Meet the Cool Guys who keep your drinks frozen all summer
A ride-along with the 'tropical mental attitude' of frozen machine repair
The first reassuring thing to know about the repairman that comes to fix your bar’s frozen drink machine is that he shows up bearing several tattoos that read “tropical mental attitude."
It’s a riff on the classic Bad Brains song "Positive Mental Attitude,” a slogan the repairman, Austin Hartman, 37, took and “kinda just Jimmy Buffetted it,” he told The Groove. The other reassuring thing comes in the form of other tattoos, including at least five shark pieces. Those were inspired by his time catching, tagging and swimming with sharks in Southern California. It can make the high-stakes, quick-turnover, always-something-breaking world of bars seem a little less stressful.
A few weeks ago, I met Hartman for a repair-job ride along of sorts for his company the Cool Guys, at a bar in South Slope, Brooklyn. When I arrived, he had already made a diagnosis.
“The brain is not functioning,” he said of the faulty machine behind the bar.
I had heard frozen machine repair work like the kind Hartman does was in high demand, especially as more bars add frozen drinks, and the weather keeps getting hotter. When I met him, it was a sweltering July day, and my 10-minute bike ride to the bar left me drenched, parched and craving a frozen drink, even though it was barely lunch time. But the frozen machines at the bar — an indoor/outdoor lot across from Green-Wood Cemetery recently reopened as Brooklyn Backyard — weren’t spinning any frosty concoctions today. Which brings us back to the diagnosis, and the reason for the call.
Hartman explained that the lungs of the machine (the compressor) and the heart (the contactors) — appeared to be fine. The circuit board — the brains — was the issue. Hartman had taken the back panel off the machine and was poking around.
Frozen machines are finicky things, a pain to clean and the bane of some bartenders. They can break down or buckle under the heat of a busy summer day. Few feelings are as disappointing as waiting for a frozen margarita and being handed a cup of melted green goo instead.
They’re also mad expensive: a basic machine can run $2,500; higher-end ones can cost up to $14,000. Cheaper versions — what Hartman derogatorily called “Temu machines” — can cost more in parts and repair than the initial purchase. The bar we met at, Brooklyn Backyard, had Spaceman machines, what Hartman called the “Cadillacs” of the industry.
Frozen machines are also difficult to fix on the fly. If an ice machine goes down, you can borrow a couple buckets from another restaurant on the street; if the frozen machine goes down, nothing is going to freeze again for a while, and the tropical vibe takes a hit for the whole day.
“Every machine is a challenge,” Hartman said. “They’re all puzzles.”
Hartman parlayed a career running bars around the city into one repairing frozen drink machines about five years ago. When he’s not repairing machines, he’s a deckhand on charter ships and sailboats that set to sea from the Hudson River. He plans to take the captain’s test soon. The two career lanes opened up about the same time: he used to run Paradise Lounge, a rum-focused bar in Ridgewood, which closed during the pandemic. At the same time, a friend who knew that Hartman enjoyed riding motorized boats in California asked if he would be interested in learning sailing.
“I was pretty in the dumps about Paradise closing and it was like, ‘you need a happy thing right now,’ ” he said. “Also, it was the only thing you could do during COVID.”
Learning to fix frozen machines was a consequence of owning a bar that used frozen machines, he said.
“Fuck it, I’m gonna learn how to do it myself,” he recalled. “As an owner, I was like, ‘I don't want to pay somebody.’ ”
He soon realized there was crossover between boat skills and frozen machine engineering. He brought on one other employee from the boat — a fellow “seapunk,” in his words — and might soon hire another member of the boat crew for the repair team too.
“Boat folk, sailors, are proficient in electrical and plumbing,” he said. “Which are two things I needed to do here.”
Rates vary widely by situation but they can run up to a few hundred dollars a job. Some days, he said, he can just phone it in, literally, diagnosing a problem over the phone and ordering a part from a special website. Other times require a house call and digging around in the machine.
This particular machine on our call was already on its third visit, but the problem seemed to be on the mend. Hartman noted that someone else had already taken the back panel off the machine.
“Opening the back of this up, I don’t know if you guys did it, it’s fucking brilliant,” he told Andre Martinez, the bar’s director of operations. The machines need to breathe sometimes, he said.
“It generates a lot of fucking heat,” Martinez said.
By some accounts, frozen drinks are getting more popular across the city, part of the craft cocktail movement and the resurgence of tiki bars. Part of it is maybe the aesthetic appeal of posting a picture of a well-poured frozen drink on a hot day; part of it is that summer seems to be getting longer all the time; everyone in this city should be living that subtropical mental attitude already. Winter frozen drinks have taken root in recent years too.
“The category has transcended its ‘fun in the sun’ seasonal nature and we put the same effort into seasonality of category as our non-frozen menu,” Bar Prima beverage director Josh Nadel told Vinepair in February.
Hartman has some favorite frozen drinks: “You can’t fuck with a spicy mezcal margarita,” he said. If a frozen drink is pouring improperly, Hartman said it’s probably because of the brix levels, the name for the sugar ratio.
“They just try to emulate what it is in the glass,” he said. “And that does not translate to a frozen machine.”
But like many punks approaching 40, he doesn’t drink as much at home any more.
“We have a massive collection of vintage rums,” he said. “It’s just collecting dust.”
Instead, the proverbial drink — the open seas — is his biggest pressure release these days.
“Just raising sails and making sure the ship is right, it’s my biggest joy,” he said. “I can work a thousand hours and if I get 10, 16 hours on the water, I just totally reset.”
With 15 years in the local bar industry, he gets jobs through referrals, through bar-owner groups and the like. His competition is local HVAC companies but sometimes they’ll send business his way too. He managed to get at least one seapunk paradise on his roster, fixing the machines at Rippers on the boardwalk in Rockaway Beach.
“Ah, I have to go to the beach at 8 a.m. and hang out?” he joked. I mentioned another beach bar that famously has frozen drinks and his demeanor quickly turned serious, saying that wasn’t one of his gigs.
“They have a guy,” he said. “It’s kind of locally unionized over there.”
Hartman replaced the back of the Spaceman frozen machine and closed up the job for the day. As it happens, I was able to check in on his work this Monday: I had plans with FOB (fiancé of the blog) Callie to see a Rooftop Films event at Green-Wood Cemetery. It had been postponed from Friday, due to heat and rain, and Monday’s temperature was still cooking hard, but the event was on.
I decided to take our weekly New York Groove meeting from the bar across the street, Brooklyn Backyard. I pulled up and ordered a frozen margarita from the machine. The bartender pulled the handle and a perfect snake of frozen margarita flowed out, filling a jar glass. The refreshment was instant, and the freeze was perfect. At our meeting, I discussed writing this very story while enjoying the flawless consistency of a summer margarita.
Later, FOB Callie showed up and got us a second round as the meeting wrapped up. There was, however, a miscommunication and she returned with margaritas on the rocks, not frozen. They were, to put it politely, really terrible. The freeze made a world of difference.
I tried to coordinate another ride-along with Hartman and his crew, but he said his schedule had been wild lately, “especially in this heat.”
The spread of frozen drinks might be a fad, or it might be a sign of climate doom to come. Hartman and I had jokingly talked about our apocalypse plans for fleeing the city should anything short of total nuclear annihilation occur. His answer was full of tropical mental attitude: “Get to any boat as fast as possible.”
Contact the Cool guys here: Callthecoolguys@gmail.com.
The Groove
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