubs to all the bar pages. This should be especially helpful for those of you planning a bar crawl in a city where you don’t know the scene.  From the list, you can find the closest places to migrate your festivities to, should the mood start to wane or you need a fresh menu to plunder.  If you’re bar hopping by foot (not only more responsible, it’s also more fun!), we’ve added the distances to the next location.  For large cities, as previously noted, we’ve started adding public transport lines to the bar guide pages as well.  You never know who you might run into, so bust out the shirts, and prepare yourself for incriminating photos.

We’re always trying to find new ways to help you discover new places to have a great pint, cocktail or glass of wine so we hope this helps.  Be sure to review the bars after, so we can improve the recommendations for future crawlers!

We’ve added OpenID to all the Barmano websites to help those people that are sick of having 400 logins for 400 different sites.  We feel your pain, so we’ve taken steps to making it easier for you to enjoy our websites, minus one more password to remember.

Don’t know what OpenID is?  Here’s a little bit about the technology:

With the increased use of the Internet to conduct business and the rise of new types of on-line interactions, such as social networking and user-generated content, innovative kinds of digital identifier technologies are necessary to sustain the “open Web.” OpenID enables individuals to convert one of their already existing digital identifiers, such as their personal blog’s URL, into an OpenID account, which then can be used as a log-in at any Web sites supporting OpenID.

Wide adoption of OpenID reduces the frustration of repeatedly having to register username/password accounts and then later recalling log-in information for an ever increasing array of Web sites. To learn more about the OpenID, please visit http://openid.net.

Please let us know if you run into any problems trying to use your OpenID on Barmano, or have suggestions on how to make your experience better!

Team Barmano takes another step forward by letting users rate and review their favorite, or least favorite, bars.

We spent quite a bit of time trying to think this through in order to come up with a rating system that is weighted towards establishments that are devoted to quality and selection.  A single criteria, 1 to 5, or 1 to 10, rating system wasn’t going to cut it, and something too complicated would have bored our beloved users to death.  We took the middle road, and hope we’ve not compromised too much, so here’s our core rating criteria:

• Atmosphere - Does this place have a nice ambiance?
• Service - Did the staff cater to your needs or completely ignore you?
• Selection of Drinks - How was the selection of drinks available?
• Quality of beverage - How were the drinks? Do they have high quality and fresh ingredients?
• Price - Was the quality and quantity worth the price you paid?

Next we wanted to do something a bit more unique, and came up with “I go here for(tm)”, and then users can choose cocktails or wine or beer.

You’ll soon be able to keep track of all your reviews on your member page.  If you have established a friends connection with any other Barmano member they’ll be able to see your opinion.

So get started, find your favorites and start reviewing them today!  Once we get enough data, we’ll start generating recommendations for you based on other users reviews, and love of cocktails, beer and/or wine.

Until next time, bottoms up!

Dave

Back in June we shared a bit on where our visitors to our global bar guide were coming from. Given that it’s almost October, and things have changed so much on the websites, we thought we’d give an update on where our beverage connoisseurs are coming from.  We think it’s interesting.  Here’s the top 10 countries our visitors are coming from:

1. United Kingdom (UK bar guide 40% of our traffic)
2. United States (Our US bar guide 39% of our traffic)
3. Canada (Canadian bar guide 9% of our traffic)
4. Australia (Australian bar guide 4% of our traffic)
5. Germany (German bar guide 3% of our traffic)
6. Spain
7. France
8. Ireland
9. Italy
10. India

The traffic coming from the United Kingdom shot ahead of the US in the last couple months due to our bar jobs BETA launch, but US bar guide traffic is on a march upwards (over 10K new bar listed last month!). These two countries play a larger role, as the English site becomes more established. It’ll be interesting in the coming months to see how things develop as we finally start expanding our UK bar database (most notably our London bar guide) and launch a spirits and beer catalog.

Our Spanish site is also growing with all top 10 country referrers being Spanish speaking countries (plus the US), the Guía de bares as become increasingly popular in Spain, Argentina and Mexico.  The French and German sites are now receiving solid traffic from countries speaking those respective languages.

Oh, almost for got, the Faroe Islands fan club is going to be disappointed with new ranking of 28th. And where’s our Kiwi friends? Hopefully next month they’ll make their grand top 10 debut.

