for those who don’t know, a muddler is a small wooden baton used by bartenders to smush (muddle) friut for drinks. to my knowige they are always painted red and after about a week or two the paint starts to flake off. it gets to the poing that there is no paint left on the muddler at all. why even paint them?
Flavoring? Decorative paint chips in your fruit drinks?
does anyone know the answer?
I did a search for “muddler bartender” on Google and most of the wooden ones I saw looked like they were’s just painted red but instead had a cherry stain with a high-gloss finish on them. One of the sites that had them for sale said it was “alcohol proof” so perhaps the paint (or the finish) keeps the “traditional” wooden muddler from soaking up the liquid which contains acid (from the fruit) which can probably turn it to mush.
On one site, they had listed under the wooden muddler a “sanitary plastic muddler”… so I bet bartenders are catching on to your flaking paint phenomenon.
Sorry I couldn’t be much more help.
One other WAG…it seems like a muddler is known for it’s use in Old Fashioned’s and really “hard core” and “old school” bartenders use it. Thus I would venture to believe it’s more of a traditional item than a a really necessary one and perhaps it’s got to be made out of wood because that’s the way it’s always been done. One site had a really old, traditional Brazilian drink recipe and said if you’re real hard core, you’ll substitute your muddler for a club you’d use to kill fish with (sorry I don’t know the name).
So anyway, in conjunction with my previous post, a muddler is traditionally wood and you can’t just use unfinished wood all day when smashing up fruit, so it’s got to be covered by SOMETHING and the red paint and finish is it.
Still not a definitive answer but I’m grasping here 
The sites I checked indicated that they are made of wood so they won’t scratch the glass.