Why Your Favorite Bar May Start Pouring You a Cocktail on Tap

Tori Latham
·2 min read

The decline of beer has been well documented. But that’s left some bars in a bit of a pickle: They have all these taps, but people aren’t really drinking what’s in them.

Enter, the draft cocktail.

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More and more bars and other venues have started serving premade cocktails on tap, The Washington Post reported on Thursday. While fewer than 1,500 draft lines in the United States were used for non-beer drinks prior to the pandemic, some 10,000 lines are now used for those products, according to Draftline Data numbers cited by the newspaper.

“With the decline in draft beer, that’s going to give [bar owners] more opportunities to make that switch, as draft cocktails become more normalized,” Gareth Croke, the co-owner of Boundary Stone and All-Purpose in Washington, D.C., told the Post. “The trend is most certainly going in the direction where a larger selection of beer is not necessarily better.”

Draft cocktails have been around for about a decade, The Washington Post noted, but they’ve seemingly reached a fever pitch. Part of that may be due to the fact that the reigning Best Bar in North America according to the World’s 50 Best organization serves tap versions alongside its fresh-mixed cocktails: In the front room of New York City’s Double Chicken Please, you can order almost a dozen different draft cocktails or mocktails. Recipes include citrus brandy, cold-brew coffee, yuzu, and shiso, or gin, seaweed, kaffir lime, and elderflower.

The ease of pouring a draft cocktail has also made them popular at venues where time is of the essence, like sports arenas and stadiums. At some stops during Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, fans could order the draft Lavender Haze, a premixed cocktail of vodka and fruit juice, with edible purple glitter to match. And Petco Park, the home of the San Diego Padres, started selling draft cocktails last year, an important upgrade in the era of pitch clocks and sped-up games.

“Maybe you’re selling canned or bottled beer but also offering a margarita on draft through those beer lines,” Dan Butler, the general manager of the baseball stadium, told the Post. “With the increase in attendance we’ve seen and wanting to increase speed of service, going to draft cocktails made sense.”

A faster cocktail with all the same flavor and intensity of a hand-shaken one? Sign us up.

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