How to Do a Capture Flair Bartending Move

Learn how to do the flair bartending move called a capture from mixologist Chris Cardone in this Howcast video.


Hi, I'm Chris Cardone I work at the Beatrice Inn in New York City and I'm going to teach you to do a two tin capture. When you're capturing an object, it's basically you're swiping it or stealing it out of the air. You can do this with garnishes. You can do it with bottles. Do it with a lot of different objects behind the bar, but today we're going to focus on the two tin capture.

So what we're going to do is, you're going to bring your first tin, you're going to hold it with the mouth facing down, and you're going to hold it where you feel most comfortable. Some people feel more comfortable in the middle, I feel more comfortable at the bottom of the tin to give myself that swiping motion. The only way you can't hold it is like this, It just won't work.

So you're going to hold it wherever you feel most comfortable with the mouth facing down and you're going to make a swiping motion. Your other tin, in this case, is going to sit on an angle that you would bring the tin down to. So it's going to sit like that. If the tin's like this, all you're going to do is hit it and it's going to fire into your body. So the tin has to be on an angle to work with the other tin to come down and capture it.

Now the best way to practice this move, is to simply keep your tin here, come down, and get your hand out of the way and steal it out of the air a few times. Once you get comfortable, you start here, you toss your tin up, and then you capture it out of the air and when you get really comfortable with it, that's when it becomes a smooth motion of, as this tin goes up, this tin comes up at the same time and then it comes down.

You don't have to kill the tin. A lot of people just try to, as hard as they can. Generally, that causes you to lose the tin or bang the tin somewhere else or, it's not about that. It's about the motion of how you're bringing it down and the timing of it.

So again, this tin sits onto an angle. This tin comes up and comes back down and as you capture it, you want to finish it with tilting this up, because if you capture it and just hold it like this, the tin will never stay and it will fall out. The garnish would fall out, the bottle would fall out. So it's really important that after the capture, you're always finishing so that the object's facing up so the tin will hold it in.

So one more time. It looks like this. And that's how we capture two tins.

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