New golden age of cocktails stirs SLO County nightlife
It’s four hours before opening, but Josh Christensen and his staff are already hard at work behind the bar at Sidecar Cocktail Co. in San Luis Obispo.
They’re infusing spirits, shaking up shrubs, making tinctures, simmering syrups and blending up a batch of the house sour mix. That’s what it takes when your cocktail list is 60-drinks strong, and you make most of your mixers and syrups in house.
The display is evidence we’ve entered a new golden age of cocktails, where bartenders have been elevated to mixologists, handcrafted is the standard of the day and drinks can be the star of the menu.
Cocktail culture now defines nightlife in cities across the country, with places like San Francisco and Portland becoming meccas for artisan, hipster drinks. Spirit sales have outperformed wine and beer in recent years, and cocktail spots around San Luis Obispo County appear to be thriving.
“People are looking for the next new thing,” said Christensen, who always has to be ready to top his last creation. “New flavor combos, something fresh and untested.”
With liqueurs and inspiration pouring in from around the globe and over social media, there’s a cocktail for just about any taste or occasion. But cocktails aren’t just about the flavors — they’re also about the show.
“People come to watch us work,” said Benny Regan, bar manager at Mason Bar in Arroyo Grande. “They’re seeing exactly what’s going in their drink. They see the TLC. It’s not just throwing alcohol in a glass.”
From North to South, here are four spots contributing to the cocktail revolution in SLO County.
La Cosecha
835 12th St., Paso Robles
La Cosecha’s cocktail menu offers up new concoctions for every season, a half-dozen signature elixirs, a handful of barrel-aged libations and a solid roster of resurrected classics. But the bar’s mixologists are likely just to ask what you like and whip up a custom creation on the spot.
“It’s way more interesting than just making the same drink over and over,” said Nikki Corkins, a manager at the Latin-inspired bar and restaurant on Paso’s City Park.
Like bourbon? You might get a hand-picked selection from an up-and-coming small-batch producer mixed with Cynar artichoke liqueur, Benedictine, a drop of ginger, grapefruit, Luxardo cherries and housemade vanilla syrup that Corkins calls rock candy.
Looking for something more refreshing? Bar manager James Schank might mix up a cocktail with cucumber Pisco brandy, hibiscus rum — both infused in-house — egg white, rhubarb bitters and a half-dozen other ingredients that come together in perfectly balanced sour-yet-sweet sips.
If you’ve finished your meal, he may present a luxurious espresso martini, and if you’re coming in after a day of wine tasting, he’s likely to offer up a Ginfandel, made with Re:Find gin, dry vermouth, lemon juice, orgeat syrup and a Turley zinfandel float.
“It’s the perfect crossover drink,” Corkins said. “Your palate’s attuned to the zin, but the gin comes in and wakes you up and gets you ready to drink liquor.”
It’s a decidedly different focus in the heart of wine country, though La Cosecha still has an impressive list of Spanish, Argentinian, Chilean and high-end Paso wines.
Carole and Santos MacDonal, owners of the acclaimed Il Cortile Italian eatery a few blocks away, began to notice a new urban, hipster crowd coming to the area. Envisioning a spot open during the day, one where the mixology paired with the food, the pair capitalized on Santos’ Honduran background and three years ago opened La Cosecha, which means “harvest.”
The kitchen cooks up daily ceviches and paella, stone-fired pizzas, shared plates and entrees with spices and flavors from Central and South America — but the array of spirits doesn’t discriminate by geography.
Domestic, Scotch and Irish whiskeys, tequilas and mezcals, Peruvian piscos, Brazilian cachacas, gins, rums and liqueurs and bitters from every corner of the globe pack the bar shelves. There’s even an absinthe fountain for those wanting a taste of late 19th-century Bohemian culture.
Whiskey & June
5950 El Camino Real, Atascadero
A 75-year-old corner bar in Atascadero may seem an unlikely spot for the modern cocktail resurgence.
From 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. every day, patrons lean up against the pleather-padded bar or shoot pool on the two tables in back, spinning tunes from the Wurlitzer jukebox hanging alongside vintage beer signs.
Wines available: Red, white, pink and can-pagne, which is exactly what it sounds like: sparkling wine in a can, complete with a little red straw. On the menu? Gardettos snack mix, Corn Nuts and Slim Jims, $1 each.
But there’s also a respectable selection of canned beers, 135 whiskeys from around the world and a focused list of cocktails paying homage to the classics, brought in by Daniel and Erin Green when they purchased the bar three years ago.
“I’m a pre-Prohibition kind of guy,” Daniel Green said.
He favors the savory, stirred cocktails, Manhattans, Old Fashioneds and Negronis, made with precision and without pretension.
He stresses the importance of measuring — “Proportion is key to a good cocktail,” he said — and maintains an old Rolodex with recipes and prep notes for all the cocktails a bartender might make.
As the name suggests, whiskey takes center stage at Green’s bar. The extensive list features selections from the United States, Ireland, Scotland and Japan — Green’s favorites right now — priced from $6 up to $48 per 2-ounce pour. Rare bottles of Pappy Van Winkle, when he can get his hands on them, go in a couple of days, even at $100 a serving.
He also mixes up big batches of crowd-pleasers like Moscow Mules and Manhattans, offering them on draft using an old soda dispenser.
