SAN ANTONIO — At the San Antonio Cocktail Conference opening night event Thursday at the Majestic Theatre, some 500 people each will spend $100 for an opportunity to dress up, nosh and sample 40 hand-crafted cocktails.

While guests sip the night away, 200 volunteers will be scurrying behind the scenes to make the event seamless.

Consider just the glassware. There's nowhere to wash dishes at the Majestic, so trays of glasses will be carried out the first floor, loaded onto a truck, driven two blocks to the St. Anthony Hotel where dirties will be dropped off, trays of clean glasses picked up, driven back to the Majestic, carried up and dropped off on all three floors. Rinse and repeat for four hours to accommodate the 5,000 cocktails that will be served just this one night.

Then add all the mixing, shaking and making sure there's plenty of ice, and the result is a barely controlled chaos the guests never will be aware of.

And that's just the first event.

More Information San Antonio Cocktail Conference The conference runs through Sunday. Visit sanantoniococktailconference.com for a full schedule or to purchase tickets. Highlights of the conference include: Opening night event: 7 p.m. Thursday at Majestic Theatre, $100. Tickets still are available. Scotland vs. Mexico: 1 p.m. Friday at The Worm Tequila & Mezcal Bar, 123 Losoya St., $30. Seminar exploring the differences and similarities between tequila and single malt scotch. Texas Spirits Night: 6 p.m. Friday at Weston Centre, 112 E. Pecan St.; then at Pearl Stable, 303 Pearl Parkway, via river barge, $75. Weston Centre: Cocktail tasting hosted by Remy-Cointreau. Pearl: Hand-crafted cocktail tasting using spirits from 11 Texas distilleries. Tickets still available. The 5 W's of Drinking: 1 p.m. Saturday at the Sheraton Gunter Hotel, 205 E. Houston St., $30. Seminar to help bar patrons better communicate with bartenders when ordering drinks.



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There are two more big events on Friday and Saturday night, as well as daily seminars and tastings throughout the weekend.

To make it through, volunteers led by Chris Ware of Arcade Midtown Kitchen will put in countless hours over the course of the four-day conference slicing and squeezing an astounding 8,000 pounds of fruit to produce 14,000 shot glasses worth of juice and garnishes, and going through who knows how much sugar to produce 58 gallons of various simple syrups.

Conference coordinator Jenny Rabb's eye started to twitch as she counted the total number of cocktail recipes: 170 over the course of the conference for events and classes. Multiply that by the number of attendees at each event and seminar, and well, that's a lot of cocktails.

To keep track of it all, Ware carries a binder with 15 tabs, one for each event, with spreadsheets calculating the total ounces needed for each ingredient, plus ice and garnishes.

“I'm looking forward to the last event,” exhausted volunteer Carlos Faz said.

Faz, the assistant general manager at Bohanan's, is in charge of logistics for the conference.

The crew that coordinates the conference has commandeered the empty space that was Suede on Houston Street as its production and staging center. Faz allocated and labeled all the areas for all the conference supplies, such as ice, buckets, linens and glassware, so volunteers can easily find things.

Faz also rented the more than 7,000 cocktail glasses of various shapes and sizes that will be used throughout the conference, most times at multiple events at the same time.

On Tuesday night (technically Wednesday morning) a team of a dozen volunteers, mostly local bartenders, juiced fruit and ginger until 3 a.m. This was after staying up until 4 a.m. the night before doing the same thing. The juicing will continue through Sunday.

Three Zummo commercial juicers made quick work of cases of lemons, limes and oranges, squeezing 1 gallon of juice every 3 minutes. But with thousands of pounds of fruit at hand, quick is relative.

Grapefruit doesn't fit into the Zummo machines, so volunteers juice them by hand at three stations. Ginger is the most labor intensive because it has to be peeled and juiced by hand to make ginger simple syrup.

Making and serving the cocktails made from these juices is a group of 50 volunteer bartenders picked and now led by Karah Carmack, a bartender at Bohanan's and the Esquire Tavern and winner of last year's Speed Rack Texas female bartending competition.

Carmack drew on her experience at the Cocktail Apprentice Program last year at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans, the largest and longest-running cocktail conference in the country, to recruit friends and bartenders she met there.

They hail from as far as Canada, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Wisconsin. Members of the Austin and Houston chapters of the United States Bartenders' Guild also are helping.

“It's amazing how committed these people are. They signed up to work instead of play,” Carmack said.

Still, this kind of work can be lots of fun, too.

She has organized nine teams of up to four people for each day of the conference and given them creative names such as Team Playtpus, Team Atlas and Team Tiny Dancers.

“She's doing an amazing job. It has allowed me not to sleep on the floor like last year,” Ware said. “So, that's fantastic.”