Essential Bar Tools

With Jackson Cannon

If you have these essential tools you will be able to handle any bartender duties like a professional for your next party. Strainers, shakers, spoons, a muddler, tempered mixing glass and a few jiggers are all very helpful.

Mixologist At one of Boston’s most successful restaurant-bars, a head mixologist plies his craft. Jackson Cannon, 44, is Eastern Standard’s bar manager and one of Boston’s revered senior mixologists. Cannon’s cocktail style is classic, but not conservative, and he views drink making as a tool of hospitality, not as an end in and of itself. Eastern Standard’s success as a hip American bistro is partly due to Cannon’s lengthy cocktail menu which helps appeal to the broad cross-section of diners who might come from nearby Fenway Park, from the adjoining hotel or who are there just for the cocktails. It’s all balanced with top-notch front-of-house service that keeps locals coming back. Cannon is foraying into largely uncharted territory for modern American mixologists: the art of making homemade vermouth. Along with the help of other protégés he’s trained and other vermouth enthusiasts, he’s creating his own recipes and laying the groundwork for one of the next trends in artisanal mixology.