The Whisky Tasting Left the Bar

The last whisky tasting you went to in New York, you were probably standing up. Likely in a liquor store, on a weeknight, beside a folding table near the register. Almost certainly you didn't pay.

It didn't always work that way.

2013: a tasting was a night out

In 2013 the four busiest whisky venues in the city, after Astor Wines, were all bars. The Flatiron Room hosted 54 tastings that year. Brandy Library hosted 49. Noorman's Kil, the Williamsburg bar with two hundred bottles and a grilled cheese menu, hosted 44. Ward III in Tribeca hosted 39.

Seven of the fifteen busiest venues that year were bars.

I was at Ward III most weeks that year. I saw friends there and made new ones. You could talk to whisky nerds who had come in from across the city, and go properly deep on the craft behind a bottle with someone who knew it. The brand reps became friends. The bartenders knew us. Everybody in that room had chosen to be there for the whisky.

That last part is the bit that actually changed.

2026: a tasting is an errand

This year, seven of the ten busiest venues are shops. Astor Wines leads with 20 tastings, BQE Wine & Liquors follows with 14, then The Corkery with 10, and K&D Wines and Union Square Wines with nine apiece. Three bars hold on in that top ten: Foolproof in Brooklyn, Brandy Library, and Copper & Oak — and a handful more sit just below it, The Flatiron Room and Travel Bar among them.

Several of the 2013 names are gone. Char No. 4, the Smith Street bourbon bar, poured its last on 12 July 2015 after seven years. Ward III closed in October 2020, eleven years in — its owners kept the Rum House in midtown going. Noorman's Kil has closed too.

The price moved with the venue. In 2013, 61 percent of the tastings we listed were free. This year it is 72 percent. A shop tasting is a bottle open on the counter for three hours; a bar tasting is a seated flight somebody has to pay for.

What you gain, what you lose

A shop tasting is a genuinely good thing. It costs nothing, it asks no commitment, and you will try bottles you would never have spent forty dollars to find out about. There are more of them, in more neighbourhoods, than there were.

What it isn't is a bar full of people who came for whisky. Most of the people at that counter are buying something else and will try whatever is open. That is fine — it is how anyone discovers anything — but it is not the same as forty people who turned up on a Tuesday specifically to argue about mash bills.

The encouraging part is that the bar model isn't finished. Foolproof Whiskey Bar in Brooklyn has hosted nine tastings this year, and every event we have on record for it is from 2026. It has no history before that, because it is new. Somebody is still opening whisky bars in this city — they are just opening them across the river.

Where to go

Astor Wines and Union Square Wines are the two I would send anyone to — consistently good pours, people behind the table who know the liquid. Astor has been the most active venue in the city since we started counting, with 553 tastings on record, and it is still number one this year.

BQE Wine & Liquors is second by volume and worth the trip for the prices, which are genuinely excellent. Go for the bargain, not the atmosphere.

And if you want the old thing — a seat, a flight, and someone to talk you through it — it is still there, in smaller numbers. Brandy Library is running six tastings this year, The Flatiron Room six across its two rooms, and Copper & Oak four. Foolproof, the Brooklyn newcomer, is posting more than any of them — on the numbers, the one to watch.

What are we missing?

What I miss about Ward III isn't the flights. It's that you could turn up alone on a Tuesday and find people who wanted to talk about whisky until closing. That is a harder thing to put on a calendar than a tasting is.

One answer might be the distilleries. There are more of them in the city than there were in 2013 — Great Jones in NoHo and Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn didn't exist then, and Kings County has been pouring in the Navy Yard for years. They barely register in our numbers, six tastings between the three of them this year, but that undercounts them badly. A distillery running tours most days doesn't post them as events, so the calendar never sees it. If the whisky nerds have gone somewhere, that is a likely somewhere.

Wherever it is happening, that kind of gathering tends to exist for a while before anyone writes it down, which is where you come in. Is there a bar near you quietly running a serious list? A shop where the Thursday pour has turned into the same faces every week? A group that has started meeting somewhere we have never heard of? Those are the things this calendar cannot find on its own, and they are the ones worth finding.

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