All Shook Up

Bar czar Sven Almenning likes to mix a bit of theatre with his cocktails and he has a collection of shakers to prove it.

I’ve made a habit of collecting rare and elaborate cocktail shakers. Visit any of the bars I’ve opened and you’ll see the evidence in action. At Eau De Vie in Melbourne and Sydney you’ll likely witness cocktails being poured out of fanciful shakers – shaped like blimps, teapots or bells. At The Roosevelt, in Sydney, you may also spot shakers in the form of penguins, golf bags, hourglasses and dumb-bells displayed in the glass cabinets.

To me, these shakers hark back to a time when the art of the cocktail was practised in every home (especially in the United States), and your merit as a host was judged as much on your ability to produce a well-made Manhattan as it was your skills in the kitchen. It’s probably no coincidence that the golden era of cocktail-shaker design, when it reached the height of shape-shifting, neatly coincides with Prohibition in the States; most of the now famous shakers were produced during the 1920s and ’30s with designers such as Norman Bel Geddes, Russel Wright and Lurelle Guild getting in on the action.