Why Hire a Bartender in Aruba Instead of Mixing Your Own

Hiring a bartender in Aruba makes sense because making cocktails for a group on vacation is real work. Someone shops, carries, measures and shakes, then spends the party at the counter while everyone else is in the water, and Aruba’s own cocktails are fiddly to get right on a first try. Bartender Aruba’s jugs are mixed by a professional bartender and arrive ready to pour. And if the plan is a couple of beers with one or two friends, you honestly don’t need us.

Below is the longer answer to why hire a bartender: what doing it yourself involves, why the island’s drinks are trickier than they look, a side-by-side comparison, and the cases where DIY is the better call.

Why hire a bartender: what running the drinks yourself involves

Most groups underestimate this because each step sounds small. Put the steps together for a beach day, a villa night or a few hours on a boat, and it adds up to a part-time job for whoever volunteers.

Before: the shopping list and the haul

Three or four kinds of cocktail can mean rum, vodka, tequila, a liqueur or two, several juices, limes, mint, syrup and soda. Somebody has to work out quantities, usually by guessing, and buy full bottles when a recipe needs a splash. Then it all has to travel: bottles, cartons, a bag of limes, a knife, a cutting board and a shaker, loaded into the car and carried across the sand or down the dock. On a hot day the juice has to stay cold the whole way.

During: the bar nobody signed up to run

Shaken cocktails get made one or two at a time. With eight people that’s a lot of rounds, and the person making them spends the afternoon cutting limes and counting pours instead of swimming. On the beach there’s no counter, so the bar is a cooler lid. On a boat, space is tight and the deck moves. The drinks drift as the day goes on, too: the first round is carefully measured, the fifth is poured by eye.

After: the sticky sink

At the end of the night someone washes the shaker, the jigger, the strainer, the knife, the board and every pitcher, usually in a rental kitchen close to midnight. Then there are the half-empty bottles and the juice that won’t last the rest of the trip.

Aruba’s local cocktails are harder than they look

The second reason is the recipes. Visitors want to drink what the island drinks, and those cocktails weren’t written for a first attempt in an unfamiliar kitchen.

Take the Aruba Ariba, which the Aruba Tourism Authority calls without doubt the island’s most emblematic cocktail. Its ingredient list runs to white rum, vodka, banana liqueur, orange, pineapple and lemon juice, grenadine and Coecoei, with Grand Marnier as the stand-in. It’s a bartender’s drink by birth: Juan “Jocky” Tromp won a bartender competition with it in 1963, according to Wikipedia.

Making it at a rental has a few traps:

• Tiny measures. The VisitAruba recipe calls for 1/8 oz each of Coecoei and crème de banana. That’s less than a teaspoon, hard to judge without a proper jigger and easy to overdo.
• A local liqueur. VisitAruba says Coecoei comes from the sap of local agave plants mixed with rum and sugar, and is only found in Aruba. Its suggested substitutes (passion fruit nectar, agave nectar or cherry brandy) each pull the drink in a different direction.
• No single recipe. VisitAruba also says the recipe “often varies”. Its own version uses cranberry juice, while Wikipedia and aruba.com use lemon. You pick one and hope it matches the glass you liked at the bar.
• Technique. The same recipe says to shake for one to two minutes. That’s fine for one glass and tiring for a group.

Rum punch is no easier to pin down: our Aruba rum punch guide compares several published versions, and the Aruba Ariba guide covers that drink’s story and variations if you want to try your hand. With our jugs, the measuring is done once, for the whole jug, by a professional bartender, so the last glass tastes like the first. The Beach Bash, for example, pours Aruba Rum Punch, Margarita, Mojito, Piña Colada and Aruba Ariba.

DIY drinks vs. delivered cocktail jugs: an honest comparison

Here is how the two options compare for a group outing. We’ve left a price out of the DIY column on purpose, because what you spend depends on what you buy and how much is left over.

	Doing it yourself	Bartender Aruba jugs
Shopping	Liquor, juices, fruit and mixers, with quantities guessed	None: the cocktails arrive mixed
Carrying	Bottles, cartons, fruit and bar tools	The jugs, each 1 gallon
Making the drinks	Measure, shake and pour every round	Pour from the jug
Who works during the party	Whoever volunteered	Nobody has to run a bar
Consistency	Depends on the round and the pourer	Same batch from first glass to last
Aruba’s own cocktails	Find Coecoei or a substitute, pick a recipe, hope	Mixed by a professional bartender
Choice of drinks	Anything you have ingredients for	Set packages, with swaps through the booking notes, confirmed by WhatsApp
Freshness	Made to order	Batched fresh the same day, best within 24 hours chilled
Cleanup	Shakers, jiggers, knives and pitchers	No pile of bar tools to wash
Cost	Depends on what you buy and what’s left	Packages from $95 (sample prices), 20% deposit online, balance on delivery

When doing it yourself is perfectly fine

Jugs aren’t the answer to every drink, and we’d rather say so. DIY wins in these cases:

• A couple of beers. If the plan is a cooler of beer on the beach, there’s nothing to mix. Balashi, which the Aruba Tourism Authority calls Aruba’s national beer, and its light lager Chill are easy picks.
• Two or three people. A bottle of wine or a simple rum and juice for a small group takes five minutes. You don’t need a package sized for a party.
• You enjoy mixing. For some people, making drinks is part of the vacation. If shaking cocktails at the villa is your idea of fun, go for it.
• You want drinks all week. Our jugs are best within 24 hours, so they suit one day or one party. A bottle you open over a week is a different purchase.

When it’s worth hiring a bartender in Aruba

The jugs earn their place once the group gets bigger or the spot gets harder to supply:

• Groups of six or more. That’s roughly where making rounds one by one turns into the job described above. Each jug pours roughly 8 to 10 cocktails.
• Beach days. A cooler with a few jugs is far less to haul than a portable bar.
• Boats. GetMyBoat says BYO is welcome on many private charters, so check the listing and ask the captain first. Our boat party guide covers what charters include.
• Villa parties. The host gets to be a guest. Our villa party guide has the rest of the planning.
• Mixed groups. If some guests don’t drink, the Zero-Proof package pours Virgin Mojito and Tropical Fruit Punch, which beats a can of soda.

Choose from our cocktail jug packages, where cocktails start at $150 and the alcohol-free option is $95 (sample prices). You pay a 20% non-refundable deposit online by card and add any flavor swaps to the booking notes, which we confirm with you on WhatsApp. The bartender batches everything fresh that day, and you pay the balance to the bartender on delivery. The person booking must be 18 or older, which is also Aruba’s legal drinking age under a 2016 amendment, and we serve only guests of legal drinking age.