Now a four-time global winner, Canada prepares to host the big event

As Canadians, we don’t like to boast, but even so, Michael Armistead can’t help but be a little bit pleased.

A Canadian bartender, Keegan McGregor of Halifax’s Highwaymen Restaurant & Bar, has just won the World Class Global Bartender of the Year 2024 competition in Shanghai. That’s the fourth time Canada has won the planet’s biggest and most prestigious cocktail competition since this country started competing in 2013.

“It’s very exciting, yeah,” says Armistead, who oversees the World Class Canada Bartending Competition as the National Onpremise, Reserve and Sponsorship Manager at Diageo Canada. “Canada is the best performing country in the competition. We’ve got back-to-back wins in 2023 and 2024. That’s never happened before. And we’ve won three of the last four years.”

That alone would be cause for excitement and some modest self-congratulation. But even more thrillingly, in 2025, Armistead will see a long-held dream become reality: The global finals will be coming to Canada sometime late next summer.

“It’s going to be big,” he says.

Not just a competition, the World Class Global Final, sponsored by Diageo and its reserve brands (including Johnnie Walker Scotch whisky, Don Julio tequila, Tanqueray No. Ten Gin and Ketel One Vodka) since 2009, will be a full-on cocktail festival held all across the city of Toronto. In Shanghai, Armistead points out, there were over 100 events. He envisions something similar in Toronto, with seminars, parties, pop-ups, guest shifts and all sorts of activations at venues across the city, in addition to the challenges for the competing bartenders.

“It’s going to be all about the city, experiencing the city,” he says. “The key for me is to introduce the rest of the world to Canada and Toronto and the bartending community here. It’s going to be a citywide experience. It’s going to be a national experience if all plays out the way we want it to.”

A big part of the plan is to attract the attention of the world’s star bartenders, renowned judges, big publications and prestigious competitions like World’s 50 Best.

“We want to shine a spotlight on Canada and the bartending community,” he says. “It’s time that Canada got recognized for the really great venues that we have. We’re excited to welcome the world.”

But first, McGregor gets to enjoy the title of Global Bartender of the Year, joining his fellow Canadian winners Kaitlyn Stewart (2017), James Grant (2021) and Jacob Martin (2023). They are all now judges and ambassadors for the competition.

Meanwhile, the next round of World Class Canada starts in earnest this fall. This is more than a competition, Armistead points out. World Class Canada is a uniting platform that connects bartenders coast to coast. And the scale of it is huge — there are studios and events planned from Halifax to Victoria, culminating in two regional finals (one in the east and one in the west), the national final next spring and the Global Final in Toronto next summer.

Armistead says to expect plenty of updates over the next 10 months, with some big announcements coming soon.

“The scale of it is so big,” he says. “I think it’s a great thing for the whole industry, whether it’s brands or bars or bartenders.”

THIS POST IS SPONSORED BY:
Diageo World Class Canada,
DiageoWorldClassCanada.com