I’d like to see that thing in action

Main Street bar mixes it up with unique cocktail shaker
Kendra MeinertUSA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

Darrell Greig has installed the Steampunk Cocktail Shaker, a hand-crank cocktail mixing machine, at Standard & Co., 1139 Main Street in Green Bay.
When James Bond uttered his signature "shaken, not stirred" catchphrase, he probably didn't have the Steampunk Cocktail Shaker in mind.

How could he? It's a creation so new even 007's gadget guru Q would be impressed.

"There's no other one in the world. This is the first and only one since the milkshake machines," said Darrell Greig, who had his built from an 1800s drawing just for his The Standard & Co. Bar. at 1139 Main St. in Green Bay.

The hand-cranked contraption can mix two craft cocktails at once without the bartender breaking a sweat. Ingredients and ice are poured into wide-mouth Mason jars that are secured on a platform that rapidly goes up and down when the bartender puts one hand on the crank and the other on a safety handlebar. A refurbished gear off an antique farm implement — perhaps from an old corn shucker or butter churn — another smaller gear, a flywheel and more than a splash of engineering ingenuity turn mixing a drink into something of a performance art.

"When you start it up, everyone in the bar just looks at you. When you're mixing it, the spotlight is on you," said bartender Sarah Soyk, who finds herself occasionally demonstrating it with just water and ice and a splash of grenadine to satisfy curious customers wondering what the heck it is.

Since installing it earlier this month, it has gotten a lot of second looks and a lot of questions. That's the whole idea, Greig said.

"Something to be fun, something to catch people's eye. When it lights up at night, people all want to know what's going on. They think it's crazy," Greig said. "... People love it. They giggle."

Sarah Soyk uses the Steampunk Shaker to make the Green Eyed Devil and Steve McQueen cocktails at Standard & Co., 1139 Main Street in Green Bay.
It all came about because Greig, who also owns The [censored] & Bull Publick House on Main Street, was paging through his library of 500 food and beverage books for inspiration a year ago when he ran across an 1895 pencil drawing of a 51/2-foot shaker that mounted on the floor. He discovered someone in Australia has made a new, high-end version that's for sale for a whopping $35,000 through Nieman Marcus.


Eventually his research led him to the counter-top, hand-crank milkshake mixers found in apothecaries in the late 1800s. He used those as a model for building his own.

Armed with nothing more than two gears and a couple of photos he had taken of his TV screen showing a similar gadget on an episode of TV's "Pawn Stars," he went to visit owner Denny Brotski of nearby Riverside Welding Co.

"I said, 'Denny, we've got to make this.' And surprisingly, he was crazy and said yes," Greig said.

Brotski, who does everything from work for the paper mills to fixing children's bikes, was up for the challenge.

Darrell Greig, owner of The Standard & Co. Bar, was inspired by milkshake mixers from the late 1800s to early 1900s to make his cocktail shaker. He plans to have seven more made to ship to craft cocktail clubs in Las Vegas and San Francisco.
"It was an ambitious project, but it looked like a fun project," he said. "There was no blueprint. It was just a picture and two gears. It was like a puzzle. You just put the pieces together and see how they fit."

The shaker looks deceivingly simple, but Brotski said there's a healthy dose of "backyard engineering" to it.

The trick was to get it to balance so it would turn smoothly. A flywheel opposite of the crankshaft provides the necessary counterbalance. Brotski and Greig, who also called upon the expertise of New Tech Metals in New Franken, put together and took apart the 40-pound machine a half-dozen times over the course of five months to fine tune it. To their surprise, there were no major glitches.

"It works like a million bucks," Greig said.

"There's a better way to shake a drink," Brotski said. "You could have motorized it and made it modern, but that takes the fun out of it. This one is more of a novelty."

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It's mounted on an oak platform on the bar, rather than behind it, so that customers have a front-row stool to see it in action.

"People want to see the show," said Greig, who put LED lights underneath to illuminate it at night.

To the dismay of Bond, James Bond, The Standard, which is known for an extensive offering of martinis with such names as the Dirty Girl Scout, Scooby Snack, Almond Joy and Fuzzy Flamingo, doesn't use the shaker for its martinis. The bar simply makes too many of them to do each one that way, Greig said.

Instead, he created a menu of five long drinks (cocktails served in a tall glass) exclusively for the shaker. There's a custom margarita, the Steve McQueen, named so because it's made with Bulleit Bourbon, and a pineapple and coconut-flavored rum concoction called the Green-Eyed Devil.

"I named that after an old girlfriend," Greig says of the latter.

Steampunk Cocktail Shaker menu at Standard & Co.
All the shaker drinks, which sell for $8.50 each, are mixed with juice. Anything made with soda would fizz all over when the lid is taken off the Mason jar.

Greig has managed to round up seven more of the hard-to-find large antique gears on the Internet. That means he can have Brotski make seven more of the shakers. He's sending emails to the top 10 craft cocktails bars in New York, San Francisco and Dallas as well as a couple in Las Vegas to see if he gets a bite. His price tag for each: $3,500.

DC she can mix me anything she wants!

Uh huh.

Stirred, Not shaken. Says 007.

Ummm.....

That's what she......nevermind.