Editorial
Every year, someone publishes a bar trends piece full of observations that were already true eighteen months earlier. We are not doing that. These are the bar trends of 2024 that our editors have tracked from their earliest appearances in serious bar programs — the ones that have moved from a handful of innovative menus into the mainstream, and the ones still early enough that finding them still feels like discovery. Ranked by how much they matter to you as a drinker.
The low-ABV cocktail is not new. Bartenders have been making excellent lower-alcohol drinks for years, but the trend in 2024 is the seriousness with which the best bars are treating these programs. This is not a wellness gesture — it is a genuine expansion of what a cocktail menu can be. Bars are building entire sections around fermented beverages, vermouths, amari, and fortified wines, with the same level of attention previously reserved for spirit-forward drinks.
The Japanese highball has moved from novelty to baseline expectation at serious cocktail bars. In 2024, the trend extends further: Japanese whisky education, Japanese-inspired hospitality philosophy, and the technical precision that characterises the best Tokyo bar culture are appearing in bars from New York to Melbourne. This is not cultural appropriation — it is the bar industry finally acknowledging that Japan has been doing certain things better than anyone else for decades.
The most technically demanding trend on this list is also the one with the longest legs. Fermented ingredients — kombucha, tepache, shrubs, kefirs, fermented fruit juices — are appearing on serious cocktail menus not as garnishes but as primary ingredients. The best examples produce cocktails with a complexity that cannot be achieved by mixing standard spirits and mixers. This trend started in the kitchen and has taken years to arrive in bars with the rigour it deserves.
Milk-washing, centrifuge clarification, and various other techniques for producing crystal-clear cocktails from cloudy ingredients have been available to bartenders for years. In 2024 they are moving from occasional feature to programme-defining approach at the most ambitious bars. The appeal is aesthetic — a perfectly clear Old Fashioned is visually arresting — but the best examples justify the process through flavour, not presentation alone.
A small but growing number of bars are investing in production capability — infusions, distillations, macerations — that allows them to produce proprietary ingredients unavailable elsewhere. This is expensive, time-consuming, and not suitable for every operation. But the best examples produce genuinely distinctive menus where at least one ingredient in each cocktail cannot be purchased anywhere. In 2024, the most ambitious bar programs include at least one house-made component across their entire menu.
The common thread across these trends is ambition applied with rigour. Low-ABV programs, fermentation, clarification, and house production are all means to the same end: cocktails that could not be made in a bar without commitment to quality as a baseline, not a marketing claim. The trend-resistant bar visitor benefits from these developments even if they never order a low-ABV drink or ask what clarification technique was used.
The trend we are most bullish about for the next three years: fermentation. The number of serious bars incorporating fermented ingredients into their programmes is still small enough that finding one is an event. By 2026, the best examples will have produced a second generation of even more developed programmes. The bars doing this well today are worth visiting as early adopters while the discovery still feels like discovery.
James tracks bar trends the same way a serious reader tracks literary fiction — by reading everything, visiting constantly, and remaining sceptical of anything that travels as fast as a press release. He has been wrong about trends twice in ten years, which he considers an acceptable record.