| | | It's easy to scoff at a list that dares to call itself "The World's 50 Best Bars."In the era of Yelp and TripAdvisor and Buzzfeed and this very website (and every website remotely like it), hy | | If you have trouble reading this email, go to the online version |  | |  | | | | | |  | | | | February 12, 2019 | | How the World's 50 Best Bars List Gets Made
Group Editor William Drew on 10 Years of the World's 50 Best Bars | |  | | | | | | | It's easy to scoff at a list that dares to call itself "The World's 50 Best Bars."
In the era of Yelp and TripAdvisor and Buzzfeed and this very website (and every website remotely like it), hyperbole has emerged as a lingua franca for quasi-definitive rankings of every imaginable thing. The word "best," a barbed term, has been dulled by repetition. Indeed, to create a "best-of" list today is in some ways a futile exercise: you want it to mean everything, of course, but often it means almost nothing at all.
And yet, the World's 50 Best Bar list still means something. Here, it might be instructive not to think of it as a best-of list at all, but, as its Group Editor, William Drew, told me, "a reflection of the global bar scene each year, a snapshot of opinion," formed from the votes of approximately 510 anonymous "experts"—premier bartenders, cocktail aficionados, drink writers and the like.
Published by William Reed Business Media, the institution is heading into its 10th year. Though the 2019 list won't be announced until October, an anniversary celebration of sorts is taking place in New York today, during which six world-renowned bartenders—including representatives from local favorites, like Jillian Vose of The Dead Rabbit (pictured above) and Jim Meehan of Please Don't Tell—will gather to discuss the future of the industry. (A cocktail party—a very enviable one, at that—will follow.)
Before traveling from London to New York for the event, I caught up with Drew, a longtime journalist and editor who's worked on the list for the last two and a half years, to find out how they put it together, what it tells us about the industry and why it's more relevant now than ever.
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