The Swedish. Conscious of what they eat, drink, do and how they affect the environment. But what we haven’t really done yet is adopt the sustainable cocktail trend. What exactly makes a cocktail sustainable is something Josephine Sondlo, obviously one of Sweden’s sharpest bartenders, can tell us. This summer she represented the Nordic region and finished seventh in the world’s largest cocktail competition held in Mexico City. The theme: Sustainable cocktails.

We catch Josephine as she’s on her way out to ride her horses, the day before her first ever shift at Bar Hommage on Södermalm.

In the wine world, natural wines have had quite a bit of hype over the last few years, and organic food takes an ever-increasing market share. People have quite frankly become very aware of the impact of their food actions and decisions on the environment. What does this mean for bartenders and for future cocktail trends?

As the guest become more aware, we will also have to take a look at how we work with the raw produce we use in our cocktails. A lot of bartenders already work with alternative acids, to replace the citrus fruits that has been transported such distances to get here, which has a very large carbon footprint before it lands in our glass. There is also a lot of talk about minimum waste in the bar world at the moment. I think it’s a natural reaction, not only to bartenders and guests being more aware of the actual climate effect our bars have, but also to the fact that we’re on our way to completely destroying our planet.

You finished seventh in the world’s largest bartender completion World Class. Tell us more.

Haha, yeah it was an insane experience. I decided to do this already last year – I was out with my horses when the thought hit me – why even do this if I don’t intend to be the best? I’m incredibly competitive. So I submitted a recipe the day before the deadline without even having tested the cocktail, and then I had to work for two months trying to get that damn cocktail together. It was disgusting at first, my colleague even threw up when trying it for the first time. But I got it together and went on from the Swedish final to the Nordic final where I won, making one cocktail with 12(!) ingredients and another with carbonated saltwater and seaweed that I served in a blue Kånken backpack.
After the Nordic finals it got real, and the period up until the world final was probably one of the toughest in my life. You can go nuts because the first thing on your mind when you wake up is World Class, then it’s all you think about all day and when you finally fall asleep it’s all you dream about. I woke up several times each night and wrote down ideas. I was practicing my skills in the bathtub, blind tested liquor from a glass beside the bed when I woke up, mixed things, poured it out again, did it again, broke down, tried again, and so on. You couldn’t socialise with me and people got very tired of hearing my ideas. About a month before the final, Penny & Bill was closed and I was there at my bar lab more or less every day between 8AM to 2AM. The only thing I had to eat was macaroni and falukorv sausage. Sometimes I slept on the floor so I didn’t waste time going home and then back again. It’s hard to describe, you enter another world where everything is all about presenting. But all this helped me get as far in the competition as I did of course, and I had some real heavy-hitting ideas and cocktails to present for the finals. An Ikea-Bloody Mary served in a tube, among other things.

The theme was sustainability. How did you get that across in your cocktails?

In Sweden we’re obviously very good at sustainability, so for me it was dead important when it came to that part. We’re really good at taking care of our waste here and making it into biofuel. We’re so good we even import waste from our neighbouring countries. So I wanted to do something on that theme and make a zero-waste cocktail. Unfortunately, one of my bags went missing after the flight to Mexico so I had to rethink my zero-waste cocktail and stole waste from our hotel. I made a cocktail with remains from breakfast: used teabags, pineapple and grapefruit peel, carbonated yoghurt whey. And with whatever was leftover I made a yoghurt and lime palatea (a Mexican ice cream). And I mixed the very last waste with leftover soap to make a waste soap, wrapped in paper as a coaster. But hey, the yoghurt ice cream melted during the presentation – I mean it was Mexico, you know – and to wrap things up I asked the judges to have a look at the coasters, which just happened to be a soap they could wash their hands with.

How do you work sustainably here behind your own bar?

I think about sustainability in everything that I do, which means that a lot of the cocktails or cocktail ingredients that I make are minimum waste. The dream is to have a bar that is as near closed loop as possible, but it will be a while yet before I’m there.

Charlotte Halzius at Tak won Diplomatico World Tournament in London, you got seventh place at the biggest competition in the world, does this mean that the level of bartenders in Stockholm is very high internationally?

We’re really, really good here and can measure up against the international bartender elite. But what many of us lack is a strategy for how to break out onto the global scene and really put Stockholm and Sweden on the map as the very strong cocktail nation that we are.

So what’s your overall view on Stockholm’s bar scene?

I think it has enormous potential with a great number of skillful and ambitious bartenders. But unfortunately there are many bars that look alike when it comes to both the cocktail list and philosophy. There are very few that stand out when it comes to the experience they provide the guests with. We still make cocktails with one eye on what other bartenders will think and that’s a shame.

Any idea what 2018 will mean for this scene?

As per usual there will be a couple of new bars opening. It will be interesting to see what will become of the foodpairing trend, and my guess is that there will be at least one new place that will experiment with cocktails and food. Personally I’m longing for a spot with full focus on the cocktails and not so much on other things.

And you have switched bar to tend. Tell us about your new gig.

I’ll be working at Bar Hommage, which is a really well-liked bar on Krukmakargatan. It’s got this very Parisian feel, which I love. I need to step up my game, which, at the same time, will be great fun.