“It’s the wave of the future,” Green said. “Being able to offer a $6 Mule is a time-saver for a busy bartender.”
The Greens take their cocktails on the road, too. With a license allowing off-site catering, the pair refurbished a vintage trailer they roll out as a mobile bar for weddings and parties, with decor, garnishes and other touches customized to the occasion.
Back at home base, though, the Greens embrace the dive bar vibe. They made few changes to the place, other than painting and putting a bear skin on the ceiling. The old corner booths remain, and 1970s-era Playboy covers back the menus, where unlike the ceiling tiles, the drink stains are intentional.
“It’s an antique really,” Daniel Green said. “The big cities are all about dive bars now. People are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to recreate this.”
Sidecar Cocktail Co.
1127 Broad St., San Luis Obispo
A 12-page cocktail menu detailing 60-some drinks might be overwhelming to some customers. But Josh Christensen welcomes the reaction.
“It gives us a chance to interact with the customer,” he said. “With just a few good questions, I guarantee we can find something for everyone.”
That something might be a funky combination you’ve never seen before. Take the K-Bomb: sesame-infused gin and kimchi/miso shrub with cucumber and pineapple. Or Ya Thai-Ness: coconut/Thai-chile infused rum, chile vodka, lime syrup, pineapple, half-and-half and yellow curry. Sunday Morning Cartoons combines rum and cognac with marshmallow root bitters and Lucky Charms-infused milk.
“There’s plenty of room for serious cocktails,” Christensen said. “We wanted to have fun with a couple of them.”
When Christensen bought the place in 2013, there were only 14 or 15 drinks on the menu. As he and his staff have brought in new products and expanded the drink list, they’ve brought the patrons along, too.
“People weren’t nearly as comfortable branching out a couple years ago,” he said. “Now people are demanding crazy new stuff every time they come in.”
It’s a request he’s happy to oblige. For the longtime bartender, cocktails are a creative outlet, requiring a chef-like understanding of how flavors work together.
“With beer and wine, you crack the bottle and that’s what you’ve got,” he said. “Cocktails are like alchemy. You can create something totally different.”
The magic starts with making as many ingredients in house as possible. Sidecar makes 16 syrups, 12 tinctures and bitters, 10 infused liquors, four shrubs, allspice dram and a house sour mix.
“If we’re gonna do flavored vodkas, we’re going to do it ourselves,” Christensen said.
Plans to expand into the space next door recently fell through, but Christensen has his eye on a nearby spot he hopes to move into within a year or so. He’d like to have a bigger lounge area, as well as outdoor seating, and relishes the thought of building his bar from the ground up.
As he continues to expand the bar offerings, Christensen has been working to refine the food menu, paring it down from 50 or so dishes when he took over to about a dozen he feels they can pull off well.
“This town doesn’t need another place to get a burger,” he said. “We want to offer a focused menu of shareable plates that pair really well with our drinks.”
Mason Bar
307 E. Branch St., Arroyo Grande
Cocktails weren’t even in the initial plans for Mason Bar — it was beer and wine only. But manager Dustin Winkelpleck had been playing around with barrel-aging cocktails at home, and when the opportunity for a liquor license came along, he persuaded the owners to let him try them out.
“It took off like crazy,” he said. “We’ve got a very speakeasy style, and it went along with that.”
The cocktails — bourbon and Campari with Amaro di Angostura bitters is one recent combo — age for about six weeks in 5-liter American oak barrels, where flavors meld together, blend with the oak and smooth out.
“It does the same thing it does for wine,” bar manager Benny Regan said.
There’s a half-dozen sitting on the shelf now, though Winkelpleck is aiming to offer more soon. And if you can’t find one that suits you, you can get your own 2-liter barrel with a custom-made cocktail to enjoy whenever you come in.
Mason Bar shakes up the rest of its lineup seasonally to take advantage of ingredients they can get locally — often just across the street at the Saturday morning farmers market. The makings of a lavender syrup came from Winkelpleck’s mom’s garden. The Rabbit Chaser — Mason Bar’s version of a Greyhound — uses fresh, pressed-to-order farmers market grapefruits, and Winkelpleck has been honing a grapefruit-cello recipe.
“I thought I hated grapefruit,” he said. “The difference between canned and fresh is night and day.”
Classic cocktails are the basis for most of the drinks.
“They’re oldies but goodies for a reason,” Regan said, but there’s usually a twist.
“It’s fun to take something and make it your own,” says Winkelpleck. “There are so many great ingredients out there, so you take one out and sub another in and see what new flavors you can bring out.”
The bar carries about 50 whiskeys, which Winklepleck hopes to double when the eatery, just over a year old, completes an expansion into the space next door that will more than double its size.
He’s seeing a rising interest in gin, too, and creating converts from those who don’t think they like the liquor by whipping up tasty concoctions like the St. Swagger, with St. Germaine, muddled cucumber and cranberry juice.
But in modern mixology, where imagination and artistry reign supreme, that chance to create a convert comes with every shake of the mixer.
“Putting together a cocktail that will put a smile on people’s face — that’s the name of the game,” Regan said.
This story was originally published September 2, 2016 at 3:42 PM with the headline "New golden age of cocktails stirs SLO County nightlife."