5 of the Best “Non-Bourbon” Bars in Louisville

Over the years, I’ve been to a lot of American cities with renowned drinking cultures and eclectic bar scenes. I’ve seen my fair share of markets inundated by specific brands, or specific styles of beer, spirits or cocktails. But the very moment you step off a flight and into the Louisville, Kentucky airport, it becomes exceedingly clear that you have ventured into territory so inundated by one spirit in particular that the walk to the baggage claim becomes almost comical: There is so much bourbon whiskey branding and advertisement that you would think you had just walked into a distillery gift shop rather than an international airport. The entire structure feels like some kind of whiskey-slicked funnel, channeling you in the direction of Louisville and the surrounding area’s copious bourbon distilleries and bars. I’ve never seen another place with half as much obvious focus on alcohol tourism.

Not that it’s difficult to understand why: The state’s bourbon tourism apparatus, centered around the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, is quite muscular, and it has built up Kentucky (and especially Louisville) as a destination for all the whiskey lovers who developed a taste for the spirit during the 2010s bourbon boom to treat as a site worthy of pilgrimage. And because Louisville has increasingly acted as a centralized hub for the Bourbon Trail, many distilleries have invested in new tasting rooms along the famed Whiskey Row, from major players like Heaven Hill and Brown-Forman, to upstarts like Buzzard’s Roost.

Locally, this has resulted in a bar and restaurant culture that revolves around bourbon with a single-minded fervor that is hard to put into words without seeing it for yourself. Effectively, nearly every bar and restaurant in Louisville doubles as a “bourbon bar” in some capacity. Restaurants slinging tacos or seafood boast of their extensive bourbon selections or single barrel picks. Humble dive bars here can often boast more bourbon than upscale cocktail bars in other parts of the country. It’s a paradise for lovers of Kentucky’s most iconic spirit … but it can also make drinking in Louisville feel a bit cloistered, at the same time. Eventually, you long for some other kind of experience to break up the wall-to-wall bourbon saturation. That’s where this little list comes in.

Suffice to say, there is also an undercurrent of other alcohol and spirits appreciation in Louisville, though you may have to work a little bit to really uncover it. If you’re committed, however, you can find some great bars passionately focused not just on bourbon, but on other styles of whiskey, or agave spirits, or beer, or even gin. This is a tribute to those bars–I know you’re in Louisville for the bourbon, but considering that I’ve spent years begging bourbon bros to diversify their drinking habits, it’s only natural that I highlight some of the great experiences Louisville has to offer beyond the most obvious ones.

Note: With that said, any one of these places will likely also feature an excellent bourbon selection in addition to their other features. It is still Louisville, after all.

1. Tartan House

One of Louisville’s most lovely, aesthetically pleasing cocktail bars, Tartan House doesn’t venture too far from the bourbon path, being instead dedicated somewhat more to scotch whisky and cocktails that utilize it. Plush seating and warm lighting, with exposed brick in a building that appears to be an old house, give a very cozy, lounge-like impression–the moment you walk in here, you just want to post up with a drink and a good book. Located on the edge of industrial Butchertown and the hip, restaurant-packed East Market District typically referred to simply as NuLu, Tartan House feels just recessed enough from the heaviest areas of tourist foot traffic to be less commonly visited, while still being walkable from many of the downtown hotels, or other destinations such as the AAA ballpark of the resident Louisville Bats.

In terms of its menu, Tartan House offers what I’m assuming must be the area’s best overall selection of malt whiskeys from home and abroad–Irish, Scottish and Japanese whiskies in particular, as the tartan name would no doubt imply. It couples these neat drams with a refined cocktail list that splits the line between modern classics and new experimentation: I heard from multiple drinkers while visiting Louisville that the bar makes the best Penicillin cocktail they’ve ever sampled. If you’re looking for a gentle departure from the city’s bourbon scene, Tartan House is an obvious candidate for one.

2. Darling’s

I have by no means exhaustively visited every bar in the greater Louisville area, but I feel fairly confident in saying that Darling’s is probably the only one you’d visit where they have not a whiskey list, but a gin list available for the consumer to peruse. This cocktail lounge is an extremely refreshing change of pace from what so many visitors and tourists imagine as the prototypical Louisville bar experience: Yes, they of course have bourbon, but more so than almost any other place in town they have defined themselves outside of it. It’s a lovely, quaint cocktail bar with art nouveau stylings, and a deep array of gin-based cocktails that are pushing new boundaries of flavor experimentation.

