Travelling to about 30 countries every year, paid to talk to bartenders about vodka, consuming cocktails every night of the week and meeting people from all over the world.
It's a life that Jacob Briars, 42 Below's "vodka professor", stumbled across after taking up a job in a bar while completing his law studies in Wellington.
Working at The Matterhorn, Mr Briars (31) said it wasn't long before he was hooked on hospitality.
"Much to my parents' disgust . . . bartending became intoxicating, excuse the pun.
"The history of spirits goes back 1000 years and cocktails go back 200 years - the more I got into this, the more training I used to do.
"I was working at the Matterhorn in Wellington and Geoff Ross, the founder of 42 Below, came along to one of the trainings."
It was nothing short of fate, with Mr Ross impressed with what Mr Briars was doing, inviting him to join the 42 Below team in 2002 as a part-timer.
Three years later, Mr Briar went full time with the world-renowned vodka company and hasn't looked back since.
"It's definitely enjoyable. These days I'm probably the face of the company, I'm the face of 42 Below abroad. We're very, very export focused, New Zealand has a very strong market in China, the US, UK and Asia.
"I'm the person that gets sent around to do bartender training and tastings. A significant part of my job is going to the US and explaining where New Zealand is."
For most of us, drinking cocktails is something of a novelty and more about sipping on pretty drinks than analysing what our livers are about to process.
But Mr Briars said there was a fine art to making and understanding cocktails.
"It's not just about getting drunk. Once you start paying attention to what you're drinking, it's like being in a restaurant.
"When you're just drinking . . . on a Friday night, you don't see all the work and passion which goes into it."
Bartenders, he says, are really chefs who work with liquid, spending months trying to perfect their cocktail recipes.
The cocktail is the food equivalent of desert - it's not many chefs who walk into a restaurant and get the recipe right the first time.
Trial, error and tasting are what separates the best from the rest - and 45 of the best are about to arrive in Queenstown to compete for the 2008 42 Below Cocktail World Cup title.
The CWC is now in its fifth year and proudly calls Queenstown home, Mr Briars said.
Its recipe for success is a combination of many factors - not least of which is the destination.
"New Zealand is both very, very familiar and incredibly foreign to people. For vodka itself, 42 Below is built on the New Zealand environment.
"When you do it here, it brings it back to the wildness and untouched nature of the environment which is a big part of the 42 Below story.
"Queenstown is a town where just about anything goes, except for drinking after 4am.
"We would never be allowed to have people bungy jumping and going down [a river in] a jet-boat [while making cocktails] anywhere else in the world.
"We try to make it as fun as possible because this is a town that's been pretty good to us.
"We effectively take over the bars and restaurants for a week."
And while fun is a big part of what makes 42 Below's signature event a success, in the end it is all about the competition.
"Last year's winners, Las Vegas, they're known across the US as being three of the best bartenders across the country," said Mr Briars.
"They shipped out several thousand dollars of equipment to The Heritage as soon as they knew they were coming."
"This is one of the biggest stages in the world to showcase new trends."
Mr Briars said that some teams would probably spend three or four months perfecting their recipe, others perhaps a month.
He said the only major change to this year's event was the invitations-only Cocktail World Cup Final, which has been held in Earnslaw Park for the past two years.
It became very difficult to hold the event in public, with crowds jamming Earnslaw Park last year, spilling on to Beach St while waiting to be admitted to the fenced-off area.
Mr Briars said that they could have filled the park 10 times over, but "if we moved [the final] to a much bigger venue, we would lose the feeling".
