Hello, I'm James.

I'm James Craig, a 21 year old English university graduate in a course completely unrelated to bartending. Bartending is now my passion, with a craving to explore/create new avenues and meet exciting and interesting people along the way.

I have been lucky enough to experience many things in my short 21 years thus far, with many of these experiences being encountered due to the wealth of overseas travel that I have embarked upon. This travel experience spans over 32 countries, including 24 of the states of the U.S.A. Some of the more interesting countries visited include Panama, Australia, Kenya, Cuba, Canada, Greece and Costa Rica. This travel experience has led to an ability to communicate and interact with almost anybody, from all corners of the globe and therefore many different and unique personalities. One of the most significant experiences of my life came from my adventures in Kenya. At the age of 15 I decided to embark upon a four-week journey to Kenya alongside a few of my friends. We raised approximately 5000 pounds each through many different methods like local village sales and running events for people to donate towards our cause. This led to us being able to travel to Kenya and move between multiple camps with the aid of a company called Camps International. We took part in many charitable activities including the building of schools, medical facilities and building wells to supply water to local villages. To put into context the level of impact that this experience had on myself personally, I wrote my entire 42'000 word university dissertation/thesis specifically on this journey. To save you reading that however, here's a summary of its effect on me. The Kenyan adventure made me a more ambitious and determined person, craving the need to help others and revelling in the joy that I could bring them through acts, both large and small, of kindness. The application that was required in order to make this happen whilst in country led to the hard-working attitude I have today, with a need to constantly be busy and an outright hatred for sitting behind a desk unable to move and interact personally with others. It also provided me with an insight into the way others live, thus making me more appreciative of what I have and the people I surround myself with. To link this to working as a bartender, well you can make all the links you want. I prefer to link this experience to who it made me as a person, and the person I am today can still suggest 5 years later that this experience got me to the point of writing this right now. Though hard to be certain, it can be assumed that without my journey through the harsh environment, both mentally and physically, that Kenya is, I may never have had the ambition and determination to move to Greece to undertake my EBS course. If I had not done that, I doubt that I would have been sitting here right now doing my best to be creative and sell myself to anyone with the patience and sufficient enough interest to be reading this. It would be accurate to say that I could ramble on about Kenya all day long, but in the interest of highlighting a variety in my past experience, I shall move on. Bartending then, that's what we're here for right? I have been lucky enough to work four jobs as a bartender, all in very different places with different attitudes. The first one, the Buxton Tap House, was absolutely my favourite, but was also the most demanding. Read into that however you want, I like a challenge. The Buxton Tap House made me want to be a bartender. They encouraged mistakes, they taught me pretty much everything I knew before EBS. As an independent tap house for the Buxton Brewery (Brewcast Brewery of the Year 2013), new beers were brought out almost weekly, including collaborations with other breweries. This meant that, alongside the already huge collection of beers (180 bottles) that I had to know about, there was constant training regarding new beers that had come out. Information that I needed to know included Beer Type, ABV, Brewery, Tasting Notes and Country that the beer came from. As you can imagine, this is a lot to ask considering that this was a part-time job alongside university, but I loved it. This job provided a huge knowledge on the beer world and everything involved, including the ability to effectively manage a demanding cellar. Alongside this I also had to learn the job of being a bartender and a waiter as this was my first job in the industry. Moving on to the Old Clubhouse. This place was more of your traditional family-style English pub/restaurant. This meant a less creative and interesting collection of drinks to serve, but allowed me to enhance my ability to handle customer complaints and provided me with the opportunity to interact with a different type of customer to the more up-market Buxton Tap House. Ithaca Greek Restaurant again provided a different experience, with a higher focus on waiting on tables than the more bartender-tailored experience of the other two employers. This provided more experience as a waiter at an expensive restaurant, with a whole menu in a new language to have to learn in order to do my job correctly. Due to a lack of time spent there because of restrictions with working abroad, I haven't included a full detail about my time spent working as a cocktail bartender in PortoEye Cocktail Bar in Greece. These many different bars have turned me into a good all-rounder in terms of experience, with the knowledge provided by the completion of the EBS course now added on top of that.

International Bartender Course (4 weeks)

Grade B Kos - Jun 2017

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