Society of Cocktails presents: Memory Bar 2025

ArtHouse Jersey is delighted to announce details of this year’s edition of Society of Cocktails: Memory Bar, the Island’s acclaimed immersive mixology-meets-performance experience.

This year’s event will take place inside the private artist studio of celebrated Jersey painter Jason Butler, transforming an active creative workspace into a site of theatrical drinking.

Since its inception, Society of Cocktails: Memory Bar, conceived and directed by Thomas Buckley, has become a flagship of ArtHouse Jersey’s programme: a
collaborative, creative approach to cocktails in which story, scenography and flavour are combined to create one live artwork experience. Previous editions (Memory Bar, The Aurelian, The Hunting of the Wren) have sold out, each reinventing the form with new narrative worlds built through taste, light, language and design.

Jersey’s memories, distilled into cocktails

This year’s edition of Memory Bar continues a long-form body of work by lead artist Buckley, who has spent six years gathering lived memories as creative material. In September 2025, islanders were invited to ‘lend’ a memory in a 20-minute one-to-one conversation, from the monumental to the seemingly mundane, stories of travel, allotments, first kisses, bus rides to hospital, or eating ice cream in the rain. These encounters were gently documented through photo, voice and video, not as interviews but as human conversations. A selection of these borrowed fragments will now be interpreted and distilled into bespoke cocktails to be served publicly in November, transforming private recollection into a shared, sensorial artwork while honouring the artists’ central belief that the everyday becomes magical when looked at closely enough.

Working with a small team of mixologists, technicians and artists, including Kate Phillips who collaborated on earlier Society of Cocktails projects in Jersey, Buckley will create a new 90-minute seated experience for this year’s audience: three bespoke cocktails, a narrative score in sound and text, and the unique intimacy of encountering the work inside Jason Butler’s working studio, a rarely accessible environment that becomes itself a character within the evening.

Audiences can expect:

• A welcome drink on arrival
• Three original cocktails crafted exclusively for this edition
• Immersive dramaturgy in sound, light, object and temperature
• A one-of-a-kind venue: Jason Butler’s private studio in St Helier
• Limited capacity and table-only seating for an uninterrupted experience

“Society of Cocktails is not a bar, it’s a story you drink your way through” says Thomas Buckley. “Staging it inside Jason’s studio lets us fold an artist’s lived working environment into the experience, so the room becomes part of the ritual.”