Editorial
The best bars are always running twelve to eighteen months ahead of what gets written about them. By the time a trend appears in a year-end roundup, it is already the floor rather than the ceiling of the most ambitious programs. Our editors have spent the last year identifying the movements shaping bar trends in 2025 — the ones that are already present in the menus of forward-looking bar programs and will become mainstream by next year. Here is what is coming.
Mezcal has been building a following for a decade. What changes in 2025 is the depth of that following and the breadth of agave spirits beyond mezcal: raicilla, bacanora, sotol, and single-village expressions that barely existed in Western bars five years ago are appearing on serious cocktail menus with the same contextual treatment previously reserved for single-malt Scotch. Serious bars in 2025 will have an agave section rather than a mezcal bottle.
The most significant shift in serious bar culture for 2025 is not a spirit category or a technique — it is a philosophy. The bars that will be discussed most in 2025 are the ones that have decided hospitality is the primary product, not the cocktails. This sounds obvious. It is not obvious to implement. It requires paying staff enough to retain them, training them in something beyond drink recipes, and building a room where a guest who does not know what to order is made to feel more comfortable, not less.
The artificial separation between serious cocktail bars and serious craft beer has been eroding for several years. In 2025 it collapses in the best bars. Taproom-adjacent cocktail menus, beer-based cocktails that are not novelties, and bars that treat their beer selection with the same rigour as their spirits list are appearing in cities from London to Portland. The bartenders running these programs tend to have worked in both worlds, which shows in the depth of their approach. Our full guide to the best bars for classic beer cocktails maps where this convergence is most fully realised, from Michelada specialists in Oslo to Black Velvet bars in Edinburgh.
The most significant trend for 2025 is not a cocktail or a technique — it is a behaviour shift. A growing number of serious drinkers are structuring travel around bar itineraries with the same seriousness that food-focused travellers have applied to restaurant reservations for decades. The result: bars in cities like Osaka, Porto, and Tallinn that were previously known only within their local industry are now booking two months out for visits from international guests who specifically came to drink there. Our ranking of the world's best bars in 2025 and the best new openings of 2025 reflect exactly this shift.
The defining characteristic of 2025 bar culture is that the quality ceiling is higher than it has ever been, and the gap between the best and the average is wider. The bars doing serious work in 2025 are drawing on a global conversation about spirits, fermentation, hospitality philosophy, and design that did not exist in the same depth ten years ago. The visitor who knows where to look will find better drinking in 2025 than at any point in recent bar history. That includes a new generation of sustainable bars leading the way on zero-waste and hyperlocal sourcing — arguably the most structurally significant shift in how serious bars operate today. To see where these trends point beyond the current year, our editors have mapped the future of bars in 2030 with specific predictions for each major category.
Our recommendation: build at least one trip in 2025 around bar visits specifically. For a closer look at the movements shaping the industry right now, our guide to bar trends to watch in 2025 breaks down eight shifts already visible in the most forward-thinking programs. Pick a city that interests you — Osaka, Porto, Mexico City — and treat the bar research with the same rigour you would apply to a restaurant trip. You will drink better, understand more, and return home with recommendations that none of your friends have heard of yet. For a ground-level view of how these trends are already reshaping specific neighborhoods, read our feature on the bars changing cities worldwide in 2025.
One specific trend worth watching outside of the permanent venue category: the rise of the serious pop-up bar. Our guide to the best pop-up bars worldwide covers the format in detail — both the recurring annual series that have become institutions and the new collectives using temporary formats to test ideas the permanent venue market isn't ready for yet.
James has written about bar culture for over a decade and takes trend prediction seriously enough to track his accuracy year over year. He has been right about agave spirits for longer than anyone wanted to hear about it, and remains stubbornly optimistic about hospitality as a growth area in bar culture.