Lynam Up | Matthew Bax, Melbourne bartender, a flavour fiend out to ignite your sixth sense

Bartenders are often philosophers, and may consider themselves artists, but are seldom intellectuals.

Matthew Bax, who was in town recently to teach a master class for Hong Kong and Macau's entrants in the Diageo World Class international cocktail competition, is different.

Bax is an accountant by training, a painter by vocation, and a mixologist by accident.

Before he opened Melbourne's acclaimed Der Raum in 2001 he freely admits he knew little about cocktails other than he liked to drink them, and he thought a bar would be an easy business to run. His intention was not to mix drinks, but to come in late in the evening and count the money.

It didn't quite work out that way. "It was one of those scenarios where it's actually a really good thing not knowing anything," he says. "I had no idea what I was doing. Like most bars, at the start it was a real struggle. Just out of pure necessity I had to learn how to tend bar. Because I didn't know what I was doing, we were open to experimentation."

Bax's cocktails at Der Raum, which became one of the most acclaimed bars in Australia, often involved then relatively new molecular mixology techniques, including the use of foams, gelatin, liquid nitrogen, and smoke - although he says what many people principally remember about the bar was the bottles hanging from the ceiling.