In June, Espolon Tequila gathered 11 likeminded and creative bartenders together in Hobart to attend Dark Mofo, the winter festival of arts and culture known for being a little subversive and provocative. They discussed creativity, swapped ideas, and found inspiration in the depths of winter — and now they’re sharing what they found with bartenders in their cities.

Elliot Pascoe has been one of Brisbane’s most creative bartenders for the best part of the last decade, as you’ll find in the discussion on creativity below. Here, lightly edited and condensed for clarity, he talks about why everyone has a creative instinct in them, the importance of putting some boundaries on the creative process, and more.

BOOTHBY: Tell us about your drink?

ELLIOT PASCOE: I called the drink A Room Between A Rooms. Shamelessly, I stole that from one of my favourite artists, a guy called Kammarheit. He’s a very ambient artist, is absolutely plagued by insomnia. So this guy writes music essentially to put himself to sleep. It’s super cool stuff. The drink itself was very much inspired by the Dark Mofo experience and particularly the idea of liminality.

It refers to this idea of being on one or other or on both sides of some kind of threshold, as metaphysical as you want to get into it. And the very aleatoric, choose your own nature of Dark Mofo, and drinking experiences, and life in general. It really speaks to me because you can be in the same moment as someone else, but like Emily Dickinson, you’re in the same moment, you’re just in another room along.

So this idea, that where creativity really sparks for me at these events, is this weird confluence and meeting places, room between the rooms where our liminal parts actually cross over.

It’s a deliciously large whack of Espolon, the bourbon barrel-finished Espolon Añejo. I don’t normally go out for bourbon barrel finished tequilas, but I put this in my mouth and my brain said yum. And at this age and in this day and age, we follow not the rule of thumb, but the rule of yum.

So it’s a great little starting place for this freezer style martini drink. Following on from there is a corella pear and smoked pine needle justino, which is a very fancy way of saying that I blended fruit and a resinous herbal element into some kind of low ABV alcohol. Clarified it using enzymes. And then some forest berry and farmhouse ale reduction, which is essentially a fancy way of saying I took a funky farmhouse ale and I took a whole lot of red berries of a variety of types and I cooked them down for a long time, not dissimilar to Nonna’s vincotto. And that just gives it this lovely little farmhouse-hell funk, there’s some acid from the berries, and then just a tiny bump of champagne vinegar.

Do you consider yourself a creative kind of person?

I would be very keen to hear the argument that anyone’s not a creative person. Honestly, creativity is like breathing, we all do it, we just do it in different rhythms and in different times and in different ways but I don’t think there’s a human alive — with the possibility of my accountant — who could be called an uncreated human.

Where do you tend to draw your inspiration from when it comes to creating drinks?

Where I derive most of the little that I’m blessed with from whatever muse you choose to blame is kind of what I like to term second to seconds. Like you’re in the shower and you think of the perfect response. The French call it a staircase thought. This is kind of this moment where you might like miss half a step mentally or in ambulation.

One of my lecturers said, and I believe it very firmly, that all that creativity is, is your brain subconsciously computing the vast swathe of the entirety of the human race and thinking, we could do that a little differently. And then that’s the seed from which it all germinates.

Do you do anything to sort of systematise the process?

Yeah, for sure. It’s interesting that you mentioned systematisation because there’s an old query: if there’s no reference point, is there room for expansion within an infinite space?

I think that it can be proven more or less conclusively that creativity does better with boundaries. So in order to expedite the process, it’s very useful having — in a drink making context or in a menu making context — certain parameters in the back of your mind. Like, okay this for this competition, it must contain tequila already. You’ve got a huge part of the puzzle nailed down. Because otherwise, I do tend to rabbit hole into my own navel very quickly.

What was it like to be there and experience Dark Mofo?

Dark Mofo is incredible. It’s one of the most joyous things on the face of the planet. It’s dark, a little bit weird, it’s immersive, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Say maybe there’s a younger bartender starting out trying to make drinks or people in general just wanting to spark a bit more creativity and bring it to whatever task is at hand. Do you have any advice?

A good way to get started? All roads eventually lead to Rome. Whether you like it or not, if you’re in this industry, at some point you will have to be creative and there’s not a damn thing you can do to stop it. The only way that I can speak to that question is what I would have done slightly differently when I was starting out. Sit with yourself. Be a little bit silent. Human beings hate silence. I can guarantee you if you sit in silence for 10 minutes with your own thoughts, you have no choice. Something will crop up and then take that something, take that feeling and massage it into a workable format with whatever you’re wanting to achieve. But listen to yourself first off.

Elliot Pascoe’s A Room Between The Rooms

• 45ml Espolon Bourbon Barrel Finish
• 20ml Smoked Pine and Corella Bianco Justino
• 10ml  Fig Leaf Chardonnay Verjus
• 2.5ml Forest Berry Farmehouse Ale Reduction
• 1g Champagne Vinegar