The Kimpton hotel brand opened The Journeyman in the Historic Third Ward, providing the chilly city with a rare, year-round rooftop bar, The Outsider. In 2018, bartenders Joey Houghtaling and Mike McDonald founded Beaker & Flask Beverage Co., Milwaukee’s own purveyor of cocktail ice. The latter recently opened the Bittercube Bar & Bazaar, a one-of-a-kind complex that encompasses a bitters- making facility, a bar and a retail store. Milwaukee is home to its own makers of specialty mixers and bitters, Top Note and Bittercube, respectively. It’s a formula that has allowed the city’s cocktail community to achieve remarkable things. We’re just going to find a way to have a good time and drink on the water.” The Yardbird at The Jazz Estate features blanco tequila, grapefruit liqueur, lime and cava.Īt bar after bar in today’s Milwaukee, many in the popular Walker’s Point and Bay View neighborhoods, you’ll find formulas similar to that of Lost Whale and Snack Boys-thoughtful and lovingly made cocktails matched with humor, humility and hospitality. “That, to me, describes us as a people better than anything. “I came across a group on Facebook that’s got more than 12,000 people from Wisconsin, Michigan and Illinois who go out and whale watch on Lake Michigan,” says Duval. The bar’s curious name came from an old article Duval found about an April Fool’s joke regarding a whale sighting in Lake Michigan. There’s some actual Jolly Good fruit punch in there, along with bourbon, rye, amaretto and two kinds of bitters. One of the most popular drinks at Lost Whale, the Oops Not Berry’s, is served in an emptied can of Jolly Good, an old regional soda brand recognizable to any Wisconsinite. “They build outlandish, fun cocktails, but they do it in a way that makes people feel comfortable,” he says. In June 2018, the duo opened Lost Whale, a nautical-leaning bar with a midcentury modern feel, in the old Boone & Crockett space. He cites Daniel Beres and Tripper Duval as examples. So do most of my friends.”īut Elmergreen thinks bar owners have slowly hacked out a winding path to the heart of Cream City’s drinkers. “Milwaukee has always been its own entity,” says Joe Elmergreen, bar director and general manager at Morel, a restaurant that hosts whiskey dinners and employs a local forager named Mushroom Mike. A combination of blue-collar roots, a love of tradition and an aversion to highfaluting airs makes the population almost impervious to persuasion.

The modern cocktail revival is rife with stories of bartenders knocking down barriers, riding into uncharted markets and convincing set-in-their-ways drinkers to try something new. “The twirly-moustache, super-serious, scoffing at someone who doesn’t know an off-brand of amaro”-not his thing. “We take a corner-bar approach to cocktails,” says Revord, who grew up bouncing between bar stools: Both his mother and father were bartenders. Among them, “No, we won’t turn down the jams,” and, “The lights are fine.” A list of sardonic “rules” is written in large letters near the door. A larger-than-life blow-up of Burt Reynolds’ 1972 Cosmopolitan centerfold hangs on the wall. The slogan of Snack Boys, which opened last January, might well be “Unpretentious Drinks Without the Pretention.” Cocktails with names like LaCroix Boy and Alpine Hippie Juice are spelled out behind the bar in jumbo, multicolored refrigerator magnets. So to disarm that ingrained skepticism at the door, Revord posted a chalkboard message near the entrance: “Pretentious Drinks Without the Pretention.” Beer, shots, brandy Old Fashioneds, Tom & Jerrys-they figured out a solid working regimen long ago. Milwaukeeans have a historically prodigious thirst, but they’re suspicious of change and jeer at trends. But the owners knew what they were up against. There was no masking what Boone was when it opened: It was a craft-cocktail bar.

Only seven years old, Boone & Crockett can still count itself one of the granddaddies of Milwaukee’s cocktail scene, which, even by the most generous standards, is barely a decade old.

He’s just crossed the few blocks from his other property, Boone & Crockett, a cocktail bar that recently moved from its home on South Kinnickinnic Avenue to vastly expanded digs along a river, also called Kinnickinnic. John Revord walked into Snack Boys, the Milwaukee bar he owns with Mitch Ciohon.

Milwaukee hidden bar