Making A Drink In A Shaker? Impress Your Friends With The Tin Spin Trick

One of the big questions when you're throwing a party is how to handle the alcoholic beverages. You could serve a drink that works well as a batch cocktail, a choice that's simple for everyone, simply present it in a punchbowl and let guests ladle out a cup whenever they want. Or maybe you prefer bartending for the partygoers instead by making their drinks individually. If you go that route -– and have basics down like the dry shake technique for foamy cocktails and the know-how to muddle different ingredients –- show off your stuff and impress your friends with a bartending trick that needs nothing but a cocktail shaker and your hand: the tin spin.

The trick involves quickly rotating the shaker tin 360 degrees on the palm of your hand. You start by holding the tumbler-like tin horizontally on its side on the ball of your palm, not on your fingertips or the palm's base. Then you move your wrist in and whip it out, almost like throwing a frisbee, opening your hand to let go of the tin as it goes into a flat spin, and then close your hand and catch it after it makes one rotation. Open your hand as much as possible once you let go so you don't stop the spin halfway with your thumb. Practice to get the tin spin smooth and it will look effortlessly cool!

The tin spin comes from flair bartending, which is a bit of showmanship for customers by using tricks like throwing, flipping, spinning, or juggling cocktail shakers, liquor bottles, glasses, ice, and even cocktail napkins while making drinks. Modern flair bartending is said to have begun in the 1980s when John Bandy, a bartender at a Los Angeles T.G.I. Fridays, was looking for a way to liven up his job so he started creating tricks with the bar tools. It burst into pop culture when Tom Cruise starred as a flair bartender in the 1988 film, "Cocktail,"  and restaurants and bars began featuring it to draw in and entertain customers. 

Organizations like the World Flair Association formed and started holding still-ongoing international competitions.  However, there is a difference between working flair, which bartenders do on the job and doesn't interfere with making drinks quickly, and exhibition flair that's done at competitions with longer routines and more elaborate tricks.

Some other basic flair tricks include the flip, in which a bottle is held by the neck and flipped so it goes upside down and back up to be caught at the neck or lower; the stall, in which the flipped bottle is caught upright on the back of the hand; the swipe, where the bartender throws a bottle from one hand to the other in a behind-the-back move; and the ice toss, where you take a tongs-held ice cube, toss it up at an angle behind your back, and catch it in a glass.