Winner of the Ketel One Sustainable Bar Award at North America’s 50 Best Bars 2023, Yacht Club in Denver has become a bastion of good drinks, great hospitality and planet-forward practices. From pre-batching to preserving, read along as the bar’s owners share their top tips for kickstarting an eco-revolution in your home bar
Launched in 2021 by co-owners McLain Hedges and Mary Alison Wright, Yacht Club has been on a meteoric rise to become a standard bearer for sustainably-minded hospitality in North America. Founded in the city’s northern Cole neighbourhood, Yacht Club set out to become Denver’s original ‘anti-club club’: a place away from the exclusivity of other members’ clubs, where all are welcome to imbibe and unwind. Cherry-picking and incorporating the best elements of natural wine lounges, dive bars and cocktail establishments into its design from the ground up, it has become the perfect meeting place for a Champagne Mojito, glass of orange wine or, simply, an ice-cold beer.
It’s clearly a winning formula, as after just two years of existence, the Coloradan bar made its debut at the No.42 spot on the North America’s 50 Best Bars 2023 ranking. But behind its stellar drinks programme, it is Hedges and Wright's holistic approach that gained the attention of the Sustainable Restaurant Association – 50 Best’s sustainability audit partner.
Yacht Club's holistic approach to sustainability earned it the Ketel One Sustainable Bar Award 2023, collected on stage by its co-owners McLain Hedges and Mary Alison Wright
Beyond simple ingredient swaps and eliminating single-use plastics, Yacht Club’s devotion to its local terroir and staff is evident, leading the charge for the North American bar sector and earning itself the Ketel One Sustainable Bar Award 2023 as a result.
For Hedges and Wright, it was a series of small steps and habits that helped the bar innovate while simultaneously reducing its impact on the planet. To extend their mission outside of their bar’s four walls, the pair share their insight on how home mixologists can level-up their own bars in their own words.
1. Start preserving your produce
Preservation has kept food accessible to people throughout history in many different forms and is a great way to extend the shelf life of what might otherwise quickly deteriorate. Whether making some fruit leather with leftover scraps, preserving the best in-season strawberries as a purée for later use in cocktails and garnishes, or just making a bunch of snacks, the sky's the limit with where you can take things.
2. Pre-batching isn’t just for commercial bars
The rise of the ‘freezer martini’ and other pre-prepared drinks are great ways to help reduce water waste. By eliminating the need to chill and dilute a cocktail at the point of each serve, you avoid the need to discard any undiluted ice remaining in the shaker or mixing glass. If every cocktail we make during service at Yacht Club has somewhere between two to five ounces of ice left over after pouring the cocktail, we are potentially throwing out a massive amount of water on a daily basis. For every 100 drinks, you would be dumping somewhere between one and a half to four gallons of water down the drain. Multiply that by over 300 services a year and you’ve almost filled a small swimming pool with water waste. It all adds up, even for the home bar.
The 4th Colour (gin, fortified wine, carrot, plum, bergamot and peat) is one of the bar's standout concoctions
3. Start composting
Composting is one of the easiest additions you can implement into your daily routine. It reduces your waste output and greenhouse gas emissions, conserves water in the garden, promotes soil health and so much more.
4. Grow your own
While it can be time-consuming or even daunting to take on the task of raising some plant babies, it can also be a highly rewarding path to building more sustainable practices into your bar game. This will limit your use of packaging, trips to the store and food waste all in one. Furthermore, you’ll also get the benefits to your surrounding garden and environment, such as pollination, healthier nutrient-rich soils and fewer pesticides.
5. Support your local farmers and producers
Where you source your ingredients and the relationships you have with those that provide them is a large part of how we made it to where we are today. Try and find farmers in your area that align with your values and what you like to eat. We try to look for farmers that take a regenerative and holistic approach to the work that goes into the land. What comes out is usually honest and delicious, while positively impacting the environment, so a true win-win.
Miss the ceremony in Mexico? Recap the highlights here:
North America’s 50 Best Bars 2023, sponsored by Perrier, was announced at a live awards ceremony in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, on Thursday 4th May 2023. Browse the website to browse the full ranking and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube to stay up to date with all the news and announcements
