We Asked A Bartender To Grade Trudeau's Beer-Pouring Form & There's 'Room For Improvement'
Trudeau has been hitting the bars on the campaign trail, but he's got a bit to learn yet.
The visit to the bar is a classic tool for any politician. Barack Obama has done it, Hillary Clinton has done it, and Trudeau has done it multiple times (and once with Obama, too!).
With a federal election just weeks away, Trudeau took the time to visit Hawthorne Beer Market & Bistro, a pub in Surrey, B.C. on Wednesday, August 18, and he even took a couple of orders and poured a few beers.
But while Narcity couldn't be on hand to observe Trudeau's serving skills in person, we asked a pro bartender to take a look at the resulting photos and judge the prime minister on his beer-pouring and serving form.
Ella Huber worked for three years as a bartender at a craft beer pub in Victoria, B.C., and she has completed the first level of the Cicerone Certification Program, a Sommelier-esque training program for serving beer.
Narcity asked Huber to analyze Trudeau's pictures and point out any mistakes he's making. As it turns out, the PM has a lot to learn.
Huber said Trudeau's shirt-and-tie attire was fine, but she did mention aprons as an alternative to accidentally having a loose tie dip into an open beer.
His pour, however, needs some work.
"He's got the tap faucet all the way down into his glass, which is a common mistake, lots of people do it and lots of different bars," Huber explained. "You're not really supposed to do that because then the beer is gonna eventually touch the faucet head, and then you're gonna get a bunch of yeast build-up over time and then it's gonna make your beer taste gross and just not be very sanitary."
Huber says her colleagues claim that the build-up of yeast can also lead to worse hangovers — something no politician wants to be responsible for.
"The other thing is that he is holding the tap incorrectly," she said. "You're supposed to hold it much further down so that you have more control."
Huber explained that the way Trudeau is holding the tap would typically create a lot of foam — however, the prime minister has the opposite problem.
A pint of beer should have an inch of foam, Huber explained, but the glasses shown in Trudeau's pics don't have nearly enough foam in them. That's likely due to the incorrect faucet placement, she said.
But it's not all bad for the PM. Huber said his mistakes are very common, the glasses themselves look very clean (you can spot a dirty glass if you see bubbles in the beer clinging to residue on the inside of a pint, she explained) and that not enough foam is certainly the better alternative.
"What's worse is when people don't know how to pour beer and they pour extremely foamy beer," Huber said. "You just waste a lot of the product and stuff. So he's not doing that. And it is a really common error to put the faucet head right in the glass so it's kind of excusable, in a sense, but still wrong."
If she had to give Trudeau a beer-pouring grade, Huber would give him a B.
"He's doing fine, but there's room for improvement."