The Spare Room

cocktails at The Spare Room

With the flurry of trends in the cocktail world, you'd be hard-pressed to guess which will have staying power. Take barrel-aging. Yes, it's super cool to get your nightly cocktail from a barrel with provenance, but is it really relevant anymore?

With barrels now available to the home bar geek, distillers barrel-aging and bottling their boozy recipes, and barrel-aged cocktails appearing in even more experimental combinations across the country, barrel-aging seems destined to age quite well.

So, what exactly is this mysterious process? Not so mysterious at all, really. Booze has been in barrels for centuries. During the Golden Era of the cocktail in the late 19th century, Jerry Thomas -- the ultimate bartender/showman -- was aging rum shrub in casks for about six weeks, as well as bottling many of his cocktails, most likely for easy storage and batching drinks. At the turn of the century, 1910 adverts from the Heublein Company touted their bottled cocktails first being aged in wood; these Club Cocktails were popular even into the 1960s.

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Anne Fishbein

Cocktails at the Varnish

Hot on the heels of last year's Best American Cocktail Bar award at Tales of the Cocktail, The Varnish is this year a finalist for World's Best Cocktail Bar, along with 9 other finalists. Eric Alperin, who leads the crew at The Varnish, is also up for American Bartender of the Year.

Other L.A. finalists:

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Christine Chiao

Cocktails at Vertical Wine Bistro (L-R: The Old-Fashioned and The Lolita)

Place: Vertical Wine Bistro, 70 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena; (626) 795-3999.

Hours: Tues.-Sat., 4 p.m.-7 p.m. All day Sunday.

Deals: Eleven food options include truffled mac-n-cheese, charcuterie and sliders, ranging from $5 to $10. Cocktails are $7 to $8, which include blueberry lemonade and Kir Royale. A handful of beer and wine options like Listel Rosé and Paulaner are $5 to $8.

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Freddy Smalls

the Conejo at Freddy Smalls

Freddy Smalls Bar + Kitchen has a pared-down cocktail menu courtesy of its new director Johan Stein, who trained under Noah Ellis at Red Medicine and Julian Cox of Picca, Sotto, and Rivera, among others. The cocktails were soft-launched in mid-February.

Stein came up with eight cockails to replace the previous 12 after looking into what was selling at the bar and taking into consideration Freddy Smalls' location, size and ambiance.

"I wanted to strip it down. I try to keep the menu as simple as possible. Approachable and clean," he says.

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Sarah Bennett

For many bars, happy hour means rock-bottom prices for stiff well drinks that could peel paint off the walls. But plastic-bottle vodka isn't for everyone. Besides, any two-for-one deal on Kentucky Gentleman is likely to leave you stuck calling a cab. Instead, take advantage of beer-focused happy hours, where you can maintain your legal driving limit while still having a few. And don't settle for the fizzy yellow stuff. If you're going to drink discounted beer with discounted food, it might as well be quality discounted beer, right? Right.

We scoured this burgeoning craft beer city for the best places to visit during those magical early-evening hours. Behold, our five favorite spots where tasty microbrews are poured at PBR prices.

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Anne Fishbein

cocktails at The Varnish

If you're out on the town and you've got a drink in your hand, chances are that it's been made with a spirit you didn't ask for by name. Instead, the booze likely was selected by the bar manager as the place's go-to spirit for its class -- part of a collection known as "the well" because it usually stands in a convenient well just beneath the lip of the bar. Go ahead and peer over the edge: Just a quick glance at the set can tell you a lot about the place.

Traditionally, the well has been used to make cocktails that don't require a lot of effort or discernment: your rum and Cokes, your vodka and sodas, the low-hanging highballs that are the thruster engine of inebriation in your average watering hole. The well is also a repository of profit, with booze cheap enough to maximize the margin of a given drink.

But like everything else in the realm of serious drinking, the well is changing. These days, the well concept is more like three subconcepts: We'll call them the Stand-In, the Standby and a higher-end, more bespoke echelon reflecting the ambitions (and prices) of the new cocktail movement -- something we'll label the Call Well.

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Erika Bolden

By Sarah Bennett and Erika Bolden

When we went looking for all-day happy hours, geographic diversity was a priority. But striking patterns emerged -- namely, the bars most likely to discount booze beyond the typical late-afternoon hours were located mostly in 9-5 work destinations. In fact, from Santa Monica to downtown, all-day happy hours cling to I-10 so devotedly you'd think SigAlert determined the value of a drink. Venture into the Valley and, generally speaking, you'll find establishments serving cocktails and beer whose prices are unaffected by the inflation of the Westside. Often they don't call it happy hour there -- they just call it cheap.

So call all-day happy hour a gimmick if you want. Or call it a desperate attempt to lure office drones away from their work. But we're not complaining. In fact, we offer congratulations to those of you living or working somewhere along the I-10: You've got a really great excuse to start drinking now.

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Erika Bolden

Duke's

It can be easy to forget that L.A. is an oceanside city. Brutal traffic and busy schedules prevent regular visits to the coast. But having a destination in mind makes the Pacific more accessible -- and when that destination also features a happy hour discounting wine, cocktails, beer and the occasional appetizer, your excuses for staying inland get swept out to sea. The waves crash, the seagulls squawk, the sun sets and the salt air dances with an aromatic mai tai or pale ale. What's not to love?

Also captivating: the chance to observe a rare breed of beachgoer, to be found only in its natural habitat. Whether you're watching a theater of absurdities on the Venice Boardwalk or taking in the lofty Pacific view from a hotel bar, the following happy hours by the beach marry deeply discounted drinks with the sublime vastness of the sea and some truly interesting people watching.

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Christine Chiao

Hush puppies and poutine at Jay's Bar

Place: Jay's Bar, 4321 W. Sunset Blvd., Silver Lake; (323) 666-1898.

Hours: Daily 4 p.m.-7 p.m.

Deals: $1 off all drafts and wine by the glass; $1 sake shots all day; $3 cans of PBR and bottles of Coors Light; $3 off draft pitchers and wine by the bottle. Five options for food -- including fresh-cut fries with roasted garlic aioli; and fried walnut brie with cran-raspberry relish, pickled onions and watercress -- range $5-$6 each.

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photo credit: Matthew Bowers at Manufactur

interior of R&D Bar

You say you don't know what you want? You say you want more focus in your life, all parts of your life, including your drinking life? You could do worse than the R&D Bar.

The "R&D" stands for research and development, rather academic posturing for a drinking establishment, but from the moment you walk in from the bar it's within, Harvard & Stone in the Thai Town section of Hollywood, you know you're not in for the usual experience. Rough-hewn, industrial, dimly lit, with a bar set beneath an old grill hood (we're in an ex-kitchen, evidently), it looks like a cross between a dungeon and an antediluvian laboratory -- if Dr. Frankenstein had wanted to devote himself to mixology, he'd probably be in digs like these.

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