It’s Friday, and I’ve been in Adelaide for the Distillers SA conference, getting to meet and know some of the smaller Australian distillers doing great work here. Jump on the Imperial Measures Distilling Rapture Amaro, by the way, and give the gin things a go from Little Juniper — they were just a couple of the standouts for me.
While I’ve been here, I got to stop into Honeydripper, the latest bar from Sean Howard and the guys behind Memphis Slim’s and Cry Baby — it’s a very different beast to those bars. Honeydripper is a luxe hifi lounge, it’s beautiful, and their upper level cocktail bar — which features a DJ deck setup between two flat lay cocktail stations — opens tonight.
Give their Dante cocktail a spin if you stop in; it’s a great example of When Drinks Collide, as you can read below.
Also below, a look at six vinyl bars from around Australia.
Last chance to enter — the Drink of the Year closes for entries at midnight tonight.
Boothby Staff
It might come as a curious trend to those who began their drinking years in the early 2000s; in those heady days of stick drinks — Lychee Caiprioska, anyone? — to visit a cocktail bar was to be in a space where drinks and DJs co-existed. There may have been some dancing, but if you had a bar you had a DJ — the two went hand in hand.
The music selectors went missing soon after the speakeasification of bars arrived. Spurred on by the cocktail renaissance — as bartenders reached into the profession’s long history to claim some respectability for their craft — the frivolity of a DJ was frowned upon.
But what is old is new again. Vinyl collections have begun to line the shelves of small indie bars around the world, and Australia and New Zealand are home to some fine examples — whether they’re known as listening bars, hifi bars, vinyl bars, or Japanese-inspired kissaten.
Of course, a bar doesn’t need to be known by any of those monikers to give attention to good music and a quality sound setup. Melbourne’s Caretaker’s Cottage sports a pair of high-end Superwax Mini speakers from bespoke Tasmanian makers Pitt & Giblin; recent Newtown addition, Bar Demo, boasts a custom-built speaker set up from Marrickville’s Translate Sound.
Honeydripper
11 Frome St, Adelaide
@honeydripper.hifi
Honeydripper is the much-anticipated next bar from the creative mind of Sean Howard (Memphis Slim’s, Cry Baby) to open in Adelaide’s CBD. The ground floor opened back in August, with the upstairs cocktail lounge opening tonight.
The upstairs lounge is where, between two industrious bartenders, the night’s DJ will preside over a custom gold plated Condesa mixer, which will take place in the centre of the bar, with three SL1210 turntables and two big Klipsch Heritage La Scala speakers built into the back bar.