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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Courtesy ABC

Adan Canto and Vanessa Lengies in Mixology

As far as we can tell, no one is very excited about much of the programming the major networks are launching this coming fall. But in an already sad lineup, one show stands out as having the potential to be stunningly bad: Mixology, the new comedy from ABC.

The new series is apparently written by some of the writers of The Hangover, and follows a bunch of people in a New York bar over the course of one night. Yes, as in, the entire season takes place over one night in one bar. It's like 24, but instead of high stakes drama we learn scintillating facts, like how women who wear flats don't like sex -- or something.

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B. Rodell

Sculaccione at Osteria Mozza

By Osteria Mozza's standards, the Sculaccione is an old standard, a cocktail that's been on the list since the restaurant's opening. A recipe for it appears in The Mozza Cookbook, and it's a favorite of GM David Rosoff (though he admits to making his with mezcal, rather than the tequila used in the original). So why drink the Sculaccione now, specifically?

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Caroline on Crack/flickr

Mint Julep

Happy Kentucky Derby! This is the place where I'm now supposed to tell you that today would be a great day to go out and drink a julep in celebration of a horse race in Kentucky you barely care about, but hey it's an excuse to drink and wear a big hat so who cares? But alas, I'm not going to do that. Why? Because mint juleps are kind of bullshit.

That's right, I said it. I consider myself a somewhat proud somewhat Southerner and I still said it.

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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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Courtesy Chipotle

Did you even know that Chipotle serves margaritas? I didn't. But apparently they do, made with Sauza and sour mix.

But, as Nation's Restaurant News reported last week, they'll soon be serving a premium margarita, made with Patrón and fresh juice. At $6.50 to $8 (depending on location -- my guess is L.A. will be on the upper end of that scale), that's not a bad price for a Patrón margarita made with fresh juice.

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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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Photo: Elina Shatkin

Good luck finding a seat at Thirsty Crow.

In honor of Tax Day, five of the hippest bars from East to West -- all helmed by nightlife gurus 1933 Group -- are offering craft cocktails for just a buck from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. This "liquid relief" deal sure beats any happy hour, especially considering that a cocktail at participating bars Bigfoot Lodge, Bigfoot West, La Cuevita, Oldfield's Liquor Room and The Thirsty Crow will normally cost you around $12.

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Via Wikimedia Commons

Daguerreotype of Washington Irving

Today in 1873, Washington Irving was born in New York City. It was the same week the American Revolution ended, and Irving was named after the hero of the day, George Washington.

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