We’ll start making this a regular update. So stay tuned for more.

~ Dave

From time to time we feel the need to party a bit, and that sometimes means possibly drinking a little too much.  We don’t condone this (our lawyers made us say that), but to ensure we remain solidly committed to responsible drinking, Barmano has started identifying nearest public transportation to the bars listed in our bar guide. So don’t take your car, take public transportation. We’ve started with our Munich bar guide (as in Munich, Germany) and are rolling out the feature to other major metropolitan areas that have well established subway, tram and light rail systems.  Check out our bar page for Sausalitos Schwabing, you can see the U-Bahn is 451m away.

After we’ve set this up for as many cities as we can, we’ll look into finding a way to provide the main taxi companies for cities as well.

Let us know if you have any suggestions, feedback, etc.  All is welcome.

And remember to have fun. And drink responsibly.

~ Dave

Barmano has officially launched job e-mail alerts, so let the jobs come to you! You can now sign up for job alerts for a wide variety of bar and pub related jobs, and get a daily list of new jobs (or no e-mail if there are no jobs, we don’t like useless e-mail either). In addition to that you can refine your alerts by country, state/region/province and/or city. AND IN ADDITION to that, you can also specific the contract type and full time/part time.  We recommend not going too granular, otherwise you may miss out on a great opportunity! Likewise you don’t want to cast your net so broadly as to make extra work for yourself looking through listings.

Please let us know if you encounter any problems with this, would like to other improvements or just have general feedback.  We’d love to hear all that you have to say!

~ Dave

Barmano quietly added a new feature to our member pages, we’re gettin’ social wid it.

So how does it work? It’s quite easy:

1. Search for your friends
2. then “add as a friend” directly from the results
3. or from a member’s page, again look for the “add as a friend” link
4. et voila ! an invite is sent to your friend-to-be

We send an email invite to the person for them to accept or reject to make sure they’re ok with it.  After your friend has approved it, then you can find each other in your friends list on your member page. If the invitation to connect is rejected, it’s equivalent to being ignored. sorry.

Connecting with friends helps you keep track of:

• your friends page
• check out mutual friends
• see what bars and drinks they love
• If they are a mixologist at heart you can check out their creations

It’s quite genius in it’s simplicity.  But there’s a lot more coming.  At our research and development center, hidden under a mountain in the French Alps (with a long underground tunnel to Munich for Oktoberfest. of course.), we’re thinking of all sorts of new ways to get connected with people, and discover new things. Top on our list is bar ratings/reviews, recommendations, and figuring out how to make it stupidly easy to invite other non-barmano member friends.

If you have any ideas for killer features, let us know!!

~ Dave

Perhaps it’s a little dated, and cliche, but oh so important to deliver content our users want! When we first launched, barmano.com was targeting the US market, and then reality set it that it was very much global.  We’ve recently added geographical location data to our systems, so now people get data, that are relevant to their country. Right now we only do this for our “hot lists” that you see in the columns that show most popular bars, jobs, etc. and help you preselect your country on forms so you don’t have to scroll through a massive country list. It’s a small step, with huge potential. So what can I expect? If you are from Australia, you’ll start seeing Australian the popular bars and pubs.  If there is not enough information, it’ll show the global data.

Thought this was some interesting information we dug up while working on this, here’s our top 10 country list for bar and pub seekers (and the related country’s bar guide):

1. United States (Our US bar guide 37% of our traffic)
2. United Kingdom (UK bar guide 30% of our traffic)
3. Canada (Canadian bar guide 15% of our traffic)
4. Australia (Australian bar guide 8% of our traffic)
5. Germany (German bar guide 5% of our traffic)
6. France (France bar guide)
7. Israel (Israel bar guide)
8. Ireland (Ireland bar guide)
9. Spain (Spain bar guide)
10. Faroe Islands (Faroe Islands bar guide, yes we even have one of those too!)

It was interesting to see Germany and France right up there near the top, with Ireland barely making the top ten, and our Kiwi friends barely on the map with New Zealand coming in at 24th (of about 55 countries).  Perhaps they and our Irish friends are too busy having a real pint versus a virtual one.  Wise people.   We were pleasantly surprised to see the Faroe Islands on there, so hello to our Faroese fan club!

stay tuned for more!

~Dave