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" The Alternative Bar Awards should&amp;#039;ve already started, but no one was sitting on the velvet red couches. No one was at the bar either, because the half dozen or so people who had arrived on time were busy on the bar&amp;#039;s cramped back porch, picking the winners of categories like Best Boobs, Best Drunk Guy, and the &amp;quot;Fuck You, I Started It&amp;quot; award. Several of the most famous members of the cocktail industry launched the annual bartender roast to take a breather as they entered the final stretch of what had been a week of utterly exhausting industry talks, parties, tastings, and bar crawls at last week&amp;#039;s Manhattan Cocktail Classic. And so, within a couple hours last Tuesday, the smell of tequila shots already neared a saturation point. Co-presenters Sam Ross (of Attaboy, formerly of Milk and Honey) and Steve Schneider (of Employees Only) spent serious time in a DJ booth taking periodic swigs straight from a bottle of Hendrick&amp;#039;s gin. No less than six people were serving behind the bar, and a communal drinking game was established wherein the audience had to chug their beers whenever a compromising photo of the DJ appeared on a lurchy, video-enabled slideshow. The awards had begun. Get several hundred bartenders drunk at a conference and you&amp;#039;ll hear the same sorts of things you&amp;#039;d hear from several hundred insurance salesmen drunk at a conference, but ratcheted up to eleven. &amp;quot;Whose wife is he sleeping with?&amp;quot; became &amp;quot;How many wives is he sleeping with?&amp;quot; and was, in fact, a prize you could win. In between awards, Ross and Schneider hurled devastating insults across the top of the crowd.  &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s lipstick, not a cold sore, you syphilitic fk,&amp;quot; shouted one. &amp;quot;That award is recycled, just like all your ideas,&amp;quot; shouted the other. Perhaps more interesting was the cocktail gossip. One award skewered absurd cocktail names (Anyone for a &amp;quot;Peach me how to Dougie?&amp;quot;) and of course launched a brief discussion of contestants that didn&amp;#039;t make the final list. Have you heard about the cocktail that comes topped with an entire barbecue grill? We now have. So here, without further ado, are our contenders for the most bonkers cocktail we learned about at the Alternative Bar Awards. Just for you, you syphilitic \u2014 sorry, as we were saying: Hot Sake Whipped Cream Ionna Morelli, bartender at Bar Gyu in Hokkaido, Japan, couldn&amp;#039;t stop raving about a new bar in Azabu-Juban, Tokyo, called Gen Yamamoto where the drinks are served on trays garnished with living flowers. &amp;quot;The drinks are made like sushi, they don&amp;#039;t use jiggers or shake anything,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s kind of a secret.&amp;quot; The wildest of these drinks, she says, is a small cup of hot Dassai 50 Junmai Daiginjo sake topped with a floater of cold strawberry cream.  Lemon Drop Her Panties Though it didn&amp;#039;t quite make the list for Worst Cocktail Name, this beverage at Manhattan&amp;#039;s 1534 would be at home in one of those college bars that has a ceiling decorated with dangling bras. Head bartender Justin Noel describes it as a twist on the lemon drop (a shot you almost certainly can&amp;#039;t drink anymore without grimacing): vodka, lemon juice, simple syrup, champagne, and a tincture of kaffir lime.  Driftwood Punch Los Angeles bartender Yael Vengroff recommended the whimsical tiki bar Trailer Happiness in London for a cocktail that comes topped with... a grill. Constructed in a punch bowl out of Gentleman Jack, the juice of a barbecued pineapple, barbecue marinade, lemons, and oregano, it&amp;#039;s topped with grill grates covered in skewers of pineapple covered in miso sauce, oregano, and Vietnamese mint. Then, of course, it&amp;#039;s set on fire. Says head bartender Richard Hunt, &amp;quot;the whole thing looks, smells and tastes just like an epic barbie \u2014 the food, not the doll.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/drinks/a22758/crazy-cocktails-alternative-bar-awards-15510789/>