Nikka Perfect Serve 2024: the global finals shot in Paris

The Nikka Perfect Serve is the bartending competition of the Japanese whisky house Nikka. Its global finals were held on 2 and 3 December 2024 at Bar Fréquence in Paris, with fifteen competitors who had qualified in their own countries. The commission came from La Maison du Whisky.

The format fits in one sentence, and that is exactly what makes it hard to photograph: fifteen people make the same move, with the same product, behind the same counter, across two days. What separates one picture from another is therefore neither the room nor the brand. It is the hand.

Bar Fréquence is a listening bar: walls of vinyl floor to ceiling, two turntables and a mixer set into the counter, a brass lamp, and pale wooden shelves where the Nikka bottles stand between the records. None of it was built for a photograph.

The room gives warm, low, very directional light that flatters wood and copper and is unkind to faces. The decision was to keep it, and to work flash into it so the labels and the skin hold, without ever erasing it. An evening lit flat would have had nothing to do with that particular bar.

That light is what the three opening visuals show: the same counter, the same hour, three moments of the same service.

A competition allows no second take. A pour into a jigger lasts two seconds, a bar spoon turns once, and the competitor will not repeat it for the camera. Everything that can be decided beforehand has to be: where you stand, which side of the counter leaves the hand legible, and the order in which you go for the gesture, then the product, then the face.

The rest is attention. Over two days and fifteen rounds, the same movement comes back often enough that you end up knowing, half a second early, where the light is going to land.

On a brand commission, a soft bottle or a clipped label cannot be recovered. The name has to read, the colour of the liquid has to be right, and the ice must not cloud between being set down and the shutter firing.

That means treating some frames as still lifes in the middle of an event: making them while the room resets, calmly, under controlled light, rather than hoping to catch them in the movement. The Taketsuru poured into a tasting glass, at the left of the opening band, was made that way. Those are the images that go on serving the longest.

A bartending competition is still a service: there is someone on the other side of the counter, and that relationship is what tells you about the craft. Shooting past a guest’s shoulder changes the reading of a frame entirely, because it stops showing a professional executing and starts showing someone being served a drink.

It is also the most fragile framing of the night. It asks you to be close enough for the scene to hold, and discreet enough that nobody turns round.

The competition was won by Britain’s Miley Kendrick. The trophies, engraved “Nikka Perfect Serve 2024 Global Finals” and with the Japanese phrase ichi-go ichi-e, one meeting, one time only, were handed over behind the counter, in front of the shelves of bottles and records.

A prize-giving happens in two minutes and is missed in one. The only useful work was done beforehand: finding the background it would happen against, checking the labels behind would not be clipped, and waiting for the moment both looks arrive together.

Seven hundred images were delivered to La Maison du Whisky: the rounds of all fifteen competitors, the products, the room, and the prize-giving, in the ratios that serve press, social and the brand’s own archive at once.

Part of the set was picked up by the trade press. Whisky Magazine published a gallery on 20 December 2024, written by Nicolas Le Brun, and Bar News illustrated its report on the final with these pictures.