When we think about the bar of a music club, generally the first thing that comes to our mind is a terrible mix of low quality beverage and high prices. After all, it’s clear that a bunch of young partygoers and a good cocktail, served in the right glass, with the right topping on it, at a considerable price, are hard to mix. Hard, but not impossible, as the Lumiere’s bar, in Pisa, demonstrates. Lumiere is a music club, know both for quality concerts and party nights, located in the space where once took place the most ancient cinema in Italy, one of the oldest in Europe.
The location is big and elegant, and every week thousands of people cross the door to go to a concert or to a party. Most of them are students, with few euros in their pocket, and they want to take the best advantage of them. The Lumiere offers them a standard cocktail list, with medium range products at an affordable price. Nevertheless, a demanding drinker could find a lot of surprises at Lumiere’s bar.
In parallel with the standard cocktail list, the bar proposes a premium cocktail list, invented by the famous bartender Mauro Picchi, and based on a short number of local drink producers, such as Liquorificio Taccola a small factory founded in 1895 near Pisa, Levante Spirits, one of the first producer of organic dry gin in Tuscany, China Clementi, with its ancient typical bitter, and Podere Santa Bianca, a small factory that produces a large number of top quality essences sold all around the world. The list included some typical Italian and international cocktails such as Negroni and gin tonic but revisited with locals product. But the innovative, mixed approach of Lumiere’s bar does not end with cocktails. At the bar, you can find a classical Italian draught beer, but also a small selection of organic beers, produced by ten different small breweries all around Italy. As a result, at Lumiere you can drink a simple fresh beer in a plastic glass, but you can also taste a bottle of a chestnut beer, or a smoked beer, a Polish Bitter or an Indian pale ale (this is the complete list of the small brewery present at the Lumiere’s bar: Monangi Brew Pub, Bruton, Microbirrificio San Bull, La Bireta, Crudebeer, La Mi’ Birra, Green Dog Brewery, Birrificio Artigianale Curtense, Irias).
The achievement of this result, of the capacity to mix a standard, mass consumption, with a high level drinking experience, has been possible by a complex work of networking, based on the attempt to create a link between production and consumption, together with a constant focus on every ring of the chain that from the producer goes to the consumer: the choose of the factory, of the products, the constitution of a cocktail list and a beer menù based on that products, the communication of them through an accurate graphic design work, up to the care of the process of production and service of the products.
The project of the Lumiere’s bar does not end during concerts and parties, as the management of the club propose also some event completely dedicated to good drinkings, such as meeting with the producers that explain to the public their products and make them try them. There have been also a cocktail competition with different bartenders from all the bars of the city. They participated in a challenge in which a jury selected the best cocktail and then the public participated in an auction to buy it and experience the best cocktail in the city!
For more info on Lumiere’s Bar click here