That’s the really notable thing with Darling’s: Although they will very happily make you classic gin cocktails, their house list reflects much more creative expression. I sampled one here that effectively took the vague outline of the tiki classic gin cocktail The Saturn, and then turned that drink into an alluring, clarified milk punch. Of course, if you just want some comfort, feel free to pick your favorite gin from the least and turn it into a martini the way you like best. No one here is judging how you like your gin.

Bonus: There’s a lovely cat cafe a couple of doors down, so you can get a pre- or post-cocktail kitten snuggle out of the trip. Not many bars can boast that feature.

3. Pretty Decent

Any modern drinking destination city needs at least one standout agave bar–even when the city in question is Louisville. And honestly, the bourbon-to-tequila pipeline has never been more free-flowing than it is today; even Whisky Advocate magazine recently introduced a permanent review section for agave spirits, although they’re leaning more toward the barrel-aged side of the spectrum. Pretty Decent, on the other hand, describes itself as “a love letter to the clear spirits from south of our border and the drinking cultures of Latin and South American cities. Botanically-driven spirits that showcase their source plant are our passion and the glue that binds the two elements of our business into an organic whole.”

They’re not kidding about the “plant” aspect, either–the business is actually a combination agave bar and succulent-focused plant shop, giving it a lighter, airier ethos than many of the darker, lounge-like whiskey bars of Louisville. They have the kind of sprawling list of agave spirits that you would no doubt expect such a business to possess, split into different species of agave and heavily focused on mezcal, though there is of course tequila as well. Bonus: You can also get a crash course here in sotol, the other mezcal-like traditional Mexican spirit made from Dasylirion wheeleri, the desert spoon plant. In fact, the Pretty Decent crew is so passionate about agave spirits and education that they even lead chartered trips to Oaxaca!

All in all, there’s no better place in Louisville for a bourbon drinker to belly up to the bar and sample their first Oaxacan old fashioned with mezcal instead of whiskey. It could be the start of a whole new obsession.

4. Holy Grale

Louisville is a bit of an under-the-radar craft beer city, but as you walk and drive around town, you’ll begin to notice that even as the craft beer wave recedes, there’s still quite a lot of them active, studded through the commercial areas like sudsy counterparts to all the distillery tasting rooms and bourbon bars. This makes a lot of sense given a bit of thought: There’s a distinct brewer-to-distiller pipeline that exists in terms of learning biology/fermentation, and many whiskey distillers cut their teeth in the beer world. Likewise, the brewers in town have unparalleled access to top flight, just-dumped whiskey casks from all of the distillers, which unsurprisingly means plenty of barrel-aged beers. All in all, it’s a more lively beer scene in general than one might give it credit for.

Holy Grale is essentially Louisville’s storied beer temple, in a nearly literal sense, having originally opened in 2011 inside an old Unitarian chapel. Boasting an eclectic beer menu, upscale pub grub and a locally famous burger, it was a fixture of the Louisville craft beer community for close to a decade before the pandemic shut it down for an extended period from 2020 onward, throwing Holy Grale’s future into serious jeopardy. Since 2022, however, the icon has risen from the ashes to reestablish itself, featuring Thursday night Kölsch service and an accompanying B&B, the Gralehaus, next door. Most recently they’ve even added a wine bar as well, in the form of Bar Grale–this is basically a little alcohol campus now, with no bourbon focus needed. And in Louisville, that’s always a nice break from the norm. Here’s hoping that the Holy Grale brand will persist for decades to come.

5. The Merryweather

The proper tiki cocktail revival/modern tiki cocktail scene is not particularly well represented in Louisville, which probably shouldn’t be the biggest surprise in the world–you may see the word “tiki” sprinkled into a few bar titles, but they tend to be referring more to tropical/boat aesthetics than a really interesting or geeky dedication to rum or rum cocktails. One of the only exceptions is the relatively unheralded The Merryweather, an under-the-radar neighborhood bar that, out of nowhere, really does sport an impressive menu of modern rum cocktails.

With its picnic tables and laid-back demeanor in the Schnitzelburg neighborhood just south of Germantown, blocks away from another of Lousiville’s most beloved dives The Pearl of Germantown, The Merryweather feels very much like a local industry haunt beloved by the bartenders who craft cocktails or sling beers on some of the other bars on this list. Their cocktail menu features house formulations of tiki classics like the mai tai (a three Jamaican rum house blend), jungle bird or painkiller, but they’re not content to simply rest on the classics–the aforementioned painkiller is described as a “sesame curry painkiller,” modernized with spice. They also feature a pretty extensive rum list, not something you’ll find often in Louisville, and a creative collection of shots and mini-cocktails. All in all, it’s another wonderful little haven from the one-dimensional bourbon mania that too often dictates a Louisville tourist’s itinerary.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies Editor and resident liquor geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film and drink writing.