Clinton Weir is a talented mixologist and flair bartender bringing good times and delicious cocktails to an event near you. After serendipitously shaking and stirring his way into the hospitality scene at age 18, Clinton was hooked on bartending from the moment he saw his first flair trick.
Numerous awards and a World’s Top Ten flair bartending title later, and Clinton’s passion has taken him from his hometown in South Africa to flair competitions and mixology schools around the world. He’s even performed his spins, flips and throws at a royal wedding!
Two decades in the making, Pineapple Jam is Clinton’s creative cocktail agency that fuses his passion for spreading happiness with quality cocktails. You’ll find him teaching the secrets of cocktail making in his signature pineapple shirt, pulling together bespoke events or concocting new flavors for his innovative cocktail mixes.
At Clinton’s cocktail academy you’ll explore the fun and serious sides of mixology and get a kick out of being behind the bar.
The first thing I ever made…
Was people very happy with my service, which has kept me motivated to get to where I am after 22 years behind the bar. There’s a massive cocktail industry in South Africa, I started in my smaller city making mostly long drinks like gin and tonics and then moved to Cape Town, getting involved with the bigger players in the industry and attending a lot more flair competitions and eventually cocktail competitions.
I don’t think many people last as long in the industry with being kept motivated and inspired, so all the success that I’ve had and all the crazy events I’ve been a part of, and all the people I’ve met are what has kept me reinvigorated to do more. There has always been this bigger plan to launch a school and sell my own products, but really the business has just grown and evolved completely organically with zero business plan.
I’m on a mission to…
Spread happiness. That’s always been the part of cocktail making I’ve really enjoyed. I’m one of the few lucky people who get to work at a job that keeps me motivated but is also so rewarding.
Pineapple Jam combines the global symbol for hospitality - the pineapple - with my love of dancing. It represents the - eh - fun and serious sides of bartending, cocktails and the service I aim for.
When I’m making cocktails, I…
Feel alive and in a place where I can make people happy. Whether I was the class clown at school or the head bartender on stage. I love the fact that if you do something well people appreciate it and you gain that mutual respect. It’s really cool because there are so many people around the world who just love good service, a bit of entertainment and a bit of personality.
Teaching others has taught me…
Patience, humility and that I have so much more to inspire people with. When you’re doing a one-on-one training session with someone and your personalities are similar and you’ve got the same kind of energy then it’s great. But you can also put a group of 10 people in a room together and the energy can be very different. So to be able to maintain teaching with people who might have different energies, educational skills or cultural skills has taught me a lot. I can’t just do the same thing all the time, I have to change my energy to suit every person in the group.
It’s taught me a lot of control, a lot of patience and it’s taught me to be humble as well. Humble for myself and humble for the person who might not understand as well as everybody else and not put them in a position where they feel targeted or separated. You’ve got to keep that humble mentality towards everybody so everyone is comfortable and it doesn’t ruin the mood and the energy of the class.
Christmas smells like…
Summer and spices. Growing up in South Africa which has a similar weather pattern to Australia, Christmas time has always been in summer for me. This meant that there was more family around, more things going on and having holidays from school. I have been pretty much surviving on my own since the age of 17, so for me, Christmas was at first just hanging out with friends and my brothers, and then as we got older it became more about the kids. But it was always about summer fun for us and spices were always represented in the food and the drinks around that celebration.
This year I’m grateful to...
Be living in Australia and online masterclasses. Since April last year, online classes have pretty much been the main source of our income as we’re based in Melbourne. I’ve always had to adapt my business to suit different seasons or situations and that was the main reason I wanted to expand into a company to get bigger contracts and work with bigger brands.
We had been working on building the business and we were getting really busy with events then obviously Covid hit and shut everything down. A client of ours told us to check out our competitors in Sydney and after doing that we were inspired to jump onto ClassBento. Since then, we’ve been approached by dozens of companies to run masterclasses for them. It’s become so big that we’ve created new products. I’ve always wanted to make my own products and was able to do that with the lockdowns and the extra time on my hands. It’s great to be able to bring our experience and set up to not only bring on these online classes but also things like our cocktail kits.
