Two of the world's top ten bars on The World's 50 Best Bars 2025, and four of its top fifty, are in London; The Spirit Lab teaches a five-day course in a working development bar on Marylebone High Street.
The spirits came from many places; the craft of mixing them was born in the young United States. On 13 May 1806, a newspaper in Hudson, New York, printed the first published definition of the cocktail: spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters. In 1862 a New York publisher brought out Jerry Thomas’s How to Mix Drinks, the first recipe book for mixed drinks published in the country, and the man behind the bar had his manual. Today the craft is most alive in London and New York: each placed four bars on The World’s 50 Best Bars 2025, and in April 2026 New York’s Sip & Guzzle was named the best bar in North America.
The London campus of an international bartending chain, near Tower Bridge, teaching the same four-week International Bartender Course it sells in some forty cities: six hours a day, mostly behind the bar, ending in a test and the school's own certificate. When we read its booking pages on 6 October 2026 the next London course ran 26 October to 20 November 2026, at €2,355. No teacher is named, and no class size is published.
A Marylebone bartending school that teaches in a working development bar at 93 Marylebone High Street. Its International Mixology Course is five days, Monday to Friday 9am to 4pm, for at most twelve students, at £799 plus VAT: more than forty IBA cocktails, with WSET Level 1 Spirits and a practical diploma. When we read it on 6 October 2026 the next dates were 19 October and 9 November 2026, then from 4 January 2027. Its pages name no teacher; they speak of instructors who have worked in London's top venues.
WSET Level 3 Award in Spirits — examined in person by WSET: a closed-book theory paper and a blind tasting. It examines what you know about spirits, not your work behind the bar. · Certifying body: WSET (Wine & Spirit Education Trust)
There is a real difference between a school that teaches you and a good-looking website, and too much of the internet is the second kind. Four instruments do the work, and every one of them is visible on the page you are already on.
If a place dodges these, that's your answer. It costs you nothing to ask, and it tells you everything.
This is the short version. The full method is here — the six questions, in order, for any craft anywhere.