In Person: Scott Stevens is shaking up the bar world

IF YOU'VE had your G&T served in a teacup lately, chances are it was the brainchild of Scott Stevens. The 36-year-old Scots mixologist, along with his brother Brad, is muddling up the cocktail world with teatime martinis, the 1930s-inspired cocktails that hark back to a time of glamour and intrigue.

Self-taught, after travelling around New York and California learning the trade from the bottom up, he's a voracious reader and avid fan of the classic cocktail. "One of my biggest idols is 'Professor' Jerry Thomas who was a pioneer of bartenders, creating drinks like the blue blazer and the Tom Collins," he says.

As a kind of homage, he and his brother have set up prohibition-style bars in Edinburgh and Glasgow, based on the speakeasies of 1920s and 1930s America. "Speakeasies were underground drinking dens," he says. "People like Al Capone and Lucky Luciano started them and, to mask that they were drinking alcohol, they had to serve the drinks in teacups and teapots.

"We do it with afternoon teas, so you can get your cupcakes, scones and cucumber sandwiches. It's like a Mad Hatter's tea party, but everyone loves it, and the amount of cups we get stolen... loads of people slip them in their handbags."

Originally from Edinburgh, Stevens worked for his father's catering business to learn the bar trade, before leaving to travel around the US. "At the time I was too young to do bar work," he says, "but I started doing bar-backing, which is where you help the bartenders, you get the glasses, you get the stock, and they also teach you the bar trade. I learned a lot doing that."

Back in the UK, he went to work with his brother's events company, running mobile bars at major concerts, before opening what they claim was Glasgow's first dedicated cocktail bar, Soba. "That was 11 years ago," he says. "We brought in things like the mojito, which wasn't very popular in Scotland at the time, and everybody started drinking that."

They must have been doing something right, because Soba picked up spirits bar of the year and cocktail bar of the year five years running. Now they have three more bars - the Bird Cage in Edinburgh, the Blind Pig in Glasgow's Byres Road and The Saint on Bath Street, also Glasgow.

Stevens also started working with major drinks brands including Bacardi, Macallan and Whyte & Mackay, training their staff and creating signature cocktails. One of his most notable creations was the world's most expensive cocktail, made for Macallan to be sold at the Burj al Arab in Dubai. A nip at 27,321 dirham (4,800).

"Macallan had a very fine rare malt which was the oldest malt in the world at the time," explains Stevens, "and they commissioned me to make a cocktail. I didn't really mess around too much with the brand - being Scottish, I know a lot about malts and I didn't want to muck it up by adding too many things. I made up my own fig syrup and mixed it around with some home-made bitters.But the Burj wanted to make it a bit more exclusive and a bit more expensive so they took my cocktail and served it in a solid gold cup then added some very expensive champagne, which totally killed the flavours in the drink itself. But each to their own.

"I got to try some of the malt as well," he adds stoically. "I think it was about $150 a nip, so even just trying the whisky was payment enough for me."

He's seen drinking trends come and go, from the so-called 'disco' cocktails of the 1980s - "where we had the woo woo, the pina colada, the screaming orgasm; they were all blue, green, pink, with monkeys and umbrellas and stuff" - to the more sophisticated drinks of recent years.

"A London bartender called Dick Bradsell brought out the bramble, which was just gin, lemon juice and sugar with creme de mure, a bramble liqueur, and that brought things back to the balance of drinks, where we're using the sweet and the sour to make the flavours perfect. Then came the cosmopolitan, made popular through Sex And The City."

"For a while it got a little bit ridiculous," he says. "We got into molecular mixology, a bit like Heston Blumenthal, and it wasn't very practical in terms of serving a packed bar full of people."

So now things are going back to basics. And that includes the service. So you won't be seeing any spinning of bottles and ostentatious cocktail shaking a la Tom Cruise round his neck of the woods. "I always say if you want to throw things around join the circus," he says. "By the time you've thrown a couple of bottles, the person's just standing there at the bar saying, 'Can I have my drink please?'" n