It’s time to say “Bye, Bye, Bye” to boring cocktails because two ’NSync heartthrobs are officially serving up something new for fans.
Lance Bass and Joey Fatone are back together, shaking things up as the hosts of E!’s new series Cocktail Wars, judging amateur bartenders battling it out one splash, muddle and sip at a time. But the hosts aren’t just handing out judgment — they’re picking up on a few lessons of their own.
“We thought we knew cocktails until we started doing this show.” Bass, 47, exclusively told Us during the premiere of the cocktail competition. “By the end of the season we knew something,” Fatone added, with Bass summing up their expertise as merely the two being “fake experts”.
While the world memorized their harmonies and choreography (frosted tips and goatees included), Bass and Fatone say they were also learning their way around a cocktail menu while on the road with the band. “We’ve toured around the world, gone to many different states in America as well, and tried a lot of cocktails,” Fatone said, reminiscing about the time spent sampling favorites and flops along the way. “We had our fair share of other different cocktails, what we like, what we didn’t like.”
But one particular spirit the singer says he couldn’t quite get behind was gin. Fatone revealed that he spent most of his life avoiding the tipple entirely, only to have a change of heart while filming the show. “I would never really drink gin. I never liked [it]” Fatone, 49, told Us. “But a lot of the actual drinks that people have made in this competition, I like gin [now], crazy.”
Turns out he’s not the only one who underwent a gin conversion on set. Professional mixologist Melissa Brooke, who joined the host on the season’s challenges, revealed she’s responsible for turning Bass into a fan of the liquor, adding that Fatone also picked up on an “affinity” for blackberry whiskey during filming.
Their taste in spirits isn’t the only thing that has evolved. Back on tour, Fatone says he would keep his order simple with a rum and Coke, and Bass admits he was loyal to Jack and Coke — but these days they say it’s less about the order and more about the ritual behind it. “I think I enjoy the experience of getting with friends and having a cocktail, and just that experience is different now at an older age than just being young and just being like ‘get me drunk!’” Bass told Us.
For Fatone, observing competitors on the show has made him something of an amateur mixologist. “There’s a lot of science to a lot of this stuff,” he said. “Now I’m like literally going to the bar going ‘Do I taste that?’, ‘Excuse me, is there a wash line?’, ‘What are they using in there?’ [and] ‘What is that’?”
Each episode of Cocktail Wars brings in a batch of mixologists who go head-to-head in themed challenges, with a $10,000 prize on the line and judges weighing in on creativity and presentation as much as taste. For Brooke, who has led Michelin-starred restaurants with her bartending talents, admitted she even found the competition to be fierce. “I don’t know that I would want to be a contestant on the show,” she told Us, singling out the season’s stencil challenge as one she wouldn’t dare attempt despite years of professional experience. “I even further recognize [now] how difficult the job is that I do for a living,” she added.
Among this season’s guest judges, drag icon Peppermint said stepping into the competition alongside the hosts was an easy yes, but when it came to judging, she made her standards clear almost immediately. “I’d rather the drink look good and taste bad than taste good and look horrible,” she told Us.
Cocktail Wars premieres August 18 at 10 P.M. ET/PT on E! and features a rotating cast of famous faces joining Bass, Fatone, and Brooke as guest judges, including political commentator Rachel Maddow, RHONJ star Melissa Gorga, actor Seth Green, and RHONY alums Sonja Morgan and Ramona Singer.
