Retail Therapy
By Sophia Kercher
LATimesMagazine.com – Tuesday, September 24, 2010

Lately the shelves at Bar Keeper are looking rather thin. The Silver Lake shop, which has long offered an exhaustive array of accouterments for the cocktail lover, is making room for the real thing. Next week, store owner Joe Keeper, after spending months jumping through bureaucratic hoops to obtain his liquor license, will finally add to his array fine liquors from around the globe.

His artisanal and hard-to-find brands will include California distilled spirits, a curated collection of gins and whiskeys and a large selection of amari.

“I’m a big fan of Old Potrero, which is a rye that’s made by the Anchor Distilling people up in San Francisco,” Keeper says. “There’s also this company called Square One that does 100 percent organic rye vodka—imagine that.”

Keeper also plans to marry his love of vintage cocktails with gift baskets. For example, he says, “say you got in a fight with your girlfriend or boyfriend, and you wanted to get in the last word. Lucky you—the Last Word is a famous vintage cocktail.”

Additional baskets will feature all the ingredients to make the signature cocktails of L.A.’s most notable mixologists, including the Varnish’s Eric Alperin, Rivera’s Julian Cox and the Library Bar’s Matthew Biancaniello.

With liquor added to Bar Keeper’s offerings, the Sunset Junction locale is certain to remain the It destination for one-of-a-kind barware, more than 25 types of bitters and syrups, Schott Zwiesel break-resistant glasses, Über bar tools, reprints of vintage bar books, absinthe fountains, ice molds and specialty glasses.

Bar Keeper opened five years ago, just before the cocktail revival really took hold in L.A., and now it’s frequented by vintage-drink-accessory collectors, local bartenders and even the prop department of the easy-boozing Mad Men. The city has developed a swelling cocktail coterie, and this store has become its unofficial hub.

“We get together and talk about how this must be what it was like in the movie industry in the ’20s,” Keeper says. “We’re doing stuff where people will look back and say, ‘Hey, here is the renaissance of cocktails.’ ” [LATimesMagazine.com]