The United States Bartenders’ Guild (USBG) is a fraternal organization for American professional bartenders, with more than five thousand members in fifty-two local city and state chapters throughout the United States as of October 2015. It is the United States’ only affiliate organization of the International Bartenders Guild. See IBA.
Dedicated to advancing the craft and prestige of bartending as a career, USBG offers a variety of educational and social events for bartenders, as well as group health insurance for its members. It also runs the Master Accreditation Program, a series of exams and education with three levels of certification for bartender expertise, and USBG Pulse, an online social network of bartenders and bar owners.
USBG was founded in 1971 when the California Bartenders’ Guild, a successor to the California chapter of the United Kingdom Bartenders’ Guild, reorganized as a national nonprofit corporation and adding other city chapters. However, by the 1990s the guild had grown weak and insubstantial and was down to a single branch, when the growing craft cocktail revival gave it a new lease on life.
In 2001, Tony Abou-Ganim helped establish a Las Vegas chapter. A San Francisco chapter soon followed and proved influential in helping the city’s aborning cocktail movement to coalesce, counting local rising bartenders Marcovaldo Dionysos, Jacques Bezuidenhout, and David Nepove among its early members. By 2017, the USBG had chapters in more than sixty cities and more than six thousand members. While formally affiliated with the IBA, which acts as an umbrella organization to several bartenders’ guilds, the current USBG has grown into a much more modern, activist enterprise, hosting regular meetings, social events, and educational seminars worldwide and acting as a bridge between members and various corporate-sponsored bartending competitions. Forming a new chapter requires a minimum of forty paid members, as well as a few other organizational tasks.
See also Abou-Ganim, Tony; United Kingdom Bartenders’ Guild (UKBG); and bartending schools.
California Bartenders Guild. Good Taste, July 1962, 1.
Nepove, David. Interview. June 22, 2017.
United States Bartenders’ Guild website. https://www.usbg.org/home (accessed March 12, 2021).
By: Jason Horn and Robert Simonson