April Wachtel

April Wachtel is a passionate educator, an experienced mixologist, a spirits aficionado, and a lover of learning, technology, and design. She earned most of her chops in Boston, where she bartended for the past decade. She has worked in a range of venues, from fine dining restaurants to cocktail bars and was also featured as a Bartending Iconoclast on The Sundance Channel in 2010. During her time in Boston, April simultaneously cultivated a passion for education and founded a peer-to-peer learning group called the Boston Bartenders Collaborative. She moved to New York in 2011, and spent her first year in New York bartending at Lani Kai, a modern tropical cocktail bar in SoHo, and Lot 2, a farm-to-table restaurant in Brooklyn. She spent the following two years representing Bacardi Rum as the New York-based Brand Master Apprentice, and has been in her current role as Director of Trade Advocacy for Solbeso, the world’s first cacao spirit, since March, 2014.

April has been an instructor at Astor Center since 2012, and is delighted to teach about cocktail history, tools and technique, syrups and infusions, and ratios and flavor combinations. You can find April drinking and talking about spirits in bars throughout the city, or find more information on her website, www.aprilwachtel.com.